The chronicles of the life of Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, who has been in government service since 1989 and lives either like Kanye West or Snoop Dogg, have caused a huge stir.
No wonder: the guy has spent 25 years in government service, yet he wears a watch worth 37 million rubles and rents a yacht for 26 million rubles a week. What’s more, the number of excuses and their sheer absurdity are off the charts: within a single day, the story can shift from “Navka gave it to me” to “I borrowed it from a friend for a photo” to “biker mice from Mars planted it on me.”
It has been almost a month since the start of “Peskovgate”, yet the country and the public still have not received an adequate answer to the question of how a man with access to state secrets, who is the president’s closest aide and public representative—which obliges him to lead a transparent and modest lifestyle—can openly spend tens and hundreds of millions of rubles from unclear sources. His officially declared 2014 income of 10 million rubles does not even come close to explaining such flashy, ostentatious luxury. Why has there not been a single press release about this on the Investigative Committee’s website?
After we established that Peskov’s yacht was paid for by oligarch Magomedov, we definitively placed our mustachioed press secretary in the category of “major corrupt officials and bribe-takers,” demanded that a criminal inquiry be launched against him, and continued comparing the spending of the Peskov-Navka couple with their income.
The gap is enormous, and sooner or later our chronicles will inevitably form the basis of criminal cases.
After the Instagram accounts—or rather, the geotags in the Instagram accounts—of Peskov’s and Navka’s children gave us a chance to look at their movements and trace the route of the legendary yacht Maltese Falcon, those geotags were urgently deleted from all the accounts we had written about. But some things still remained.
On the left is Elizaveta “Liza” Peskova’s well-known Instagram account, and on the right is a less well-known one, created specifically for poems and drawings.
31 photos on it were posted from one location in the Rublyovka area (an elite residential district outside Moscow).
It’s clearer on the satellite view.
The geotags lead us to one specific house in the settlement of "Tretya Okhota"
Here it is on the satellite map.
Naturally, we immediately looked into it. And right away we found a house with an area of 779.2 square meters.
and two plots of land with a total area of 9,373 square meters. Almost a hectare.
As you can see, the happy owner of the luxury residence is Tatyana Navka. Everything was purchased six months before the wedding, in January 2015.
Here, the trained eye of the Anti-Corruption Foundation sees the favorite scheme of crooked officials everywhere. The groom, a government official, buys expensive real estate in the name of the bride, who is not an official, and after the wedding he can safely live in the house while saying, “Well, my wife bought it before the marriage.”
Formally, this is called “laundering criminal proceeds,” and we hasten to inform the Investigative Committee and the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service) that they can easily establish this by looking at the sources of these funds and Tatyana Navka’s lawful income, which could not have been enough for her to buy something like this on her own.
Let’s estimate the price together: listings in this settlement (for example, here and here) show insanely expensive land, with plots starting at $60,000 per sotka (100 square meters) (one and two), which means the land alone cost Peskov and Navka $5.6 million. Including the house, the total value of the Rublyovka property owned by government official Peskov and his wife can be estimated at $7 million.
At the exchange rate at the time, to be precise, that was 470 million rubles.
Well really, what else would you expect? Could an official so uncompromising in his attitude toward corruption possibly live in an ordinary apartment?
“The fight against corruption is part of a larger effort, but it should not be visible to the general public,” Dmitry Sergeyevich Peskov tells us, a civil servant.
Still, just to catch even a glimpse of this very fight, we dispatched the ACF flight unit to the scene.
Each photograph can be viewed in high resolution, but we strongly recommend repeating as you do so: “the fight against corruption is part of a larger effort.”
We are sending new demands to law enforcement agencies to investigate Peskov for corruption and to determine whether his spending matches his official income.
ACF still demands Peskov’s immediate resignation.
ACF still demands that his lifestyle be given a legal and ethical assessment by his superior—President Putin.
We ask everyone to spread the information from this post as widely as possible.
We ask all media outlets and journalists to press Peskov for clear answers, at every public appearance, about where he gets the money for all of this.
After all, just since the beginning of the year we can count: watch (38 million) + yacht (26 million) + house 470 million = 534 million. I am sure all Russian citizens are intensely curious how someone can become so rich in 25 years of government service.
And come this Sunday to the general protest rally for political turnover in power. Because entrenched, unchanging power looks exactly like this: an impoverished country, ruined industry, and 470-million-ruble homes for the insatiable elite at the top.
September 20. 5:00 p.m. Pererva Street. Maryino or Bratislavskaya metro stations.