Hi. Alexei Navalny has now spent his 47th day in a special detention center, while the Anti-Corruption Foundation keeps working.
Last week, we were very impressed by The Insider’s investigation into Sechin’s new five-story apartment. Then we thought: why have the heads of other state corporations been so unfairly overlooked? And while we were figuring out how many floors there are in the apartments and country houses of Putin’s other state crooks, we discovered that for the sake of one of them, they literally broke Rosreestr (Russia’s state property registry) — and really the entire real estate registration system in Russia. Who is so secret that he deserves that kind of special treatment? Watch our new video.
So.
Let’s start with Sechin, who inspired this roundup. The investigation was done by The Insider; we’re just retelling it here ( ~~though we’re terribly annoyed that it wasn’t us who found Sechin~~).
On July 27, 2018 — very recently, in other words — Igor Ivanovich himself bought a five-story apartment measuring 1,229 square meters in the most expensive part of Moscow, in the Ostozhenka district.
In this fashionable new building:
Even we were stunned by the size of the apartment. The number of floors, even more so. It’s basically his own private five-story building.
The interiors match. Here’s a great lion, almost like in *Fort Boyard*, in the living room with a fireplace.
Here’s the rooftop pool. There are also saunas, hammams, wine rooms — you get the idea.
You’d think we would have developed immunity by now — both to Sechin himself and to purchases like this. But no. Stories like this are still infuriating. We’ve already seen the giant house on Rublyovka (an elite suburb outside Moscow) that Sechin built and then immediately demolished.
And the house in Serebryany Bor that went to his ex-wife. And the enormous, nearly 100-meter yacht called Saint Princess Olga — named after his new wife.
We even saw teaspoons costing 15,000 rubles and caviar bowls costing 83,000 rubles that were supposed to outfit Sechin’s official helicopter. But really — why, who on earth needs an apartment the size of a hockey rink?! He’s already divorced even from the new wife, the one who was Princess Olga, his children are grown — seriously, what does he even do there alone in the evenings?!
So we kept getting angrier and angrier at shameless Sechin, and then we thought about it. The truth is, Igor Ivanych genuinely does not understand what the problem is. His press secretary, acting on the boss’s orders, told journalists to go to hell — or less politely, to f*** off — with their questions about the apartment. And that perfectly reflects Sechin’s own position. Sechin sees no problem or contradiction in the fact that he manages STATE resources — resources that belong to all of us — while living like a Persian sheikh. Sechin’s logic is simple: “I carried Putin’s briefcase, I was his secretary, therefore I’m entitled to billions of rubles.” That’s it. Why should Sechin deny himself anything?
After all, Miller, the head of Gazprom, denies himself nothing either!
Miller’s apartment is no less impressive — a three-story penthouse of 775 square meters near the Government House.
If Miller needs to go to St. Petersburg, everything is just fine for him there too. He has a 400-square-meter apartment in the city center — an entire floor plus an attic, with views of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Hermitage, and the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island.
And Miller certainly won’t be getting to St. Petersburg on commuter trains, dodging ticket inspectors in Bologoye. Eleven private jets in Gazprom’s service can take him anywhere in the world without a problem. Miller, just like Sechin, believes he is entitled to all this. In the early 1990s he carried papers to Putin for signature, served as his deputy at St. Petersburg City Hall, and so now — if you please — bring on the billions.
Or take Nikolai Tokarev, for example. Nikolai Tokarev served in the KGB and worked in the Dresden station together with Putin. And by now we can guess what that gets you, right? Exactly: the job of heading a state corporation — Transneft.
Transneft is the largest oil pipeline company in the world; it transports almost all Russian oil. Tokarev has headed it for more than 10 years and is absolutely no different from the other heads of state corporations. In Shvedsky Tupik near Tverskoy Boulevard, he has three neighboring apartments with a combined area of 560 square meters, worth roughly 750 million rubles.
His daughter lives literally a five-minute walk away, in the elite residential complex Bryusova 19, in a 270-square-meter apartment worth 600 million rubles.
And of course, there’s the dacha — what would this be without a dacha? Here it is: the village of Akulinino, a house of 1,500 square meters.
On the 5-hectare plot there are plenty of other buildings, and of course landscaped gardens with a VIP greenhouse in the center. All of this is registered to Tokarev’s 67-year-old retired wife. That’s what the officially registered assets of a lifelong official look like.
And now let’s move on to the star of today’s roundup: Putin’s former neighbor in a prefab apartment block in Dresden, and also a former KGB officer — Sergei Viktorovich Chemezov.
When state corporations were being handed out, Chemezov got one of the best spots — he runs Rostec. It’s a structure that includes 700 high-tech companies, such as Russian Helicopters, Kalashnikov, KAMAZ, AvtoVAZ, and VSMPO-AVISMA, which supplies titanium to Boeing. Even the National Immunobiological Company, created to replace imported medicines with domestic alternatives. All of that is Chemezov.
Now let’s move from these respectable companies to Moscow’s Shvedsky Tupik. In the very same building as his colleague Tokarev, Chemezov also has two neighboring apartments. Their combined area is 370 square meters, and they are registered to his son and ex-wife.
With his new wife, Yekaterina Ignatova, Chemezov moved not far away, to Povarskaya Street, where there are two apartments with a total area of 645 square meters.
