So, shall we talk about foreign agents? Not the imaginary ones that *United Russia* keeps trying to expose, but the real kind: high-ranking, cynical, deceitful. The kind who prefer to make money (steal) while serving in the Russian state, yet tie their comfortable future to living outside its borders.
Last night, two more people were unlawfully arrested in the transparently fabricated "Bolotnaya case" (the criminal case tied to the 2012 Bolotnaya Square protests in Moscow), and we are presenting the results of our small investigation into a foreign agent sitting in the very agency that so generously hands out arrest warrants.
Please read this and help us spread the information. We can hardly count on Channel One to do it.
Meet him. This is Colonel General A. I. Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, a foreign agent.
Back in 2008, United Russia deputy Khinshtein published information stating that senior state official Bastrykin owned real estate in the Czech Republic and had founded a company there. Bastrykin weakly denied it all, Khinshtein dropped the subject for some reason, the matter fizzled out, and from then on it was discussed only in a rather gleefully malicious way on prosecutors’ and police forums.
We decided to look into the matter ourselves. It immediately turned out to be fairly simple: all information in the Czech Republic about company formation, property ownership, citizenship status, and so on is public information that anyone can request and obtain. Every step we took can be repeated by anyone; all the data and documents are verifiable, and their authenticity is easy to confirm. Knowing Czech makes the task much easier. But Google Translate helps too.
All you need to do to start is: go to the Czech Ministry of Justice website in the first search box, enter LAW Bohemia (the name of Bastrykin’s company, which we know from United Russia deputy Khinshtein’s publication). in the search results, go to SBIRKA LISTIN then you will see all these documents numbered SL1 through SL8. Open the one you need, click the PDF link at the bottom, and there it is. The same page also contains information on the legal entity—extracts (click Výpis platných or Úplný výpis). The earliest documents, from 2000 to 2005, can be obtained by anyone directly from the court archive. They have not been digitized, so they are scanned in response to written requests from anyone interested. We have these documents on paper as court-certified copies (with official revenue stamps).
As a result of these simple steps, we can say with 146% certainty: - Khinshtein was not lying
- State official Bastrykin and his wife were founders of a company in the Czech Republic. - Khinshtein’s article was published on July 1, 2008. After that, the crook Bastrykin began frantically covering his tracks and "retroactively" sold his share:
By the way, take a guess: did Colonel General Bastrykin pay income tax on those 50,000 Czech koruna in 2008? And did he report this transaction to our beloved tax inspectorate? I’m willing to bet he did not. Because the nimble Colonel General was covering his tracks, not giving up his property in the Czech Republic. The transfer of shares in a company is a formal procedure involving notarized acts. Crooked Bastrykin could hardly do everything legally and thereby confirm Khinshtein’s accusations. So he used a forged power of attorney and carried out sham transactions.
Take a look:
Anyone who has read the law "On Notariate" understands that no notary in the Russian Federation would ever certify such a power of attorney. It is forged, just like the second power of attorney, the one for Bastrykin’s wife:
The principals’ signatures do not match available samples. This is what Bastrykin’s real signature looks like. The handwritten entries “Bastrykin Aleksandr Ivanovich” and “Aleksandrova Olga Ivanovna” (Bastrykin’s second wife) were written in the same handwriting. Both powers of attorney (Bastrykin’s and his wife’s) bear the same registry number: “1828.” In a personal conversation, an employee in notary S. V. Glazkova’s office, after checking the registry number, told us that no powers of attorney with that number had been certified by the notary in 2008, and that S. V. Glazkova’s signature had never begun with the letter “S.” On July 19, 2012, after applying to notary S. V. Glazkova with a request to certify a true copy of a document, it was established that her signature does not match at all the alleged signature appearing on the powers of attorney of A. I. Bastrykin and O. I. Aleksandrova, and indeed does not begin with the letter “S.”
At this point a small but curious episode emerged. Bastrykin’s remarkably casual use of forged documents prompted us to check his earlier powers of attorney as well. It turned out that in earlier documents Bastrykin had used powers of attorney from a certain notary named Agarkov. And in 2007, the Czech Republic police carried out a series of arrests and searches as part of Operation Tibet. The course and results of the operation were widely covered by the Czech media. The searches uncovered forged documents, blank forms, seals, and stamps of various state bodies of the Czech Republic and foreign countries, as well as banks and other institutions. In particular, the Czech police provided the media with a photograph of one of the seals seized from the suspects. It was a forged seal of notary V. V. Agarkov, which differs only slightly from the seal used by Bastrykin and his wife. In other words, there are every reason to believe that A. I. Bastrykin and O. I. Aleksandrova used the services of an organized criminal group to forge the power of attorney dated March 10, 2003. Or else they forged the document themselves.
And then came the most interesting part. If Bastrykin is such a fan of business and real estate in the Czech Republic, we thought, then perhaps he also wants to spend his old age in that country. Somewhere in lovely Karlovy Vary. Might he have a residence permit?
So we sent a request to the local Interior Ministry, since information about residence permits is public information. To be honest, we wrote it without much hope. After all, Bastrykin is the head of the Investigative Committee, formerly headed the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor’s Office, is entitled to state protection, has the highest level of access to state secrets, and so on.
It simply cannot be that a man like this has permission for permanent residence in another country.
