I was starting to think there wouldn’t be a No. 5 willing to defend Chaika. Until now, there had only been four former prosecutors from the State Duma. Billionaire Aras Agalarov, in what was explicitly marked as advertising (!!), placed an article in Kommersant titled “Personal Opinion.”
You should definitely read it. It’s really something. You can immediately tell that any Russian oligarch is, first and foremost, a former member of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), and only then an oligarch.
“The cooling interest in the author.” “By what right are such categorical accusations being made?” “Yury Yakovlevich’s sons conduct their business openly and have nothing to hide.”
Agalarov, for those who don’t know, is the businessman who made his money building shopping malls along the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road) and has now become heavily dependent on government contracts. For example, he is building a section of the Central Ring Road in the Moscow Region for 42 billion rubles. And World Cup stadiums in Rostov and Kaliningrad.
The best-known of his completed projects is the Far Eastern Federal University building for the APEC summit. It was this building that people wrote about just a few months after construction, saying it “couldn’t withstand rain and wind”:
And in the new building, the electricity and ventilation didn’t work. Of course, after something like that, you’d grow fond of the prosecutor.
On the substance of it, there’s not much to argue with Agalarov about. He is trying to prove that the hotel in Greece isn’t really that expensive, that Chaika’s sons earned their money honestly, and that the company belonging to the prosecutors’ wives and the Tsapoks was not actually operating.
So it wasn’t operating? Or the company didn’t exist at all, as the prosecutor’s wife claims? You should at least settle on one version first, and only then buy up half a newspaper page.
But here’s what’s really interesting.
He’s the Prosecutor General, after all. He decides people’s fates. Ten days have passed, and so far the only ones to come to his defense are four crooked deputies and an oligarch with an advertorial.
P.S. If you know anything about corrupt ties between the Chaikas and Agalarov (I assume stemming from work in the Moscow Region, where everything is run by a prosecutors’ gang), write to us anonymously via Black Box.