A couple of months ago, we were sent wiretaps of oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s phone conversations. Well, “sent” is not quite the right word—the recordings had been uploaded to YouTube and were publicly available, but if you didn’t know they were there, you’d never find them. We received this message:
We usually ignore things like this. First, the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) almost always works only with open sources. Second, good luck proving that it’s actually Deripaska speaking (even though the voice sounds very much like him).
So the only thing the wiretaps could really prove for certain was that some FSB officers (Russia’s security service) — or Deripaska’s own security people — wanted to do something involving him.
And we would have happily forgotten about these wiretaps if two things hadn’t happened.
First of all, there was this video, which is absolutely infuriating:
This is Nastya Rybka, a Belarusian prostitute—or, if you prefer, a sex hunter. The scene is Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. A resisting Nastya is being dragged off by her arms and legs by unidentified men to who-knows-where. She was in Sheremetyevo in transit: after spending almost a year in a Thai prison, she was deported by court order to Belarus, where she is from. As you can see, she never made it to Belarus.
Nastya Rybka committed one offense: through an escort agency, she got onto oligarch Deripaska’s yacht, slept with him there, and at the same time photographed and filmed everything that was going on.
Let’s be absolutely precise in our wording. This is the shot for which Rybka spent a year in a Thai prison and will apparently spend more time in Russia as well.
A man who was not supposed to be in the frame ended up there by accident. Truly by accident—Nastya was filming Deripaska; his companion was of no interest to her. But he is to us. Because that man is Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko. Prikhodko was caught on camera with Oleg Deripaska during their joint vacation on the oligarch’s yacht in the company of seven prostitutes. You can revisit our investigation from last year here.
Rybka was not engaged in corruption. She did not order prostitutes onto a yacht to entertain a Russian deputy prime minister. She is neither an oligarch nor a government official. But she is the one being manhandled.
We may condemn her line of work, but surely you’ll agree that in this story she is clearly not the main villain. The disproportionate cruelty toward her, along with the legal irregularities (held for a year in Thailand, now detained in a transit zone), directly point to all of this being ordered by Deripaska, who wants revenge on Rybka by keeping her rotting in prison.
But the moment you say that, all sorts of idiots and Deripaska’s PR people come running and start writing: “Oh, come on, why would Deripaska care about her? Why would a FULL-BLOWN oligarch bother with some Belarusian escort girl?”
And anyway, they say, Deripaska no longer cares about this story at all—he’s long since forgotten about Nastya and her exposé.
And then the second thing happened, after which we dusted off those YouTube wiretaps and decided everyone needed to know about them.
And we want everyone to know and understand one important thing. All the illegal and quite horrific things happening to Nastya Rybka right now are the work of Oleg Deripaska personally.
The point is that the authenticity of the wiretaps was confirmed by Oleg Deripaska himself!
How?
Very simply—through his pocket Ust-Labinsk court in Krasnodar Region. That court issued a completely unlawful ruling to block my blog. The same court also unlawfully ordered the blocking of the investigation into Deripaska.
And now that same court, acting on Deripaska’s complaint, has ordered the blocking of those very wiretaps, which had been sitting on YouTube for months with only a few dozen views.
So now I can publish them with a clear conscience. Oleg Deripaska has confirmed that these are conversations involving him and his lawyers.
Below are links to three YouTube videos containing three intercepted phone calls from Deripaska’s office. In two of the three, Deripaska personally takes part.
In case the videos are taken down, we have reuploaded them here.
So. We’ll be talking about two of the three conversations. The file we won’t focus on today is the third one on the list: “74957205017 office 817026221831 Deripaska.” In it, Deripaska discusses a corporate raid on a bottled Baikal water producer. It also deserves attention, but not today.
Today is about Rybka, because the other two conversations are specifically about her.
1. File “74957205017 office 447798205538 foreigner.”
Participants: Tatyana, Georgy, and an English-speaking William.
Topic of discussion: the arrest of Rybka and company in Thailand
Summary of the conversation: Tatyana and Georgy tell a foreign lawyer, William, about the arrest of Nastya Rybka and a group of sex coaches in Thailand. They describe what happened and what the group is accused of. They ask what punishment they might face. The lawyer repeatedly says that Rybka and company will simply be expelled from Thailand and fined. According to William, if drugs are not involved, there will be no drastic measures.
Tatyana and Georgy are dissatisfied with that answer. Georgy says outright, in a very Russian—even Putin-style—turn of phrase:
And then he clarifies. They need to be put in jail.
The conversation ends without any resolution. The visibly stunned lawyer William goes off to review the materials and, apparently, think about how to make the imprisonment happen. We do not know what happened next.
Who are these people? We had no trouble establishing who Tatyana is. At the beginning of the conversation, she introduces herself by first and last name. Which is, first, polite. And second, it made our job much easier.
Tatyana Valerianovna Monaghan.
In the 1990s, Tatyana Monaghan worked as an adviser on Russia at the World Economic Forum—the very forum in Davos that Russian oligarchs and officials used to love attending, and where now even Deripaska is no longer welcome. Later, Tatyana headed the Russian branch of the International Chamber of Commerce, a business association. She has served as its secretary general from 2000 to the present day. She was also a member of the working group on Russia’s accession to the WTO under the State Council of the Russian Federation.
Strange, isn’t it? At first glance, she looks like a respectable woman from the world of international organizations. A real, serious career. She speaks before top Russian officials and is invited to all sorts of forums and government committees. So why is she suddenly busy cleaning up the mess involving oligarch Deripaska and his mistress Rybka?
Here’s why: this Russian “International Chamber of Commerce” was effectively founded by Deripaska.