But a week later, our ideas about what is considered acceptable in Russian officialdom were turned upside down. Voilà:
Undisputed legal facts:
1. On February 6, 2007, A. I. Bastrykin, while serving as Deputy Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation and holding access to state secrets, obtained a residence permit in a NATO member state—the Czech Republic—with the stated purpose of “executive manager, participation in a legal entity,” residing at: Hnězdenská 767/2c, Praha 8, Troja. 2. While holding a residence permit in the Czech Republic, on June 22, 2007, A. I. Bastrykin was appointed by resolution of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation to the post of First Deputy Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation and Chairman of the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation. 3. While holding a residence permit in the Czech Republic, by decree of the President of the Russian Federation dated May 19, 2008, A. I. Bastrykin was approved as a member of the Presidential Council for Countering Corruption. 4. By concealing the fact that he held a residence permit in a foreign state and owned shares in a foreign legal entity, he obtained appointment as head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation.
Questions (rhetorical ones): do you think the intelligence services of NATO member states were aware that a Deputy Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, with access to state secrets, had applied to the Czech Interior Ministry for a residence permit? knowing that General Bastrykin was concealing the fact that he held a residence permit in a NATO member state, did foreign intelligence services make use of this in their work? knowing that General Bastrykin, by concealing his shares in a foreign company and forging powers of attorney, was committing a crime that he was hiding, did foreign intelligence services make use of this in their work? is Bastrykin a foreign agent—in plain terms, a spy—planted in one of the highest state offices of the Russian Federation?
Personally, I am inclined to answer all four questions with “yes.” I hereby invite foreign agent Colonel General Bastrykin to try prosecuting me for libel under the newly adopted law (whose sponsor was deputy Khinshtein—what irony).
All the supporting documents are available here: http://foreignagent.mashina.org/docs/. You can review them and, if you wish, retrace our steps and obtain them yourself.
What we are doing now:
Of course, we understand that the more crooked, thieving, and criminal an official is, the more secure his position is in Putin’s system of power. And I personally understand that the harder I go after one crook or another, the dearer he becomes to Putin. Transneft only got stronger. Shuvalov was promoted. Vekselberg is doing just fine, and so on.
Let Putin keep spies in the top leadership too, if he wants.
Nevertheless:
Here is our appeal to Putin. Here is our appeal to the Investigative Committee (funny, yes, but after all, the crimes of Investigative Committee chief Bastrykin are supposed to be examined by the Investigative Committee). We are preparing a filing to the tax authorities (about the 50,000 koruna) We are preparing a letter to all State Duma factions and will send it shortly. We are especially looking forward to a response from United Russia—they do so love fighting foreign agents. Our statement to the FSB of the Russian Federation. A spy must be caught and exposed. Here is our statement to the police of the Czech Republic regarding document forgery. And here is its Russian translation.
We will keep fighting, appealing every response and every brush-off, and so on. We will publish everything. We are optimistic about the prospects for an investigation in the Czech Republic; we believe the forgery and fabrication of documents there have been fully proven.
What we need your help with.
Informing people. Informing people. And once again, informing people. Let the whole country know that the man responsible for all investigations and the entire fight against corruption is a crook, a fraud, and a foreign agent.
Through this cozy little blog, about 1.5 million people will learn about the case over the course of a month. If you are not too lazy to click the “repost,” “retweet,” and “share” buttons on VKontakte and Facebook, send a few emails, and post this on local forums, we will reach 3 to 5 million people in a week.
Just for the sake of it, we have prepared an official demand addressed to the management of Channel One, Channel Two, and NTV. We will send it within the hour. This is critically important, reliable information affecting all citizens. They are obliged to report it. Immediately after the flooding in Kuban, Channel One, RTR, and NTV were churning out reports about my hacked email that ran much longer than their coverage of Krymsk (the town hit hardest by the 2012 floods). They even read things out in assigned roles, and so on.
I hope that in this case too, they will produce some interesting and gripping reports, showing that they are not wasting the taxpayers’ money that keeps state television afloat.
But just in case, we have also prepared the Democratic Choice movement’s traditional guerrilla-style offline action, and we very much ask you to take part in it.
http://foreignagent.mashina.org/ is a special website dedicated to foreign agent Colonel General Bastrykin, designed in his favorite forest theme.
It will take you just a couple of seconds to print out a special leaflet informing citizens about this dangerous foreign agent. If Channel One slips up and (SUDDENLY) keeps silent about Agent Bastrykin, then tens of thousands of leaflets will be able to tell hundreds of thousands of people about him.
But without you, we simply cannot do this. Even if a leaflet hangs for only an hour and is read by just three people, that is still great. If you simply read the post, the reach is 1; if you put up a leaflet, the reach increases by 300%. Pretty cool, right?
The time has come to unite and take the fight to foreign agents.
Many thanks in advance to everyone who helps.
And finally, our enormous thanks to Aleksandr Loginov—a true citizen, a patriot, an expert in the Czech language, all sorts of Czech rules and intricacies, and simply a meticulous guy without whom none of this would have been possible.
Most important update: it turns out that the website http://www.bastrykin.ru/ sells toilets. Characteristically, Czech ones. This cannot be a coincidence (ominous music plays).
Update: background material on the residence permit http://naganoff.livejournal.com/63964.html