Today marks one week since the publication of our “Chaika” investigation. 3 million people have watched the film. The story has impressed and affected both ACF supporters and those who can’t stand us. The connection between prosecutors and a gang of brutal murderers is shocking to absolutely everyone.
So far, the only ones not shocked are the Kremlin. Yesterday, the bribe-taker Peskov said that the “ACF investigation is of no interest.” As people aptly joked on Twitter: the official with a watch worth 40 million rubles has no complaints about the prosecutor general, who had no complaints about the official with a 40-million-ruble watch.
This reaction is yet more evidence of the complete degradation of public authority in Russia. What interests the Kremlin are pieces of cardboard on a fence, chipped tooth enamel of OMON riot police officers, and libraries stocked with Ukrainian and Turkish literature. Senior prosecutors making money together with murderers do not interest them. The son of the prosecutor general, who uses his father’s subordinates to seize salt mines and sand quarries—none of that is of any interest either.
Nevertheless, we will pursue justice and accountability. If that is a problem in Russia, then we will do so elsewhere as well.
What irony that the Chaika family, represented here by the elder son, Artyom, has no faith in Russia’s prospects, its future, or the possibility of achieving justice there (oh, they know a lot about that), and so invests its dirty money in Switzerland.
And it is precisely thanks to this attraction to Europe, expressed through buying property and obtaining a residence permit, that we now have the opportunity to open a second front in the legal fight against these criminals—specifically in Switzerland.
Today we sent a detailed complaint to the Swiss prosecutor’s office and to the regulator overseeing the Swiss financial market.
All the Swiss authorities have already confirmed receipt of the complaints.
The complaint states that a criminal group has been operating in Switzerland for at least 10 years, with the aim of laundering criminal proceeds. A group of local lawyers has been engaged in criminal activity, including legalizing the assets of the family of Russia’s prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika.
The Swiss citizens named in our complaint are:
In addition, we point out that Artyom Chaika is a resident of Switzerland and provide the number of his residence permit. It is quite possible that Artyom Chaika obtained that residence permit by some semi-criminal means as well. What kind of residency can this be if Artyom is in Moscow, riding motorcycles and attending classes at the Skolkovo business school?
The purchase of a house in Coppet firmly gives us Swiss jurisdiction for the investigation. The ominous words “proceeds of criminal activities” mean that the house is something Artyom spent money on that, in our view, was earned through criminal means.
We are absolutely certain: the last thing Switzerland needs right now is the son of Russia’s prosecutor general settling into its Alpine meadows, buying up luxury real estate, and steadily moving toward a Swiss passport. For Switzerland, cases like this are a disgrace and a sign that its financial system and institutions are being manipulated by foreign crooks. That is why we are placing our hopes in the local prosecutors, who should pin down their Russian colleague.
Many will say: people have written to foreign jurisdictions a hundred times, and not once has anything come of it. Foreigners don’t mind dirty money from Russia.
My answer is this: yes, most of the time nothing came of it. But before, there was no direct link to murderers, and there was no story about a massacre in which infants were burned alive.
Both the Swiss prosecutor’s office and Swiss public opinion can distinguish a “white-collar crime” from what happened in Irkutsk and Kushchyovskaya (a village notorious for a mass murder case).
That’s all right: people also looked condescendingly for a long time at the English journalist Jennings, who investigated corruption in FIFA and kept calling Blatter a bribe-taker all that time. How are things going for Blatter now?
We will also persist meticulously and relentlessly in seeking an investigation into the crimes of Prosecutor General Chaika’s family—in Russia, Switzerland, Greece, and at the European level, wherever necessary. Ours is a just cause. No one needs the Tsapok gang (a notorious Russian criminal gang) at the head of the Prosecutor General’s Office.