A multimillion-dollar bribe from an oligarch to a government official is an interesting thing. Everyone wants to see how it’s done—but how are you supposed to see it? It’s an intimate matter, you understand.
We all know perfectly well that all top Russian officials are effectively on oligarchs’ payrolls. Well, except for those who are oligarchs themselves (like Shuvalov). But how do they get paid? In suitcases? In jewels? In Swiss bank accounts?
The Anti-Corruption Foundation (don’t forget to sign up for a monthly donation) is going to show one of the ways this is done, laying out the whole mechanism and backing it up with documentary evidence.
The official is well-known and high-ranking. The oligarch is well-known too. Possibly the most famous of them all.
The BBC recently reported that Deputy Prime Minister Khloponin’s Italian villa had been bought by his old friend, nickel oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. Good for them—solid work. We’re a little annoyed, because we had been preparing the same investigation for you. The BBC also reasonably suggested that the huge income listed in Khloponin’s financial disclosure came from the sale of the villa. But we discovered the most important detail in this story, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
The most important thing in this shady deal is not who bought it, but for exactly how much. No one knew that, but we found out.
And when we found out, we realized: there it is, a classic bribe—and you’ll be very interested to hear the details.
We filmed the villa itself a year ago, but shelved that drone flyover as unpromising. “This won’t even get a million views.” Sure, it’s Italy. Sure, it’s a villa. But honestly, it looks pretty mediocre. Not very impressive. So we put it in the archive for better times.
Those better times came the moment we looked at the sale contract.
We obtained a copy of the sale contract between the Khloponin family and Prokhorov’s offshore company by entirely legal means—no “Black Boxes”—and the key thing in it is the price: €35.5 million. At the exchange rate at the time of the deal, that was more than 2 billion rubles.
I’m posting the document in full; the Italian contract is duplicated in English there, so you can read it yourself. Here I’ll show the key excerpts.
Here are the parties to the contract. The seller—or rather, the sellers—are Alexander and Natalya Khloponin. The buyer is the offshore company Magora Trading. It belongs to Prokhorov.
For especially meticulous readers—and simply for the record—I’ll lay out the ownership chain of the offshore company and explain why this is indeed Prokhorov. MAGORA TRADING LIMITED belongs to another Cypriot company called NEPTOLINO HOLDINGS CO. LIMITED, and the direct owner of NEPTOLINO is a certain MIKHAIL PROKHOROV. We found all this in the Cypriot registry, although the fact that Prokhorov controls NEPTOLINO was never really hidden—you can see it, for example, in the list of affiliated persons of Payment Standard LLC NCO, published on the Central Bank website.
Next, the most important part: the amount of the deal—€35.5 million. The same screenshot also shows the date of the first payment: April 24, 2017. Full payment was due in June 2017.
The full €35 million—2.3 billion rubles at the exchange rate at the time—was to be transferred to the Khlopinins’ account at Alfa-Bank. I’m prudently blacking out the account number so you don’t accidentally send the Khlopinins another billion or two.
So it turns out that the house we filmed a year ago and dismissed as “uninteresting” and “unimpressive” was literally one of the most expensive properties we have ever filmed.
How could we at the ACF have made such a blunder, you may ask. Where was the editor’s sharp eye? What was the elite real estate valuation department looking at?
But don’t rush to shame us and pelt us with stones. Better take a look at last year’s flyover of Khloponin’s Italian summer house (in the video from this point), or at least these couple of photos:
What do we see? We see the main house, 400 square meters. It has one residential floor with a living room, kitchen, 3 bedrooms, and 3 bathrooms. On the second floor there’s an attic space, something like a loft. Behind the house there’s a terrace and a nice pool. There’s also a guest house on the property—half the size, at 200 square meters. It has two bedrooms, a small living room with a kitchen, and another attic space. There’s also a third house—the staff house. It has just one bedroom, another small living room with a kitchen, and an attached garage. Altogether that’s 150 square meters.
And here, just so you don’t think we’re hiding some secret diamond chambers from you, is the description of the property being sold according to the official contract.
All of this sits on an 8,000-square-meter plot, which is of course quite substantial. And the grounds themselves are well landscaped, with planted trees, neat lawns, and other decorative touches.
But €35 million?!! More than 2 billion rubles?!
That simply cannot be right.
And the obvious hypothesis forms in our minds: oligarch Prokhorov bought the official’s villa for such an enormous sum because this was not a real estate transaction at all, but a legalized and disguised transfer of money to a deputy prime minister in our government.
Now we need to do one simple thing: figure out the price. So let’s just look at what €35.5 million can buy you in Forte dei Marmi.
The short answer is: nothing. For all the resort’s exclusivity, inflated prices, prestige, and everything else, there simply is no property for sale there at that price.
Here is a similar house, also two kilometers from the sea. The plot is smaller, of course, but the house itself is exactly twice as large. Price: €4.9 million.
