I’ve probably gone on too much about Shuvalov already, but what can you do when this man never stops astonishing us. Whatever we uncover about him, the first thought is always: wow, would you look at that! and this is the life of a government official!
Remember that the high-rise where Shuvalov is building himself a tsar apartment is undergoing major renovations paid for by the state. A direct subsidy from the Moscow city government of a colossal size — 3 billion rubles — that’s the annual budget of a major city like Arkhangelsk, and here it’s being spent on renovating a single building.
In the same investigation, we showed that in another building on Kosygin Street, the official Shuvalov had also put together a super-apartment for himself, though a smaller one — 474 square meters (a tiny little apartment, sure).
When we went to look at the building, we saw that major renovations were underway there too, even though according to the Housing and Utilities Fund, they were only scheduled for 2030.
We even joked: Shuvalov has plenty of money, so he probably just went ahead and paid for repairs to the entire building.
Turns out we shouldn’t have laughed:
Lyubov Sobol looked into it and documented that Shuvalov really does have so much money that he simply handed over 20 million rubles to renovate the entire building where he bought apartments. Free of charge. No repayment expected.
That is twice his annual income in 2014 and one-fifth of his annual income in 2015.
A generous and magnanimous man. Are you ready to give up your annual income to pay for repairs to your apartment building? I doubt it. But the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian government can.
As our hero’s wife, Olga Shuvalova, likes to say in such cases: to each their own.