Hello everyone.
Putin’s recent inauguration has whipped the regime’s most active wing into even more of a frenzy: the liars and propagandists working for corrupt media outlets.
They slobber over their master so eagerly that anyone who dares turn on the TV or open a pro-Kremlin news site gets sprayed with it. And there are hardly any other media outlets left here anyway.
And this hysterical outburst of joy from Putin’s lackeys reminded me that it’s time to release the second episode of our series about propagandists.
And a special hello to those who prefer reading to watching videos. Let me tell you the story of the most disgusting of the disgusting, the worst of the worst, not remotely great but profoundly revolting: Aram Ashotovich Gabrelyanov.
He is next in line in my stories about propagandists. The first was Solovyov and his villa on Lake Como — refresh your memory if you’ve forgotten.
On the list of journalistic liars, grifters, and Putin worshippers, Gabrelyanov and his LifeNews occupy a special place. If a museum of Russian propaganda ever hangs portraits of Solovyov and Kiselyov gazing lovingly at the president, then Gabrelyanov will undoubtedly get an entire monument there.
Because Gabrelyanov doesn’t just lie for big money. He’s also a criminal. In his efforts to please Putin, he goes ten steps further than the others. He specializes in the vilest methods imaginable to feed his pathetic website and his now, thank God, bankrupt TV channel.
His services are used whenever someone needs to snoop, invade someone’s bedroom or bathroom, leak police operational materials through intermediaries, publish illegal phone taps or hacked correspondence, or bribe a doctor so they’ll be the first to hear that someone famous has died.
Many of you probably remember the latest stunt by Gabrelyanov’s trash outlet: they paid a local police officer to get a camera crew into the nursing home where Yashin’s grandmother lives, then shoved cameras and microphones into the faces of very elderly and not very healthy people.
That notorious “rock bottom” we so often talk about was smashed through by Gabrelyanov so long ago, and so many times over, that it almost feels awkward to write about it anymore. But for the record: for what they’ve done, the owners and managers of the LifeNews holding company should be put on trial and, most likely, jailed (just as happened to several of their British counterparts who did similar things). Their outlet should be driven out with a filthy rag, and everyone who worked there should be permanently barred from any profession connected to journalism.
You’re probably reading this and thinking, “Why is Navalny going after him so hard? Why all the name-calling?” I’m not hiding it: I’ve had a personal score to settle with this vile Gabrelyanov for a long time. For years, his brazen little thugs — who for some reason call themselves journalists — have barged into any place where I happen to be, stalked me and my family, paid people to photograph me on vacation, and when even that doesn’t work, they simply MAKE UP stories about Michelin-starred restaurants and foie gras that I supposedly eat nonstop.
So with great pleasure, I invite you to enjoy a crystal-clear example of exactly what kind of creature we’re dealing with.
This case is so textbook that it will take us literally half a minute to break it down.
First, we’ll need a tweet. Here it is:
I interpret his trademark phrase “po chesnaku” as meaning “honestly” or “I swear.” And what comes next — about not owning any real estate abroad — I take as a brazen challenge.
And here is the second part of the investigation — a document. It is the contract for Gabrelyanov’s purchase of an apartment in Paris. It belongs to Aram and Ashot Gabrelyanov in equal shares.
Ashot Gabrelyanov is Aram’s son, the same kind of “journalist”-“startup founder”-con man, who, overflowing with love for Putin, moved to New York to live.
That’s it. Case closed. All that remains are some interesting details about this apartment, which I’ll definitely tell you about.
The apartment in this building has an area of 149 square meters. The purchase price in 2009 was €1,878,910 (85 million rubles at the 2009 exchange rate). Its current estimated value is €2,100,000.
The apartment is located at 74 Boulevard Maurice Barrès. The apartment number isn’t listed there, but you can easily find it by going up to the 3rd floor (the 4th floor by Russian counting) and knocking on the second door to the LEFT of the elevator. I’m describing the route in detail on purpose so that, if you decide to pay the Gabrelyanovs a visit in Paris, you won’t need to bribe a local police officer or a concierge.
The apartment has a large living room, a study, and two bedrooms. It also comes with a parking space in the underground garage.
The building where the apartment is located is in Neuilly-sur-Seine — formally a suburb of Paris, but in reality very close to the city center. Here’s a photo to help you get your bearings.
The park you see in the photo is the Bois de Boulogne. It is one of the largest urban parks in Europe, a historic place where huge numbers of Parisians and tourists relax during the day. But to virtually all Parisians — and many of you as well — the park is known as Paris’s “red-light district.” It is an iconic center of the trade, the subject of many TV segments, reports, and countless legends. At night, the park fills with sex workers of every kind, type, and orientation. There are avenues where men stand, where women stand, where transgender sex workers stand. They provide their services right there — in specially equipped vehicles or simply in the bushes.
By an ironic twist of fate, the propagandists Gabrelyanovs settled right on the edge of this very park. Closer to their colleagues.
The apartment was purchased by the Gabrelyanovs in 2009. It was initially registered to their Cypriot offshore company, ZORANSON. There are no notes in the French documents about a mortgage or loans, which suggests that even back then Aram Gabrelyanov and his 19-year-old son had a couple of spare million euros sitting in offshore accounts.
