The Anti-Corruption Foundation is like an icebreaker. Even if people are regularly taken away from the bridge for 15 to 30 days of detention, it has no effect on its plans, speed, or course, and the machine keeps powering ahead. I’m proud to present the ACF 2017 report. Give it a read, and then don’t forget to stop by here: https://donate.fbk.info/.
To start things off, we’ve prepared something we’ve never done before. You could call it a teaser for the report: all the key facts and figures in 82 seconds.
It was an extremely eventful year for us. Our biggest success (as you may have guessed from the duck in the picture) was the film He Is Not Dimon to You. The story of how we found palaces, yachts, and vineyards linked to the prime minister has been viewed by 27 million people on YouTube alone. To date, it is ACF’s largest investigation.
It is especially valuable because *Dimon* helped spark protests across Russia on an unprecedented scale—not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but throughout the entire country.
Of course, it wasn’t all about Dimon. In 2017, there were other major investigations too: we found that the fiery patriot Solovyov had Italian residency registration and a villa on Lake Como, and Peskov had an unemployed millionaire son. Our drone, Volodya, flew over the Rotenberg palaces, over Minister Abyzov’s Italian residence, and over “Putin’s secret dacha”—and filmed it all.
Speaking of video: our video team did an amazing job. Over the year, we recorded and released 109 videos on the Navalny channel, collecting 225.6 million views. We also launched our own “television” from scratch—the live-streaming channel Navalny LIVE. By the end of the year, it already had 400,000 subscribers and seven regular shows.
Our other projects are alive and growing too. Over the course of the year, the heroic staff of RosPil investigated contracts worth 52 billion rubles (about $900 million at the time) and succeeded in getting 13 antitrust cases opened. In 2017, we completely redesigned the RosYama website, resolved more than 25,000 public-utilities problems through RosZhKH, and continued fighting for access to water.
ACF is not only against corruption, but also in favor of protecting the environment—so this year, once again, we decided not to waste paper printing the report and published it electronically instead. It contains lots of links, images, and videos. And absolutely everything described in this report is made possible by your donations. Every investigation, every video, every broadcast is paid for by you, our supporters, and no one else. In 2017, nearly 30,000 people helped us—and I am grateful to every one of them.
As before, we spend most of your money on staff salaries. After all, ACF’s main strength is its people—those who keep doing their work despite the pressure. And this year, that pressure was especially intense. Over the course of the year, ACF employees spent a total of 195 days under unlawful arrest. Our equipment was seized, our office was searched, our electricity was cut off during broadcasts, and we were even physically attacked. Judging by where I am right now, that is unlikely to change anytime soon. But of course, that will not stop us.
Thank you to everyone who shares our report on social media and sends it to relatives and friends. If people who trust your judgment learn that you are happy with our work, some of them will surely want to support us too. And if you still haven’t set up a monthly payment to ACF, we would be very glad if you did. Then the next report will be even bigger and better than this one.
Enjoy the report, and stay with us.