This week, Italy’s Financial Guard (the financial police) seized four villas, an apartment, and a hotel belonging to the Rotenbergs in Italy. Naturally, we cannot ignore an event like this.
At first glance, it is certainly surprising. Why would one family need so much residential real estate in a single country? Well, let’s assume they make money from the hotel in Rome. The list of seized assets includes a villa in Tarquinia (not far from Rome), an apartment and a villa in southern Sardinia, and two more villas in northern Sardinia.
What is also interesting is that at least the hotel is registered and managed through Cypriot offshore companies. In other words, no matter how well you hide the beneficial owners, Italy’s Financial Guard still finds them.
Arkady Rotenberg himself called the seizure of his assets “absurd and illegitimate,” while his representative, Andrei Baturin, declined to comment on the list in response to an inquiry from Vedomosti:
We agree with Rotenberg’s representative: the list is indeed not entirely accurate. They forgot one more!
In Italy’s Grosseto province, on the picturesque Monte Argentario peninsula, there is an estate of truly impressive size:
The ownership structure is complicated: the land is registered to one Italian company, while the house and outbuildings are registered to another. Both list a Liechtenstein company as their founder, which in turn is registered to lawyers from a Swiss trust. As part of a joint investigation with Novaya Gazeta (an independent Russian newspaper), we were able to establish that the construction is being carried out in the interests of Arkady Rotenberg’s eldest son, Igor. It is his name that appears in the project documentation, invoices, and other records.
Among the other interesting documents obtained by the investigative teams of the Anti-Corruption Foundation and *Novaya Gazeta* is the master plan, where the client for the entire project is identified in the lower-right corner.
You can view the full project here and the master plan here.
On the peninsula, the Rotenberg family owns an entire estate covering 211 hectares (about 2.11 square kilometers / 0.81 square miles), including olive groves, vineyards, arable land, pastures, and citrus plantations.
Around the main house there is a separate park area where, according to the cadastral extract, there are 10 buildings with 43.5 rooms on a plot of nearly 6 hectares (about 0.06 square kilometers / 0.02 square miles). Near the houses, the younger Rotenberg built himself a pergola with a swimming pool, a spa center, a mini-golf course, and a farm for birds and animals. It is hardly surprising to find an amphitheater, an olive press, and a helipad on the grounds as well. And at the center of this architectural ensemble, of course, is a church.
Here is the full list of structures from the master plan:
Construction of this estate is in full swing. We managed to obtain several photographs directly from the building site:
Here is the chapel at the center of the property, photographed by our source:
Igor Rotenberg, the owner of these lands, is not a public figure, and details of his biography are hard to find. In 2004, he headed the Department of Property for Industry, Transport, and Communications at Russia’s Ministry of State Property. At the ministry, he worked on inventorying the assets of Russian Railways, where he later went to work, again in the property department. A Vedomosti source in the Ministry of Economic Development described Rotenberg as a competent specialist and also admitted: “I’m even secretly jealous—over there he’ll be making 70,000 to 80,000 rubles a month”
What Igor Rotenberg did after 2005 is not entirely clear, but for the past several years he has served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of TEK Mosenergo.
It can hardly be considered a major career achievement, since TEK Mosenergo is owned by his father and uncle, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg.
Since 2008, Rotenberg-linked entities have been actively buying up Gazprom’s “non-core” assets. That was also the case with TEK Mosenergo: in 2010, the Rotenbergs bought it from Mosenergo, which belongs to Gazprom. After that, the pattern was familiar: TEK Mosenergo designs and builds power plants under Gazprom’s investment program, while TEK subsidiaries win state contracts worth 2 billion rubles.
We simply cannot resist publishing a few of the exquisite design choices from the Rotenbergs’ estate. Just look and take it all in.
How much do you think a set like this, with little birds on it, might cost?
Answer:
€28,000. Almost 1.4 million rubles. Or this thing?
€37,000. You can view the invoice at the link.
Mr. Rotenberg liked the unique coffee tables made of suar wood—wood said to be 10,000 years old and to have spent most of that time drifting in swamps—so much that he ordered three of them at once: two for Italy and, of course, one for Moscow.
A suar wood table: €25,000.
Or take this absolutely mind-blowing stained-glass ceiling, an exact replica of the museum-held Wisteria stained-glass work by L. C. Tiffany. According to the designer, it took six people working continuously for eight months to make it.
And just in case, let me repeat how the previous post about the Rotenbergs’ palaces ended. I have nothing against rich people, cypresses, and fountains. I also have nothing against pergolas, spa centers, bird-shaped faucets, and tables made from 10,000-year-old wood. But what is deeply depressing is how the Rotenberg family earned this money. Gazprom subsidiaries have now been reassigned to offshore companies, profit taxes are ending up God knows where, and the Rotenbergs themselves are settling in Italy, where in just the past week alone five villas and a hotel in central Rome have been found linked to them. The Anti-Corruption Foundation has written to Italy’s Financial Guard and informed them about another Rotenberg family asset in Italy.
We believe this asset was purchased with money the Rotenbergs stole from the citizens of Russia.
And let me also remind you about our major campaign to ratify Article 20 of the UN Convention against Corruption. The Rotenbergs’ property described here can hardly even be called “illicit enrichment” — it is quite plainly income obtained through criminal means. But everything received by officials or Gazprom employees in the form of kickbacks would fall under that article. Take part in the campaign in any way you can, and start by voting on the Russian Public Initiative platform.