We, of course, examined the sparse financial statements of the Cypriot offshore company. It existed until April 2017 and belonged to Aram and Ashot Gabrelyanov. The company’s sole purpose was to own the Paris apartment.
We only got a partial answer to the most important question: where did the money in the offshore company come from? We saw no transfers from the owners personally, no other income, no business activity of any kind. The only source of funds was a €2.6 million loan from another offshore company, Mount Investment Holdings — this time based in the Bahamas.
We have, to put it mildly, a few questions about that loan. It is impossible to determine the real owner of the Bahamian offshore company. However, it is administered in the same jurisdiction and by the same company that registered the Cypriot Zoranson, as well as another Gabrelyanov offshore company we found in the filings: Chimed Portfolio Ltd.
But that isn’t even the main problem. The main problem is that, in all the years of reporting available to us, not a single cent of interest was ever paid on this loan. Every year, Gabrelyanov’s offshore company was supposed to pay €104,000 in interest, and it never happened once. We cannot say for certain who issued the Gabrelyanovs such a large loan, but it certainly does not look like a market-rate loan — just try not paying interest on a loan for seven years yourself. Most likely, it looks as though they simply paid themselves money from another, much less transparent legal entity of their own — the Bahamian one. Or perhaps it was some friend of theirs to whom they don’t actually have to repay the debt. The question remains open, but it doesn’t change the essence of the matter.
And in 2017, something important happened. The Gabrelyanovs suddenly de-offshored themselves — though not in Russia, of course, but in France.
In September 2017, the Paris apartment was suddenly transferred from ZORANSON directly to Aram and Ashot Gabrelyanov, again in equal shares.
The re-registration was connected to the voluntary liquidation of Zoranson, which the Cypriot registrar was notified about in April 2017.
I didn’t call this an important event for nothing. Just for the act of transferring the apartment from their own company into their personal names, the Gabrelyanovs paid €300,000 in taxes to the French treasury (21 million rubles). That is an enormous amount just to redo paperwork — after all, the owners themselves did not change — but those are the laws, and for some reason the Gabrelyanovs urgently needed to carry out this operation.
We don’t “honestly” know what really happened there, but one possible explanation is that the “loan” used to buy the apartment — from the Bahamian Mount Investment Holdings — came from someone the Gabrelyanovs have since fallen out with. Or, if the loan was fictitious, they may fear their assets could be frozen in Cyprus, and so they paid a full €300,000 to avoid that.
What else can I tell you, dear readers?
Let’s take another look at the apartment purchase agreement. It includes, for example, a detailed description of what the Gabrelyanovs bought along with the apartment — namely, a set of furniture for which they shelled out an additional €50,000.
A kitchen, some oak dressers — nothing especially remarkable, except for a bookcase priced like a two-room apartment in the Moscow suburbs: €27,400 (2 million rubles).
I’d also like to note that, unlike LifeNews, we did not have to bribe a single gendarme to obtain the information for this investigation.
Anyone could have found the exact address of the Gabrelyanovs’ apartment in Paris simply by entering their surname into the Paris phone directory and finding Aram’s wife there — Galina.
I’ve come to love this directory, because it’s also where we found the Paris apartment of Peskov’s daughter and ex-wife (on the other side of the same Bois de Boulogne, about a half-hour walk through the park). Excellent directory. Use phone directories.
Next, we invested €36 — and a great deal of patience — in a record identifying the apartment’s owner, another €15 in the purchase agreement, and finally spent some money in the Cypriot registry, where the annual reports for ZORANSON cost us another €10.
It’s a real shame that no random interested person pulled this off before we did, because now any such person is going to be disappointed.
At first there’s some incoherent mumbling, but then you can see for yourself: a public promise to give the apartment to whoever found it. Of course, I understand that the apartment we found can’t exactly be called a penthouse, but backing out of your own public promise to give away any elite property that gets found is somehow not very manly. As compensation for the imprecision in both the wording and the find, I’m willing to waive my claim to the €27,400 bookcase. You can keep the bookcase, Aram Ashotovich, if you insist.
This is where the conclusions should go, but honestly, I don’t have much to add. Except perhaps to exclaim, “Who could have imagined!!” The chief Putin toady, the loyal and eager lackey for whom Putin is a great tsar and savior. He despises Europe. It’s full of enemies, traitors, and corrupt politicians. He thinks one thing and says the same thing, and seems even to believe it sincerely — yet his money is in offshore accounts in Cyprus, his apartment is in France, and his son is in America. It’s genuinely ridiculous by now.
Here’s what interests me. Fine, you’ve got an apartment in Paris — and you’ve had it for a long time, seriously and solidly. But why the hell would you go on Twitter and shout that you don’t own any property abroad? Why, after paying €2 million for an apartment, would you sit in an interview and, without batting an eye, deliver monologues about how you don’t have any “luxury apartments”? Is he insane or what? Truly the worst of the worst. A pathological liar and scoundrel. A star of modern Russian propaganda.
As you’ve probably already understood, we at ACF will continue telling you stories about propagandists. It will be a slow-moving series in which every episode is predictable in its own way — that’s just the genre. If you would like to support us, we would be very grateful for donations. If you know something interesting about propagandists yourself, write to us. You can do so completely anonymously through Black Box, but don’t forget that we won’t be able to reply to you there.