Ulyukaev’s ridiculous arrest derailed our investigation into him. True, it’s partly our own fault—we found his offshore company two years ago, but kept putting it off.
I have no doubt that Ulyukaev is a crook:
Here are the documents for his Cyprus offshore company, which we found a long time ago. Formally, it belongs to Ulyukaev’s father, but if Alexei Ulyukaev himself is now 60, then his father is definitely over 80. I very much doubt he’s running any kind of business that would require a Cypriot company.
The offshore company was registered on May 19, 2011, when Ulyukaev was First Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank, and it is still active.
We did not find what assets were registered under it, but we assume Ulyukaev used it to conceal foreign real estate from disclosure.
Now it’s not quite as interesting to pursue—Ulyukaev will no longer be a government official—though maybe some journalists will dig into it.
Income.
In 2015, he reported 60 million rubles and his wife 15 million rubles. That’s four times the salary of the U.S. president. Obviously, this is the same kind of “business” as Volodin, Surkov, and all the other government officials have—just a way of laundering corrupt income.
For many years, Ulyukaev has chaired VTB’s supervisory board—and that really is a place where corruption thrives. They steal anything that isn’t nailed down, and Ulyukaev covers for it. I remember how, at shareholder meetings, he wouldn’t let people like me speak and instead helped Kostin.
And more broadly—this guy spent 16 years in Putin’s government. He is just as much a part of the corruption vertical as Sechin, Shuvalov, or Yakunin.
At the same time, I don’t believe the version put forward by the Investigative Committee and the FSB for a second. It wasn’t only Ulyukaev who opposed Rosneft’s purchase of Bashneft shares, but also Medvedev, Dvorkovich, and Shuvalov.
Ulyukaev was definitely not the most outspoken of them.
The latest news that came out before we recorded the video, and therefore didn’t make it in:
Ulyukaev was detained at Rosneft’s office. Caught red-handed. Meaning, supposedly, he went there to pick up a bag of dollars.
The investigator on Ulyukaev’s case is that same investigator, Nesterov, who fabricated the “Yves Rocher case” from start to finish.
He’s a special kind of investigator (brought in from Volgograd), used in political cases when absolutely everything has to be made up. A specialist in forgeries.
This all sounds like a bad joke, and not a single word from the investigators or operatives can be trusted. That in no way cancels out the first part of my post.
The real reason for the detention, in my view, is simply a planned intimidation campaign against the elites. Putin’s elites fear him and hate him. He is afraid they will betray him, so he does what authoritarian leaders always do in such situations—from Stalin to some Tumbo-Yumbo tribal chief. Every so often, he represses some unexpected figure so that the rest will be afraid, talk less, and inform on one another more eagerly. First Gaizer, then Belykh, and now Ulyukaev.
The entire ruling system is made up of crooks; any one of them could be jailed. There’s an inner circle of crooks and an outer circle. Ulyukaev belongs to the outer one, like the other “detained corrupt officials”—the risk is higher there. And of course, when someone gets the black mark, it benefits someone else. In this case, probably Sechin. And if not Sechin, then some other Sechin—what difference does it make: they’re all equally vile.
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