Hello everyone. Today I’m going to tell you a story about one of our old and thoroughly disgusting acquaintances.
Honestly, I thought there was nothing new left to dig up about him. It seemed like we had already skinned him alive, so to speak—we’d written about the 37-million-ruble watch, the yachts, the houses, and his unemployed millionaire son.
By now, of course, you’ve guessed who I mean: Putin’s longtime press secretary, Dmitry Peskov.
In response to our previous exposés—whether about watches, yachts, or houses far beyond a civil servant’s means—Peskov came up with a brilliant formula.
“NAVKA GAVE IT TO ME.” In other words, his wife gave him everything, and he’s just a poor kept civil servant.
This “NAVKA GAVE IT TO ME” became a powerful antidote and a sturdy shield against ACF’s attacks. A universal explanation. An invisibility cloak you can throw over corruption-bought assets and pretend everything is fine.
But we can’t just give up that easily, can we? We can’t let him fool us for years with fairy tales about his fabulously rich and generous wife. So at ACF we thought long and hard about how to break Peskov’s formula. All we had to do was find something very expensive that Navka definitely could not have given him.
And we found it. In Paris.
It was in Paris that Peskov’s ex-wife, Ekaterina Solotsinskaya, bought an apartment for nearly €2 million. Ekaterina is a newly minted state official, working for Rossotrudnichestvo (Russia’s federal agency for international humanitarian cooperation). She absolutely cannot afford an apartment like that. And yet there it is. So where did it come from? Could it really be...?
All right. Watch the video. And for those who prefer reading, below you’ll find a sparkling text version and a whole lot of pretty pictures.
I’m sure most readers already remember the chronology of ACF’s mortal combat with Peskov. Still, let’s refresh our memory and, as they say, enter it into the record.
It all began with this photograph. The watch on the official’s wrist cost 37 million rubles. And it was thanks to that watch that the miracle formula “Navka gave it to me” was born. According to the official version, Navka gave her husband the watch to celebrate the birth of their daughter. Sure.
Apparently, Navka also gave Peskov his other watches. We carefully took inventory and found timepieces worth 9 million rubles.
Then there was a vacation on the largest sailing yacht in the world. One week’s charter costs 26 million rubles. We said then, and we still say now, that the trip was paid for by Peskov’s friend, the oligarch Ziyavudin Magomedov.
Then there was a house in an elite gated community worth 1 billion rubles. As you may have guessed, Navka gave him that too.
Then there was the latest Tesla model, which Peskov drives but which is registered to his son from his first marriage. The son doesn’t even have a secondary-school education, served time in a British prison, doesn’t work anywhere, yet lives an extravagantly luxurious life—with Ferraris, Range Rovers, and even his own horses.
That seemed to be all. But now let’s add a new item to the record.
You’ll probably recognize the young woman in the photo. It’s Elizaveta Peskova, Dmitry Peskov’s daughter.
The media write about her quite a lot, and she happily helps that along. She has a glamorous Instagram account where she posts her own photo shoots, reports from trips to Grozny, and romantic pictures of Paris—which is, in fact, where she lives.
Sooner or later, naturally, a logical question arises: where exactly does she live in Paris, how much does that home cost, and aren’t someone’s enormous mustaches sticking out from behind it?
We started out looking for Liza, and here’s who we found instead.
Meet Ekaterina Solotsinskaya, Peskov’s ex-wife and Elizaveta’s mother. After the divorce, Ekaterina moved with the children to Paris permanently, where she began her new French life. From scratch, and “on her own.”
I strongly recommend that everyone read her old interview in Tatler. It’s wonderful in every way. She talks there about her lifestyle in Moscow, and about how she moved to Paris and now “does nothing.” Here are a couple of quotes.
A lovely picture emerges, doesn’t it? In Moscow, the official’s wife languished on Rublyovka (an ultra-elite suburb outside Moscow) and suffered in an expensive car. In Paris, she is now restoring her aristocratic status and has found her place in the society of Russian aristocrats.
A glance at her Instagram lets us briefly partake in the French life of “Countess” Ekaterina ourselves.
An endless stream of balls, parties, travel, private jets, diamonds, and evening gowns.
And here is Ekaterina in her interior: a marble fireplace, mirrors, an aluminum cheetah—everything is lavish.
But the interesting thing in this photo is not the cheetah. It’s the caption.
“A new home for the New Year. Today we had the new apartment blessed.” The date: exactly one year ago. December 2016.
“Très bien,” we at the Anti-Corruption Foundation thought. A new apartment—that’s wonderful. So we started looking.
It may be hard to believe, but having the apartment blessed protected it neither from our sharp eye nor from inclusion in an ordinary Paris phone directory. You can simply type in the surname Solotsinskaya and find Madame Catherine’s exact address.
The address—Avenue Victor Hugo, as you can see—perfectly matches the geotag from Ekaterina’s Instagram.
