I read it in the newspaper this morning and couldn’t believe my eyes: this lawmaker really takes the cake.
It turns out that the subject of our investigation, and one of the examples of officials’ illicit enrichment for Campaign #20, former lawmaker Voronenkov, has fled from his beloved party and government to Ukraine and is even testifying in court against Yanukovych.
The guy voted for the annexation of Crimea and, along with his faction, supported sending troops into Ukraine.
[Back in 2014, he was giving comments to the media saying I should be jailed](Commenting on the court’s decision in a conversation with a REGNUM news agency correspondent, State Duma member Denis Voronenkov %28Communist Party of the Russian Federation%29, a member of the Duma committee on security and anti-corruption, said: “We find this legal casuistry somewhat bewildering. A second verdict, and again a suspended sentence. Of course, it does happen that a court finds a person committed a crime, but an insignificant one. But a thief belongs in prison. As a Doctor of Law, I would like to explain that Navalny is, of course, a very competent and sophisticated lawyer, and such a lenient sentence is connected to the fact that he committed this crime earlier than the date on which his first sentence was handed down. I support the position of the prosecutor’s office, which requested a term proportionate to the gravity of the crime, and there are certainly grounds for reviewing the sentence.” “A person is in the opposition. And we have very strict standards for the opposition. And suddenly we have such a lenient sentence. That raises some bewilderment. In no country in the world would this have happened. After this, it is absurd to claim that we have repressive justice,” Denis Voronenkov concluded. Details: https://regnum.ru/news/society/1881954.html Any use of these materials is permitted only with a hyperlink to REGNUM.), because “a thief belongs in prison.” And if they didn’t jail me, that means Russian law enforcement isn’t repressive.
In 2015, when we were monitoring all lawmakers for Campaign 20, this character—who had been in public service since 1995, including in the prosecutor’s office—turned out to have:
- 5 apartments with a total area of 1,088 sq. m,
- 2 garages,
- a dacha (country house) of 887 sq. m, plus a 189 sq. m non-residential building,
- the largest apartment, 446.4 sq. m, is on Tverskaya Street in Moscow and is worth about 300 million rubles,
- another, slightly more modest apartment of 226.6 sq. m is located at the intersection of Rublyovskoye and Mozhayskoye highways, in a luxury residential complex,
- the lawmaker’s car collection looks like this:
And all of that on an official income of 2.4 million rubles.
This is exactly what I was talking about in yesterday’s video about my income. So it turns out I earn twice as much as this Voronenkov, yet I still haven’t progressed beyond a rented apartment, while this guy lives the way only a multimillionaire in U.S. dollar terms can live.
On top of that, this modest lawmaker was found to have an “award” pistol.
And, naturally, he plagiarized his dissertation.
What a wonderful patriot he was, such a fighter against the Ukrainian Banderites (a derogatory reference to Ukrainian nationalists, invoking Stepan Bandera). He voted for every one of his party’s resolutions on the subject. So did his wife, Maksakova, a lawmaker from United Russia.
In March 2015, a month after the events in Debaltseve, then-State Duma Speaker Naryshkin sang at Voronenkov and Maksakova’s wedding—one of the chief hypocrites screeching about the “crucified boys of Sloviansk” (a notorious piece of Russian propaganda).
And now? Voronenkov had a falling-out with someone, got kicked out of the Duma, and he and his wife bolted for Kyiv. And apparently changed colors right on the plane—from the black-and-orange of the St. George ribbon to blue and yellow.
And now he’s testifying that Yanukovych is a traitor.
I mean, Yanukovych is of course a traitor—there’s no doubt about that. But damn, Voronenkov and his wife are the last people who should be saying it.
A perfect and instructive example. For a corrupt crook, any ideology will do. Today he’s “liberating Donbas from Russophobes,” tomorrow he’s testifying before a Kyiv court about Yanukovych’s treason. The day after that, he’ll be taking part in a press conference in Washington alongside the same kind of “opposition figure,” Ponomaryov, who was getting money from Surkov “for lectures.”
And it’ll be the same with all of them: cut off their money here, and tomorrow everyone from “The Surgeon” (Alexander Zaldostanov, the nationalist biker leader) to Dmitry Kiselyov, and from Zheleznyak to Zhirinovsky, will be telling you how they’d had their fingers crossed behind their backs from the very beginning.