Two weeks ago, government official Peskov, who has never spent a single second working in business, was found to be wearing a watch worth 37 million rubles, and all the leading Russian and international media wrote about it.
The question is: what would be the rational course of action for government official Peskov?
The logical answer: government official Peskov should lie low for a while and avoid drawing attention to himself with a lavish lifestyle.
The correct answer: don’t forget that Peskov is a government official in Russia and the press secretary to the President of Russia, so public opinion and accusations of corruption do not concern him very much.
At the end of last week, a highly reliable source contacted the Anti-Corruption Foundation and reported that Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary to the President of the Russian Federation, is currently spending his honeymoon with Tatyana Navka, a small circle of friends, and their children aboard the rented yacht Maltese Falcon off the coast of Sardinia.
“Just a routine example of minor corruption — someone rented a yacht for an official for a million rubles,” we thought, but we decided to take a look at what this Maltese Falcon actually was.
Maltese Falcon turned out to be extraordinary. Let us present: 1) the largest, 2) the most luxurious, and 3) the most expensive sailing yacht in the world. It is 88 meters long — almost the length of a football field.
Chartering the Maltese Falcon costs €385,000, or 26 million rubles a week. And that price does not include food or entertainment expenses. Dmitry Peskov would have to spend his entire salary for 3 years to afford just 7 days on this yacht.
“What proof do you have besides your ‘reliable source’?” you may ask. What if Peskov, Navka, and the children are hiking with tents in Crimea, rather than in hostile European Sardinia aboard one of the most expensive yachts in the world?
First, in our investigations we never cite a “source,” so trust us: this one is reliable.
Second, let’s establish everything together using open sources:
a) Let’s determine where the Maltese Falcon is right now. A yacht tracking service helps us here, and it shows that over the weekend the yacht really was off the coast of Sardinia.
b) We call on our old, trusty blabbermouth of secrets, Oleg Mitvol, a close friend of Peskov, whose photograph from the wedding became the basis of the recent watch scandal.
Mitvol cannot help himself and wants to show everyone the glamorous life he gets to partake in thanks to his high-ranking friends, so he photographs the neighboring yachts. We know that he is not staying on the yacht with the Peskov-Navka couple, but comes to visit them to hang out (and take pictures!).
In the last two photos, there are fairly recognizable yachts photographed at close range sometime between August 10 and 15. They were shot from so close that it would have been impossible from shore, which means Mitvol was photographing them from another yacht anchored nearby.
The yacht on the left, the one that looks like an iron, is called “A.” It belongs to Andrey Melnichenko. It is also currently in Italian waters, and on August 11 it was anchored at the exact same spot near the island of Capri as the Maltese Falcon.
So that no one thinks this is an accident or coincidence, let’s look at the route of the other yacht (on the screenshot above, on the right) that Mitvol photographed up close. It is called Garcon.
Here it is even simpler. On the morning of August 15, the yacht Garcon was off the coast of Sardinia, in the same place where the Maltese Falcon was and still is. In other words, Mitvol was calmly photographing this yacht up close while aboard the Maltese Falcon.
c) Okay, perhaps Oleg Mitvol found buried treasure and is traveling alone, without his friend Peskov? That is not the case, and here Tatyana Navka’s daughter and Dmitry Peskov’s stepdaughter, Sasha, comes to our aid.
The geotag on her Instagram says that she is in Sardinia.
And finally:
Sasha is obviously on a yacht, and the yacht’s name can be read on her robe. The name is not fully visible (?altese falco?), but the missing letters were not very hard to guess. The photograph was taken aboard the Maltese Falcon.
It is impossible to imagine that Peskov’s 15-year-old stepdaughter and 49-year-old Oleg Mitvol are spending time alone together on the largest sailing yacht in the world.
There is no doubt that our source’s information is confirmed: Dmitry Peskov and Tatyana Navka are spending their honeymoon on the yacht in the company of friends and relatives.
In case Oleg Mitvol, as last time, starts inventing a story that Peskov was simply invited onto the yacht so journalists would discuss it, I would like to say that we know the disembarkation points, the islands visited, and even the people they met in restaurants along the way.
Now let us move on to the moral, ethical, and legal part:
The Anti-Corruption Foundation demands that public servant Peskov explain who paid for the yacht charter or, if he paid for it himself, the source of such income.
We demand the symbolic and demonstrative dismissal of Dmitry Peskov for the full set of his “achievements”: a 37-million-ruble watch, a 9.5-million-ruble watch collection, and a yacht trip costing three years of income.
We demand that Putin’s presidential administration and President Putin himself provide not only a legal but also an ethical assessment of public servant Peskov’s lifestyle.
We call on all journalists in Russia not to treat this situation as “just another example of corruption that everyone will forget in a week,” but as a major political fact characterizing the country’s leadership, and to obtain clear, detailed explanations and comments from the authorities.
In any other country, such information about the spending of a president’s press secretary would trigger a political crisis.
We call on all journalists to make the “Peskov case” a standing question for every official who speaks about fighting corruption. The moment Sergei Ivanov mentions “we are fighting corruption,” bring up Peskov’s watch. If Putin reports a decline in bribery, bring up Peskov’s yacht. This is not even Serdyukov (former Russian defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov, associated with a major corruption scandal); this is a closest confidant, the man sitting at every press conference at the president’s right hand.
We ask everyone to help us spread this information. In Russia, 23% of the population falls into the “poor” category, and 17% lives “below the poverty line,” while here we have yachts costing 26 million rubles a week. Let people know.
Anyone who knows anything about this yacht and who paid for it; anyone who has photos of any documents related to Peskov and his glamorous life, etc.; anyone who encountered him in Sardinia, etc. Any information would be very helpful to us, and it can be sent completely anonymously to the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s Black Box.