Today I spent almost the entire day at yet another court hearing in the lawsuit brought against me by Vladlen I_feel_bitter Stepanov.
The next hearing will be on October 17, but something interesting happened today as well.
It very much looks as though Vladlen Stepanov started this case for nothing, regardless of how it ends.
Let me remind you that Stepanov’s two main arguments in the Magnitsky case are:
Stepanova has not been my wife for many years. So even if she did steal some money, I have nothing to do with it. The money I do have (and €8 million has been frozen in Switzerland alone) was honestly earned and declared long before the thefts that took place at Tax Office No. 28.
To support this version, a tax certificate is presented, with the implication: look, “total income 225 million! See how much money I had!”
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A good portion of today’s hearing was devoted to these two points.
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Here is what emerged:
Is Olga Stepanova the wife of Vladlen Stepanov?
The Stepanovs seem to have forgotten that if they claim they divorced in 1992, then that divorce would have been governed by Soviet law—specifically the laws of the RSFSR (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic). At that time, a marriage was considered dissolved only from the moment the divorce was registered with the civil registry office (ZAGS). And apparently, that was never done.
And if it was not, then it follows that, de jure, the Stepanovs remained married until November 2010. Which means their property was jointly owned. And so was the money in their accounts. That means Olga Stepanova, the head of Tax Inspectorate No. 28, who signed the very document authorizing the illegal refund of 5.4 billion rubles to the accounts of a shell company, turns out indeed to be a millionaire and the owner of villas and luxury apartments on Rublyovka (an elite residential area outside Moscow) and in Dubai. Tut-tut. And she failed to declare the property.
The court granted our motion to obtain documents from the civil registry office. If there is no record there of a 1992 divorce, then Olga Stepanova will lose her last chance to claim: I’m very poor, it’s my ex-husband who is very rich.
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(photo from @alburov’s Twitter)
Was Vladlen Stepanov fabulously rich before the thefts took place?
Well, everything became clear as soon as Stepanov proudly published the certificate shown above. He apparently thought everyone around him was an idiot. But we can read certificates too: 225 million is not income in the ordinary sense of the word. In fact, it is turnover from securities transactions. The actual income is listed on another line (3.5): 6.8 million rubles—a substantial sum, of course, but nowhere near the Stepanovs’ real wealth. This is analyzed in considerable detail here.
So we proposed something simple: to request Stepanov’s income records for the period from 2002 to 2009. The court granted the motion, which Vladlen was very unhappy about, and he clearly began feeling bitter again. He even claimed that he had become rich earlier—in the 1990s. We then proposed requesting information starting from 1995. At that point, Vladlen Stepanov said that he had actually been earning a lot as far back as 1990, when he worked as an underground tunneler: Our salaries were like pilots’!
I’m not sure all underground metro tunnel workers have villas in Dubai. Though perhaps Vladlen Stepanov was constantly exceeding his quotas and collecting generous bonuses. Maybe that’s how he saved up for a villa.
In short, the next hearing should clarify a great deal about how much the Stepanovs really earned (and declared), when they actually ceased to be spouses, and whether they misled the courts and investigators about the ownership of the property, and so on. It should be very interesting.