The deputy prime minister of the government of the world’s largest country is running away from journalists trying to ask him about his plane.
In Yekaterinburg, they noticed that Shuvalov had arrived on the very same Bombardier mentioned in the ACF investigation (ACF is Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation). They decided to ask about it, but it simply ended with the curious being barred from the briefing:
More broadly, tracking the movements of this humble servant of the people’s aircraft gives an excellent sense of what the “Putin elite” really is.
Take a look:
ACF tracked Shuvalov flying to Sardinia, and when people started looking into what exactly he was doing there (maybe another dog show?), they found reports in the Italian press saying that the official had gone to a party hosted by oligarch Usmanov.
And oligarch Usmanov was celebrating the maiden voyage of the yacht *Dilbar*.
So here’s what we have:
- a pointless, useless bribe-taking official;
a pointless, useless oligarch whose money came not from entrepreneurial talent, but from huge Soviet mining and processing plants, where people work in dreadful conditions;
- one of the most expensive yachts in the world, built with money from the sale of raw materials extracted at those vast Soviet mining and processing plants;
- a party in Sardinia where this Russian official and this Russian oligarch blow through their money;
the multinational people of the Russian Federation (as the Constitution puts it), who will never even hear about this party or this yacht, because Putin, Shuvalov, and Usmanov have made sure there is censorship in the media. Usmanov personally took care of that in his own publishing house, Kommersant.
Quite a system.