After every investigation comes out, I have both an obligation and a guilty pleasure.
The obligation: I always check what journalists who do investigative reporting themselves—and the editors of media outlets that know how to do this kind of work—have written about our work. Unfortunately, there aren’t many of them, and you know their names perfectly well. So I go through the Facebook posts of Anin, Osetinskaya, Shleynov, Lysova, Badanin, Bershidsky, Albats, Timchenko, the guys from Reuters, the guys from Bloomberg, and another four or five people.
They might praise it or criticize it, maybe point out something we missed. Or envy it the same way we envy their great investigations.
But they never lapse into conspiracy theories. For a very simple reason: they look at an investigation and understand how it was done, because they know how to do them themselves.
In exactly the same way, we at the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) can read someone else’s investigation and roughly understand what had to be done, and in what order, to produce it.
After the obligation comes the guilty pleasure: I read reactions from all sorts of hellish columnists, “public investigators,” political analysts, “authoritative sources,” and “experts” from anonymous internet channels. It’s especially great to gather the whole investigations team and read the funniest bits out loud.
And this time we thought: why not do that for everyone?
Why not go through all these “analytical” opuses in detail and thoroughly on video? Especially since we had a ton of behind-the-scenes material left over from the film.
So here’s a video answering all the frequently asked questions about “Dimon” (“He Is Not Dimon to You,” a reference to Dmitry Medvedev). Who leaked it? How much did it cost? Was the investigation stolen? How do drones fly? Here are the answers:
Remember how we all laughed at Prosecutor General Chaika, who said that Browder was behind our investigation about him, and that he had seen millions of dollars being paid for the film? Or how absurd Dmitry Kiselyov’s TV segment about “Agent Freedom” seemed?
This situation is no different at all. It’s both funny and sad to read all this “analysis” about Kremlin towers (rival factions within the Russian elite).
Let me explain, once and for all, who commissioned it. Here it is.
In the first month, 3 million people watched our simple flyover video of Medvedev’s dacha. Then we checked Odnoklassniki (a Russian social network), and there were another 7 million views of our video uploaded by other people.
Even the junior assistant to the deputy editor of a magazine called *Crocheting Today* would notice that this kind of interest is a journalistic gold mine. People watch stories about Medvedev. They’re interested in Medvedev. Which means we should do more on Medvedev.
On September 15, 2016, we released a video with a flyover of Medvedev’s dacha in Plyos. In it, we laid out the ownership structure in detail—we talked about the Dar Foundation and the Gradislava Foundation, to which the dacha had been gifted.
From the Gradislava Foundation to the Sotsgosproekt Foundation, it’s two clicks in any database like SPARK or Kontur-Focus. That’s not a figure of speech. It really is two clicks.
You click on the name of the foundation’s owner, Leonid Rubtsov, see that he heads a company called Green Yard, click on Green Yard, and there it is: the Sotsgosproekt Foundation.
Naturally, the ACF investigations department found and checked all of that right away. But to assemble the material we presented to you three weeks ago, it took not three clicks but 33,000. Checks, requests, records, searches for alumni lists from 1987 and videos of their annual dances. To find those stupid sneakers, we had to go through THOUSANDS of photos of Medvedev in every imaginable photo archive. All of that took a couple of months. Then we still had to film all the properties—on Rublyovka and in Kursk we filmed in October; in December, Georgy Alburov generously went on his first foreign work trip in his life—to Italy. And we filmed the mountain dacha in Pssekhako in full emergency mode—in February of this year.
And on top of that, we still had to write the film script, build a big website with a great interactive diagram, attach documents everywhere, and back up almost every single word with a screenshot.
All of this took us six months. If you know how to do it faster, come work for the Anti-Corruption Foundation—we need you.
And of course we timed the release. So much so that we were making final edits five minutes before publication (Alisher “Usmenov” is the best proof of that).
And we signed the agreement with the rights holder for the songs by the group Kombinatsiya that same morning, the morning we published the film.
With no small amount of pleasure, and with full responsibility, I state the following: this investigation was done without a single “tip-off,” without any documents sent to the Black Box, and without even hints from “informed sources.”
Every step, all hundred-plus pages of text, all the materials were gathered mainly from three databases: the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, Rosreestr (Russia’s property registry), and the Cypriot corporate register. All of them are accessible to anyone. Except for Cyprus, they’re free. For the extracts and annual reports of Ilya Yeliseyev’s offshore company, we had to shell out €10.