Next, naturally, we ordered all the records, identified the exact apartment, studied the documents, and were stunned.
The apartment is located in one of the most expensive areas of Paris, between the Bois de Boulogne and the Seine embankment, just a couple of kilometers from the Eiffel Tower.
It has an area of 180 square meters (about 1,940 square feet) and includes an entry hall, a living room, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a laundry room, and a balcony.
The apartment was bought in September 2016 and registered to a French legal entity, SIRIUS, 75% of which belongs to Ekaterina Solotsinskaya and 25% to her daughter, Liza Peskova.
And now the most interesting part: the price. It was €1,770,000—125 million rubles.
So where did Peskov’s daughter and ex-wife get 125 million rubles? Maybe an installment plan?
We can find that out too. For that, we need the apartment sale contract, which we also fished out of the French land registry archives.
€1.3 million—that is, 73% of the total price—was paid upfront, and the remaining €470,000 was financed with a mortgage. You’ll laugh: from VTB Bank. Through its French subsidiary.
Now that’s patriotism: even the mortgage is Russian. Though the interest rate is not Russian but French—2.7% annually. You fools took out a mortgage from VTB at 12% for your little two-room apartment. In Paris, they would have offered you much better terms.
The apartment purchase contract also tells us that all the funds, apart from the VTB loan, are declared by Peskov’s former family as “their own.” It also states that Ekaterina Solotsinskaya-Peskova paid €100,000 in taxes in France. That is one and a half times greater than her last declared annual income in Russia.
The contract also states that Madame Ekaterina Solotsinskaya does not understand French and speaks only Russian. It also says that she has no profession—we’ve never seen that in documents like this before—and that she is divorced from Dmitri Sergueievitch PESKOV.
So the legally documented story looks like this: a couple of years after divorcing Putin’s press secretary, his ex-wife and daughter turn up in Paris, where they buy themselves an apartment for nearly €2 million, with the lion’s share of that money already sitting in their accounts.
I think that by this point it is obvious to everyone: yes, there really are enormous mustaches sticking out from behind this purchase.
We could stop here. Everything seems clear enough. But we’ve dealt with this slippery crook before, along with the whole crowd of people who will now rush to his defense. So let me do something useful and save everyone some time by predicting right away how Peskov will try to wriggle out of this story.
There are exactly three possibilities:
Peskov’s wife earned this money herself in Russia and bought the apartment with her own funds.
She earned this money in France. Without speaking French.
She sold something here in Russia and used the proceeds to buy the apartment there, in France.
Let’s go through them one by one and demolish each of them.
Let’s look at Solotsinskaya’s declared income. From 2009 to 2013, when she disclosed it as Peskov’s wife, it ranged from 2 to 6 million rubles a year. That is clearly nowhere near enough to buy an apartment on Avenue Victor Hugo. On Putin Avenue in Grozny—maybe. But on Hugo—sorry, no chance. Especially since in 2013 Ekaterina also became the happy owner of an 800-square-meter house and a large plot of land on Rublyovka. Even if she neither ate nor drank for four years, there would still be nothing left for Paris.
So we can discard that option.
Hypothesis two: she earned the money in Paris. Let’s check. At first, by her own account, Ekaterina was doing “nothing.” Later she was somehow involved in the “Franco-Russian Dialogue,” a nonprofit organization headed on the Russian side, incidentally, by Vladimir Yakunin, Putin’s friend from the Ozero dacha cooperative (a well-known circle of Putin associates). It is not realistic that an NGO would pay her €100,000 a month. Her first major position in France was as director of the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Paris. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Like some major philanthropic project. BUT NO. It is a branch of the state agency Rossotrudnichestvo, which in turn is part of the Russian Foreign Ministry. In other words, Peskov’s ex-wife, who moved permanently to France, is a state official and continues to live off our taxes. But there is no way she could make €2 million in a government office either. So we must reject this hypothesis as well.
Option three: maybe she sold something? Definitely not. Of the more or less significant real estate she declared in Russia, there was a 140-square-meter apartment in Moscow, and it still belongs to her to this day. The house on Rublyovka I already mentioned is also still in her possession.
What other possibilities could there be? Did she find buried treasure? Win a song contest about love for Russia? Doesn’t seem likely.
Let’s not fool ourselves: the only realistic explanation is that the thief and bribe-taker Peskov got divorced and gave his daughter and ex-wife several million euros to set up their new life.
With that money, they bought an apartment 1.5 kilometers from the Eiffel Tower, and they pay for expensive education, flights, travel, an aristocratic lifestyle, and so on.
And we would very much like—and indeed insist—that now, in an election year, either Peskov himself or his boss Putin provide a clear and straightforward explanation for these astonishing facts of enrichment.
We are citizens of this country, we pay taxes, and we have the right to get answers to our questions.
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