We owed you an important topic. After RBC identified Vladimir Putin’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova (and Kashin finished the job completely), we received a flood of requests: asking the Anti-Corruption Foundation to examine the state contracts and public procurement deals mentioned in the article and give its assessment of the whole thing.
If people are asking, then we have to do it: first, this is information of clear public importance, and second, no one else is going to do it. As you may recall, many of Russia’s leading media outlets pretended not to notice that Putin’s daughter had turned up in a major investment project. Scary stuff.
We’re not scared, so here it is:
So,
Twenty-eight-year-old Katerina Tikhonova (Putina) became known to the wider public through her involvement in the large-scale expansion project at Moscow State University (MSU). In fact, Katerina has been working within the university structure for quite some time. In 2012, she was the owner and director of the National Intellectual Development Foundation, which later became the property of MSU, though she remained its director. Katerina also heads a related MSU structure called the National Intellectual Reserve Center.
Together, these two organizations created the Innopraktika brand. Judging by its website, Innopraktika is involved in just about everything connected with science: managing projects and intellectual property, conducting expert reviews, advising researchers, supporting startups, and training personnel.
As for anything more concrete, what we can see is that Innopraktika organizes student competitions and seminars.
It is also important not to forget that Innopraktika has been given key functions in the MSU expansion project, a project worth 110 billion rubles.
Katerina Putina’s foundation has trustees. Although the website says not a word about the foundation’s management, the board of trustees is displayed in the most prominent place.
We saw these same “usual suspects” among the trustees of the Acrobatic Rock’n’Roll Federation, a sport in which, as we now know, Katerina competed professionally. Trustees Chemezov and Tokarev, while serving in the KGB (the Soviet security service), lived in the same apartment building entrance as the Putin family in Dresden, where Katerina was born.
Take note of the underlined companies. Their material support is not limited to trustee contributions. Over the past two years, the National Intellectual Development Foundation has won tenders from these companies worth nearly 100 million rubles.
And on top of that, the foundation was set to receive a modest 531 million rubles from Rosneft by 2017. Apparently without any tenders.
Here are the tenders themselves:
Let’s say this right away: we found no obvious rigging or blatant corruption in these tenders. In one case—a Rosneft tender worth 46 million rubles—Putina-Tikhonova’s organization was not even allowed to participate, though that was more than offset by the above-mentioned promise of 530 million rubles for 17 projects by 2017.
One procurement deal does look questionable: Rosatom ordered an “album of technologies of MSU’s natural science faculties” for 40 million rubles. This “album” was supposed to be, quoting from the technical specifications, an information system for storing and processing data on scientific and technical fields and research teams at MSU’s natural science faculties. Let’s leave aside the question of why on earth Rosatom would need such an album for 40 million rubles. Instead, let’s look at how Katerina Tikhonova’s foundation ended up winning.
Two bidders took part in the tender: Katerina’s National Intellectual Development Foundation, with a price tag of 40 million rubles, and Spetsmekhanika LLC from Kirov, which offered to do the work for 10 million less.
Who wins? Of course, the National Intellectual Development Foundation. The tender organizers explained this by saying that the Kirov company did not have a “framework agreement with MSU”:
Formally, this is an entirely discriminatory requirement—and it raises the question of why hold a tender at all if only an MSU-affiliated structure can possibly win it.
And the most remarkable thing we discovered in the course of our digging is that the nonprofit headed by the 28-year-old, previously secretive Katerina turned out, in 2014, to be (SURPRISE) one of the largest in Russia.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the Ministry of Justice published Katerina Tikhonova’s foundation’s financial statements for 2014. It turned out that its annual budget was 281 million rubles—an enormous amount for a nonprofit, immediately placing it among the largest of its kind.
For comparison, the monthly spending of Putina-Tikhonova’s foundation is roughly equal to the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s annual spending.
In theory, a nonprofit foundation with a budget like that ought to be fairly well known, although all of us only learned about it from an RBC report. Well, I suppose we’ll be hearing more about it.
Katerina Tikhonova has another nonprofit foundation as well. It is called the Foundation for Interdisciplinary Initiatives in the Natural Sciences and Humanities. This foundation is registered in Moscow at 3/1 Novinsky Boulevard. Unlike National Intellectual Development, this foundation does not win tenders and does not even file reports with the Ministry of Justice. We were unable to find anything at all online about its activities.
Several law firms founded by MGIMO alumni, as well as the university’s alumni foundation, are registered under the same phone number and address as Katerina’s second foundation.
As far as we know, Katerina did not study at MGIMO, and so far we have not been able to trace any connection between her and these firms. Know something we don’t? Write to us through the Black Box. A reminder: it is completely anonymous, and even we ourselves do not know who sends messages there, when, or from where.
That is everything we have found so far from open sources. If we have misstated anything anywhere, Katerina Tikhonova herself or her representatives (including representatives of her organizations) are invited to provide clarifications, rebuttals, and so on. We will gladly publish them all.
P.S. If you like what the Anti-Corruption Foundation does, then head here and set up a monthly payment. You’ll become our sponsor and patron—just like Transneft and Rosatom are for Katerina.