Hi! Right before New Year’s, I’ve got a story for you about an evil Grinch who wants to steal our internet. And along with it, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and really any other freedom we might still happen to have lying around.
Senator Andrei Klishas. Watch the video — I promise, it will surprise you.
Instead of an epigraph, I’ll just say this: no text can convey the beauty and scale of Klishas’s Swiss villa. Wondering whether to read or watch? Watch! It’s genuinely breathtaking.
So. Klishas. Our loyal readers may remember that we investigated him back in 2014. That was a long time ago — our drone was basically on a stick back then (well, almost). We documented fraud in his asset declaration and then more or less forgot about Klishas. Refresh your memory if you don’t remember.
The only reason he came under our close scrutiny back then was that at one of those routine meetings with Putin in Novo-Ogaryovo, Klishas spoke for five minutes — and in those five minutes he managed to propose banning practically everything: protests, the internet, NGOs, media outlets with foreign funding, and even dual citizenship.
At the time, we thought maybe Klishas was just having some temporary seasonal flare-up — he had only recently landed under U.S. and European sanctions. After all, he’s a lawyer, head of the constitutional law department at RUDN University. People like that don’t usually go after everything with quite such rabid enthusiasm.
But no. Senator Klishas was only warming up. He was still relatively new to the Federation Council, and his main acts were still ahead of him.
A couple of weeks ago, our hero for today made headlines so loudly that everyone noticed: with, I think, just a day between them, he proposed isolating the Russian internet from the global web and also fining and jailing people for showing OBVIOUS DISRESPECT toward the authorities online.
I think the law will be passed soon. The window of opportunity is about to slam shut, so there’s no time to delay. Let’s not hold ourselves back in any way and show exactly as much obvious disrespect as he deserves.
Fun fact: Andrei Klishas was my classmate at the law faculty of RUDN University. He came to Moscow from Yekaterinburg and started working almost as soon as he enrolled. First job — and straight to success. In the mid-1990s, Klishas got a minor position at the Russian Federal Property Fund. It was a government-affiliated agency. And what was the most important thing happening to federal property in the 1990s? That’s right: it was being privatized. Vouchers, loans-for-shares auctions, factories sold off for pennies — all of that.
Klishas worked at the Fund for a couple of years, but that was enough to put him right in the middle of the privatization frenzy. Many of you remember that predatory, unjust process — the loans-for-shares auctions in particular. Giants of Soviet industry, all those metallurgical plants that sustained not just cities but half the country, were handed over for next to nothing into the private hands of a few dozen people. I write “for next to nothing,” but even that isn’t quite accurate. The scheme worked in such a way that they were effectively given away for free. And young Klishas, as a lawyer, gave these machinations a veneer of legality.
That’s where the defining work of his life happened. He handled the privatization of Norilsk Nickel — in other words, he helped steal it.
This was a Soviet super-giant on a global scale. The whole country toiled to build this marvel beyond the Arctic Circle. At the time, it was a monopoly player in the nickel and copper market, one of the world’s key producers of non-ferrous and precious metals.
Obviously, this was a prize asset worth unimaginable sums. The state announced a loans-for-shares auction at which Norilsk Nickel was bought for a laughable $170 million by ONEXIM Bank, owned by oligarchs Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Prokhorov. A few years later, Prokhorov — who made billions from Norilsk Nickel — would invest $200 million in the American basketball club the New Jersey Nets, a sum greater than what had once been paid for that enormous modern Soviet industrial enterprise.
So when you now see reports saying that Potanin is 6th on the Forbes list with $16 billion, and Prokhorov is 13th with $9.5 billion, here’s the point: all that money came from exactly there. There was no other entrepreneurship or business behind it.
Our hero, Andrei Klishas, was the one formalizing all of this on the state’s behalf. And obviously his efforts were appreciated, because right after Norilsk Nickel was stolen, he left government service and went to work where? At ONEXIM Bank and at Norilsk Nickel itself — that is, for the oligarchs Prokhorov and Potanin. And he stayed there for 15 years.
That’s it — that’s the end of his biography, and there’s really not much else to say. In his spare time, he also heads a department at RUDN University. He’s not a businessman, not an entrepreneur, not an inventor. Just an ordinary corporate lawyer who built a career on the fraudulent loans-for-shares auctions of the 1990s. A manager working for an oligarch.
If Klishas hadn’t gone into politics, no one would ever have heard of him except subscribers to business publications and perhaps some weekly called *The Norilsk Legal Herald* with a print run of 200 copies. But no — the man wanted power and fame. He decided that he knew better than the rest of us how we should live — what we’re allowed to do and what we aren’t, what we may write and talk about and what we may not.
To be honest, at first I didn’t understand why he was doing this. He was making money at Norilsk Nickel. He had some kind of academic career too — teaching, writing. A house in Switzerland, nice cars, a family — he had everything. So why give it all up and join the ranks as Putin’s chief foot soldier and enemy of freedom? Then I understood. Klishas simply genuinely hates all of us. We — ordinary people who write things on the internet — bother him so much that he can’t stand us. So much that he wants to herd us all into a pen, lock it up, and hang a huge barn padlock on it.
We get in the way of his life and the things he really enjoys — real estate, watches, money... and dogs.
Let’s start with the Swiss villa. We move to Lake Maggiore and look at exactly what Klishas sees from his window. Not bad, right? Let me rub a little more salt in the wound and add that this was filmed just about now — in December.
Now let’s look at the house itself. It has three levels: parking below, a small pool a bit higher up. As you can see, all the windows are tightly curtained. Klishas probably doesn’t get to spend much time there — if any at all — since he’s on EU sanctions lists, which Switzerland also observes. Maybe that’s why he’s so angry.