Chemezov’s son has an apartment that is outside the center and more modest — 342 square meters on Vorontsovo Pole. The total value of this real estate is 1.6 billion rubles.
And then there’s the dacha. One belongs to his son on Rublyovka, in Zhukovka. Nearly 700 square meters. 400 million rubles.
Another belongs to Chemezov himself in Akulinino, again right next to Tokarev — they’re practically inseparable. Just 140 meters between the neighbors. A 6-hectare plot, a 1,600-square-meter main house, a 500-square-meter guest house, a bunch of other buildings, and a tennis court that gets lost against the backdrop of the rest of the estate.
And I’m happy to bring you exclusive photos “from the ground.” Just look at the courtyard of the head of the state corporation Rostec. Statues of naked women, cascading fountains, and here’s the main fountain with columns and a lion. You can tell right away: a true man of the state.
Though it’s even clearer from the photos inside the estate. Just look at the amazing knight’s hall Chemezov built for himself. Giant windows, towering ceilings, chandeliers.
But what we like most, of course, is the throne.
Thanks for the photos go to the workers who built this dacha for Chemezov. Apparently, they liked Chemezov’s house a lot too.
At the beginning of this post, we mentioned that today we would talk not only about the wealth of these crooks who run state corporations, but also about how someone completely broke Rosreestr. Now it’s time for that story too. It was Chemezov who broke Rosreestr.
Anyone who orders a registry extract for this property in Akulinino today will be in for a surprise. Because instead of the real owner, Chemezov, the listed owner is... the Russian Federation!
The marble woman, the cascading fountains, the knight’s hall — all of it is officially federal property.
Can you guess the trick already? Remember when Rosreestr deleted information about the real estate owned by Prosecutor General Chaika’s children? It simply replaced their names with the now-famous LSDU3 and YFYAU9, which everyone laughed at back then. Well, now the approach has changed.
The new way to hide one of Putin’s crooks is simply to delete his name from Rosreestr entirely and replace it with “Russian Federation,” so it looks like ordinary state property. There are no codes or labels like “for official use only” or anything like that. It is literally registered in exactly the same way as, for example, GUM (Moscow’s historic State Department Store).
Chemezov did not sell the dachas and apartments; he continues to use them and declare them, it’s just that now it is impossible to find out exactly where he lives. And we never would have known if we hadn’t kept old registry extracts for these plots — from before Sergei Viktorovich was “encoded.”
It was so important for these crooks to hide Chemezov that in doing so they literally broke Rosreestr and, really, the whole property registration system. Chemezov’s name appears to have been removed through some kind of blanket process. In other words, everywhere there used to be an entry saying “Chemezov,” it now says “Russian Federation.” And thanks to that, we now have some truly fantastic documents.
Look: the Russian Federation is GIVING Chemezov’s son a house on Rublyovka worth 400 million rubles.
Or here: the Russian Federation is transferring ownership of an apartment in Shvedsky Tupik to Chemezov’s other son.
We figured it out and understand that this is really just Daddy Chemezov under a secrecy cloak. But let’s go by the official documents. If it says “Russian Federation,” then that means federal property, so please do tell us: when can we come take a stroll at the dacha in Akulinino? What’s going on in the knight’s hall? When would be a convenient time to drop by and inspect the other interiors? Better yet, please explain on what grounds the Russian Federation is gifting elite real estate to Chemezov’s children. All of this looks like a criminal offense — embezzlement and misappropriation of state property. If you call yourself the Russian Federation and destroy state databases, then be prepared to answer for it.
And of course, this story is especially striking in today’s information climate. In the span of a single week, we learn that the Russian authorities made ZERO effort to conceal various Petrovs and Boshirovs and several hundred other GRU officers. That the “enemy” can find their property and assets without making any serious effort. But the palaces of Putin’s friend Chemezov? Those, no. Chemezov was hidden professionally. Those are the priorities.
We are sure there will be many more stories of the “Sechin bought this, Miller bought that, Chemezov built something else” variety. We will keep marveling at the level of moral degradation required to pay yourself salaries of tens of millions of dollars a year from a state budget that does not have enough money for pensions.
And every time you hear them, please remember this: these people do not have a single kopek that was not paid to them by us. Everything — absolutely everything — our heroes today possess was bought with money that came to them, one way or another, from the budget. Their biographies are painfully similar. Not a day in business, not a day in private enterprise, no skills, no achievements. They simply met Putin a very, very long time ago — some in Dresden, others at St. Petersburg City Hall — carried his briefcases and papers, and now... well, you can see for yourself what “now” looks like.
They use Russia not just as a wallet they can dip into for another palace; they have turned state institutions and agencies into their personal service staff. Rosreestr serves as their errand-running secretary — erase a name here, change one there. At their instruction, the Federal Property Agency effectively works like some Cypriot nominee lawyer on whom you can register something especially secret.
But you know, there is a certain irony in this too. Because in essence, all their palaces, yachts, and planes really should be registered as the property of the Russian Federation. With some note like “temporarily occupied by Sechin,” “temporarily held by the Chemezov family.” And thanks to their new encryption system, in a couple of years half of Rublyovka will, on paper, turn out to be federal property. So much the better. In the Beautiful Russia of the Future, there will be less red tape when it comes time to transfer it back.
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