Spoiler: he got settled in very well indeed—and in highly prestigious fashion. Like a CPSU General Secretary.
Timchenko is Vladimir Putin’s closest friend and financial bagman. It was he who carried out Putin’s brilliant business scheme: the Swiss company Gunvor became the main seller of Russian oil. Four of Russia’s five largest oil companies were forced to trade through it, fabulously enriching a useless middleman.
Gunvor’s rise coincided with the start of Putin’s first presidential term, and the company’s founders included Timchenko himself and Pyotr Kolbin, Putin’s childhood friend.
In 2014, Western countries imposed sanctions on Putin-linked businessmen. Timchenko was among the first to be hit and was forced to leave Switzerland and return to Russia. Clearly, he did so very reluctantly—after all, he had long since given up his Russian citizenship.
They had to soften the blow for the poor guy—after all, what a terrible stress: having to live in Russia.
At least let’s put him up somewhere beautiful. And they really did find a beautiful place—possibly the most beautiful in Moscow. By his personal order, Sergei Sobyanin transferred to Timchenko’s offshore company (British Virgin Islands) the former main winter residence of CPSU General Secretary Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev on Lenin Hills. On a 49-year lease.
Handing over a historic mansion directly as a home for a crook-oligarch would have looked somewhat improper, so the building was designated “for hotel operation.” On top of that, this allowed Sobyanin to circumvent the law—because land for private housing can only be allocated through a public auction (details below).
The story that it was Timchenko who grabbed the residence was reported by Vedomosti, but there were no photos anywhere of the house, the grounds, or—still less—the interiors.
Especially for you, the ACF reveals and shows how the General Secretary’s successor has settled in—Putin’s bagman, Gangrene.
I should add that today the ACF officially filed a demand to evict Timchenko from the residence and terminate the lease agreement with his company:
There is no hotel there. Anyone can verify this—if you’re at the observation deck, try checking into this “hotel,” just as we did (at 3:50 in the video). In this way, city property has been removed from public use. We see clear misuse.
On paper, Timchenko’s house was and still is a hotel, but in reality it is not. The property was registered as a hotel for a reason: without an auction, land could be transferred only for social, cultural, public-utility, and consumer-service facilities. All other properties could be leased only through auctions. So by assigning the property this designation, they bypassed the rules governing the allocation of state property. See Article 39.6 of the Land Code.
As you can easily see from the video, there is an illegal unauthorized structure on the residence grounds—a bathhouse with a swimming pool. We demand that it be demolished immediately, and we hope Sobyanin will pursue this as zealously as he demolished the kiosks by the metro. The illegal structure is also grounds for terminating the land lease.
We’ll report back on the outcome.
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