We showed photos of this house back in 2014. That was because we caught Klishas cheating: he declared his Swiss land plot as being 400 square meters smaller than it actually is.
Of course, there’s also a house outside Moscow. Naturally, on Rublyovka (the elite residential area west of Moscow). Gorki-2. Literally a couple of kilometers from Putin’s residence in Novo-Ogaryovo. The house is 1,200 square meters, three stories. A huge property — gazebos, beautiful landscaping, all of it.
On the satellite image, you can see another cluster of buildings.
That, my friends, is a kennel. Klishas lives with 30 dogs.
Unlike the citizens of Russia, he truly loves dogs. He’s absolutely obsessed with them — and that’s putting it mildly. He has a full-blown breeding kennel at home, heads canine federations, judges competitions, and even publishes a magazine about dachshunds.
Klishas acquired this plot in 2003. Its area — let’s measure it together with a ruler — is 8,400 square meters (0.84 hectares).
Now we pull the cadastral records and see the following. Indeed, two pieces of the plot are registered to Klishas (one, two). They’re marked in yellow. But the one above them — marked in red — the largest one, isn’t registered anywhere.
On paper, this isn’t Klishas’s estate at all, but land belonging to their homeowners’ association. Which means that, for the second time — just as in Switzerland — Klishas has failed to fully declare his property holdings. These 5,000-plus square meters should be listed as being “in his use.” But they aren’t.
Three years after buying this country house, our senator and his dogs apparently found Rublyovka too cramped. So he bought a new house. At the Pestovo Reservoir, north of Moscow. Right on the riverbank, Klishas has a 1.3-hectare plot with a house of about 2,000 square meters on it. There’s a private pier, Christmas reindeer, horses, and some kind of pack of rabbits. The house is clearly lived in. The senator himself lives on Rublyovka, so who lives here is anyone’s guess. The dogs, maybe?
You probably think I’m joking or exaggerating now. But no. Three years after buying that dacha in Pestovo, Klishas once again found himself short on space. So in 2009 he bought a plot in the Istra district, just west of Moscow. Better take a look for yourselves.
Klishas is quite obviously building himself a Versailles. When this house is finished, it will be one of the largest in the Moscow region. By our estimate, it’s at least 9,000 square meters. And that’s without even seeing what’s underground — and there is clearly something there. The landholding is lordly too: 7.5 hectares. You could probably build the biggest kennel in the world there. Thousands of dogs would run around while Klishas sat in the garden banning, banning, banning.
Since we’re terribly curious and we don’t like Senator Klishas, we naturally checked who he bought this land from. Crooked officials love buying real estate from themselves, after all. Klishas bought the plot from LLC “Russian Tradition.”
And of course, in keeping with an old Russian tradition, the company is owned by an offshore entity from the British Virgin Islands.
With a few simple checks, we found a Maybach registered to this company. A car worth 12 million rubles. And if there’s a car, then there must be some rich guy driving it.
We found 100 traffic fines issued to this car and reviewed all the photos. The fines are suspiciously concentrated in one block in central Moscow. And what’s there, exactly? Hmm...
The Federation Council is there, ladies and gentlemen.
And here’s a photo of a bald, stocky man getting into the Maybach. It’s our hero, Senator Andrei Klishas, in the flesh.
Off he goes on important state business in a car he somehow forgot to declare. Of course, putting a Maybach in your official disclosure is awkward, so he put it under an offshore company instead.
And then we found plenty more signs indicating that the offshore company belongs to Senator Klishas.
Its Russian subsidiary — that same “Russian Tradition” — is run by Eduard Vitalyevich Eremyan.
That very same man is listed as Klishas’s deputy at the constitutional law department of RUDN’s law faculty.
Looking more closely, we can see that Eremyan and Klishas are very close. They are partners in the NGO “Modern History,” which is also — you’ll laugh — registered to an offshore company.
In fact, Eremyan seems to have developed such love and passion for the senator that he even registered 13 domain names containing the word “Klishas” in his own name. Klishasa, Klishasaa, a.klishas, and so on.
What’s more, Eremyan somehow seems to have caught Klishas’s obsession with dogs and, like a maniac, registered another dozen dog-related domains — sites about English bulldogs, French bulldogs, borzois, Sennenhunds, and even chihuahueños (that’s a Chihuahua from Mexico).
So in our view, this Eremyan is just a standard front man managing Klishas’s offshore affairs — something strictly forbidden to public officials.
Let me sum up our Christmas story. They want to restrict the internet in Russia and fine and jail all of us for showing disrespect toward the state and officials online.
And the official writing these laws is a crook driven mad by his own sense of importance, obsessed with real estate, watches, fur coats, and dogs. I only hope he doesn’t make those fur coats out of his dogs. He has undeclared land in Switzerland and outside Moscow, an undeclared Maybach, and all the signs point to a secret offshore company. He directly helped organize some of the vilest and most thieving schemes of the 1990s privatizations. And now this scarecrow demands that we show him respect under threat of fines and arrest.
So in these last days of 2018, let’s promise each other that in the coming 2019 we will not show one gram of respect to this pack of crooks and thieves — all these Putins, Medvedevs, and Klishases. That we will do everything possible to make their United Russia party fail in the elections, and that for this we will all take part in the Smart Voting project.
That we will not be afraid of them and will do everything we can to free our Russia from all this riffraff.
Working toward that is our plan for 2019. Happy New Year in advance.
P.S. Oh yes. The watches. Here are the watches. Let me show one last drop of obvious disrespect and say that no normal person — let alone a public official in a country where 20% of people live below the poverty line — should own a watch collection like this.
We counted Klishas’s watches at a total of 163,000,000 rubles.
People like Klishas must be fought, and we will fight them.
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