I almost forgot—here is the main “source” for our investigation: a page from Ilya Yeliseyev’s profile on Gazprombank’s website.
It lists EVERYTHING we wrote about in the investigation—the Sotsgosproekt Foundation, Dar, the “Olympic” foundation with the dacha in Pssekhako, and Svetlana Medvedeva’s foundation. The only thing missing is the most valuable part—the offshore company.
Even if you look closely at the underlying material, there was nothing to leak. Medvedev’s hacked mailbox has been available for download for 2.5 years. All this time, and still now, its contents have been accessible to anyone. Why had no one properly analyzed it before us? Why did journalists see screenshots where Medvedev was giving instructions about maintaining residences and fail to figure out what “hill,” “river,” and “elevation 1456” meant?
Any journalist who says an investigation like this is impossible without “leaks” should sheepishly ask for their employment record book and go in search of a better calling in life. As for the “analysts” and “political scientists” saying the same thing, they should shut down their Telegram channels after first apologizing to their subscribers.
First. The investigation is not the same. *Sobesednik*’s investigation mentions some of the Sotsgosproekt Foundation’s assets (vineyards, Mansurovo), the St. Petersburg palace, and the management company of the Dar Foundation. Ours includes all of that, plus Usmanov and his gift on Rublyovka, yachts, vineyards in Tuscany, the Cypriot offshore company, Gazprombank loans, online store orders, and much, much more.
Second. Sobesednik’s investigation came out two weeks before ours. I don’t think even the most sophisticated conspiracy theorists would suggest that we produced a hundred-page text and an hour-long video in two weeks. Or that we turned back time and shot Rublyovka from a quadcopter with green trees, and the Kursk region in autumn without snow.
Third. *Sobesednik* periodically publishes absolutely exclusive and tremendously interesting material. As for Medvedev, they’ve been covering him closely for years—you can’t take that away from them.
Why didn’t we include a link and give credit? Because we didn’t get it from *Sobesednik*. We got it from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities and Rosreestr. Everywhere we used exclusive material from other media outlets, we provided links. Take Yeliseyev’s quote about Mansurovo, for example. We had to take that from—God forgive us—*Izvestia*.
Fourth. Take the story of Sotsgosproekt and the dacha in Znamenskoye on Rublyovka. Sobesednik and Novaya Gazeta wrote about it back in 2014. But here’s the trick: all of those investigations contain the same fundamental error. They say that Sotsgosproekt owns the “Eurasia” mansion—ranked by Forbes as one of the most expensive properties on Rublyovka.
But that’s not the estate. Not the house, not the plot.
I don’t know where the journalists got that information from. Where this “Eurasia” came from. Maybe they looked at the wrong place on the cadastral map. The Sotsgosproekt Foundation never owned “Eurasia.” It owns this estate in Znamenskoye.
And if anyone had checked the material instead of simply citing a media outlet that had published something earlier, they would have found the right estate. They would have seen that it was gifted by Usmanov. And they would have written about it several years ago and gotten their millions of views.
Here I’m afraid I may cause pain to those who commission videos like this or make films. For the film “He Is Not Dimon to You”, which I hope you’ve all watched, we paid 415,000 rubles (about €6,500 at the time). We hired a camera operator, a graphics designer, and an additional editor.
As you can see from the overall budget, all of these people worked with us at rates far below market, and huge thanks to them for that. That’s it. The rest of the work was done either by the foundation’s staff or by supporters willing to do it for free. Again, enormous thanks.
I hope that after reading this, all the apologists for theories about “Kremlin towers,” “the hand of the State Department,” or “the main thing is who Navalny did NOT write about” will feel ashamed and stop spouting nonsense scarcely different from Kiselyov’s ravings about Agent Freedom.
The video has more details, and it includes funny moments from the first—the absolutely awful—version of “He Is Not Dimon to You,” filmed back in December of last year.
If you liked our film and think we did a good job, we’d be very glad if you took a look here. And support our foundation with your hard-earned ruble.
Basically, buy "a ticket" for this movie if you’re giving it a good rating. We’ll make proper use of your donation.
Thank you!
And let’s also remember that on March 26, we’ll be out in the streets asking the questions the Kremlin does not want to answer.
In Moscow, at 2:00 p.m. on Tverskaya Street. Facebook group. VK group.
The list of other cities is here. A group in Naberezhnye Chelny has also been added.