Here is another house in the same area: 600 square meters, 3,000 square meters of land, but unlike Khloponin’s, it’s just a few meters from the sea (that is, first or second line, not the 31st like Khloponin’s). €10 million. Three times cheaper.
Maybe it’s the land that’s expensive? Apparently not. Here is a well-kept plot of greater size in the same area, listed at €2.3 million.
We can see with our own eyes that the land under Khloponin’s villa is worth €2.3 million. So what did he spend the other €33 million on? A 400-square-meter house with three bedrooms? Planting trees? Honestly, even hypothetically—on what? Unless he buried a suitcase with €30 million in cash in a flower bed with tansy and asters. That’s the only explanation, in my view.
Okay, let’s keep going. Suppose this particular part of Forte dei Marmi is in a slump and nothing is selling. Less than a 30-minute drive away—in the same province—there’s a castle, literally an old restored castle: 2,000 square meters and 5 hectares of land. It has 11 bedrooms, ceremonial halls painted with frescoes, statues, fountains, stables. And all of it is almost twice cheaper than Khloponin’s house.
Here is the kind of magnificent mansion you can buy for €30 million in Italy’s capital, Rome. And you’d still have €5 million left over for gelato.
Five floors, 8 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms, huge terraces overlooking Rome. And again, it’s cheaper.
Don’t want to compare it with Italian real estate? Let’s look at a MUCH more expensive and exclusive place—the French Riviera. There, for €35 million, you can buy a villa like this—again, larger, also with a pool, staff quarters, garages, and you can see for yourself what kind of view it has.
By adding €3 million more—or bargaining a little—Prokhorov could have bought a 1,500-square-meter villa like this near Cannes. 12 bedrooms, 6 living rooms, a guest house, an 8-car garage, a pool, a spa complex, a tennis court—everything included in the price.
And here’s another interesting observation. The villa in the pictures above is brand new. So all the arguments that Khloponin might have “built something expensive from scratch” there or “spent heavily on construction materials and finishes” can safely be thrown in the trash. This is what you can build and sell for €38 million.
You, like me, are probably already getting a little tired of such a detailed survey of elite European real estate, and the prospect of seeing targeted ads for villas on the Riviera and in Monaco for the rest of the year is hardly appealing to anyone.
So I hope you’ll agree with me on one thing.
This house, located right here, cannot be worth €35 million.
It is simply not a market price. No sane person with internet access and the ability to spend five minutes on a real estate website would buy Khloponin’s villa for €35 million. And nothing can affect that market price—not how much Khloponin himself paid for the villa, not how much he invested in it, not even the fact that it may be haunted by the spirit of a billionaire official who once touched Putin.
I’ll allow myself a very generous and rather absurd assumption: let’s say Khloponin’s villa, on the 31st line from the sea, is among the five most expensive properties in Forte dei Marmi. Even then, it could be valued at €10 million.
I arrived at the €10 million figure based on the listings we looked at above.
But Prokhorov paid €35 million—three times more. Why? Because Prokhorov was not buying a mediocre villa of the sort he certainly has no need for. He was buying one of the top officials in the Russian government. And this is exactly the moment to remember that Khloponin oversees subsoil use and natural resource licensing, while Prokhorov’s interests are tied directly to that sphere.
And at least €25 million of that was a bribe, packaged in this simple way.
Great situation, isn’t it? We live in a country rich in resources but poor in people. And the rich resources that belong to those people are being carved up among crooks somewhere in Tuscany, passing villas and money back and forth. Then they come back here and tell us: tighten your belts, folks. Hard years lie ahead, but you’ll just have to endure them.
Now we have some questions for the authorities—and for old man Putin:
- We started digging into all this because we became interested in the hard-to-explain facts in Khloponin’s financial disclosure.
So why weren’t the FSB, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Investigative Committee, and the financial monitoring agencies interested?
Based on information from open sources, we say this was a bribe.
Why is no one except the ACF saying so?
Could it be because Putin’s family receives similarly generous payoffs too? And even much more generous ones.
I do not want to live under a government and authorities that consider deals like this normal. I do not need security services that ignore things like this. I do not want to pay my taxes to maintain a state apparatus that serves the oligarchy.
Today we will prepare and submit all the necessary crime reports concerning Prokhorov and Khloponin. Will there be a response? That depends only on whether we insistently demand one.
Putin’s inauguration is on May 7. A perfect occasion to tell him everything we think about corruption in the Kremlin and the government—and to ask questions we have wanted answered for many years.
On May 5, protests will take place across the country by those who did not vote for Putin and do not agree with his policies. Take to the streets—enough tolerating humiliation. They simply do not regard us as human beings.
We are full citizens, and our voice must be heard.
I ask everyone very sincerely:
a) help spread this video;
b) do everything possible to make sure as many people as possible come to the May 5 protest in your city.