The organization’s website uses lofty language: “The International Chamber of Commerce is an independent, self-governing, non-profit international organization founded in 1919, bringing together chambers of commerce, business associations, and individual companies to develop international trade standards, jointly defend interests in international organizations, and resolve commercial disputes.”
I would very much like all members of this independent international organization, founded in 1919, to know what its key representatives are doing exactly 100 years later, in 2019. Secretary General Monaghan is smoothing over the problems the chairman of its supervisory board, Deripaska, is having with prostitutes.
By the way, note the phone number for reaching this International Chamber in Moscow: +7 (495) 720-50-80.
That is the number of Oleg Deripaska’s Russian Aluminum holding.
Incidentally, all the calls we are discussing today were made from a number that differs only in the last two digits: +7(495) 720-50-17.
We’ve sorted out Tatyana Monaghan. Now let’s move on to the mysterious Georgy, who is thirsting for revenge against Rybka.
We had approximately zero hope of figuring out who he was. It seemed simply impossible. All we knew was his first name—Georgy. That was it. Honestly, we weren’t even going to try; it seemed completely pointless.
In one half-hearted, seemingly pointless attempt, we typed a clumsy Google query: “Georgy Deripaska Rusal Basic Element.”
There was one video in the results. Literally one. And you won’t believe it.
Listen for yourselves. We compared excerpts of “Georgy” speaking in the wiretap with excerpts of Georgy Oganov speaking about online education:
There is absolutely no doubt. It is definitely the same person. If the online-education video had not been uploaded to YouTube back in 2013, I would have thought it had been planted for us. But it was simply an incredible stroke of luck. For a completely non-public person, with barely any mentions on Google, there turned out to be exactly one video—and his voice is clearly audible in it.
Georgy Oganov is a former diplomat—he served as press secretary at the Russian Embassy in the United States—and is now a member of the board of directors of Basic Element and an adviser to the company’s president, Deripaska.
And this obsession with international organizations is becoming surreal, but Oganov is also deputy representative of Russia at the APEC forum.
Russia’s representative there is, naturally, Deripaska. I am sure that managing Oleg Deripaska’s personal life is exactly what Oganov went to MGIMO (Russia’s elite diplomatic university) for and spent years building a diplomatic career to achieve. A stunning success.
Hooray, we’ve finished with the first audio file and are moving on to the second.
File “74957205017 Deripaska + 9607760366 Igor”
Participants: Oleg Deripaska and a certain Igor/Yevgeny
Topic of discussion: Nastya Rybka and personal relations with her (let’s put it that way)
Summary of the conversation: Deripaska calls an unidentified man and asks whether he used Nastya Rybka’s professional services. (“Why didn’t you tell me that this Belarusian mouse had been with you?”) The man denies it. Deripaska does not believe him and scolds him for having “blabbed something while drunk,” which Nastya then published. The man also gets chewed out for giving Nastya Deripaska’s personal phone number. He keeps denying it, but less forcefully this time.
Who are these people? Deripaska is obvious. The voice is definitely his—we checked it against a million other recordings.
The second man is more difficult. First of all, our source got the file name wrong—this is no Igor. His name is indeed hard to make out, but at one point Deripaska clearly calls him “Zheka,” a nickname for Yevgeny. Also, if you listen to the recording a LOT of times (as we did), you can hear the secretaries talking to each other before Zheka and Deripaska speak. And they say: “Agarkov, Yevgeny Anatolyevich—shall I put him through?”
The audio is genuinely poor—Garkov, Gorkov, Ogorkov? But that is enough for us. After all, a whole host of Deripaska’s assets are officially registered to Yevgeny Anatolyevich Agarkov. For example, Ingosstrakh and Deripaska’s agricultural company in Ust-Labinsk.
But it would be very dull to present Agarkov as nothing more than a list of job titles and a folder of database extracts. So here is our theory about Agarkov.
Agarkov appears in two published books by Nastya Rybka under the name “Vitya.” He was on a boat in Norway together with Rybka, Deripaska, Prikhodko, and six prostitutes.
Why did we suddenly decide that Vitya from the books is Yevgeny Agarkov?
Nastya, of course, tried very hard to disguise the names of the characters (Deripaska appears there as Ruslan Zolotov), but she made one unfortunate slip. She titled one of the chapters about Vitya “The First Signs of Zhenya’s Attention.” There is no Zhenya anywhere else in the book, before or after that.
In the printed edition, the chapter title has already been changed.
She overlooked it. It happens.
The second argument in favor of this theory is that in his conversation with Deripaska, Yevgeny Agarkov says that nothing happened between him and Nastya Rybka “neither on the boat nor anywhere else.” In other words, both he and Nastya were on some boat at the same time. That boat was the Elden. That was where the now-legendary Norwegian trip took place.
Third, that same “boat,” the Elden (a yacht, of course), until recently was owned by an offshore company managed by this very Agarkov.
And if we assume that we have solved the puzzle correctly and that Yevgeny Agarkov really is disguised in Nastya’s book as Vitya, then we learn many interesting things about him: that he really does have a drinking problem, which is exactly what Deripaska scolds him for in the “wiretap”; that Zhenya/Vitya really did try, let’s say, to “spend time” with Nastya; and also that he was feeding Rybka Deripaska’s location, plans, and schedule in full detail, which allowed Nastya to find the oligarch easily at the right moments.
To be honest, there is nothing especially important in the second recording. Still, I could not pass up the chance to demonstrate how masterfully we analyzed it, and also how disturbingly truthful Rybka’s memoirs are.
Instead of drawing conclusions, I think it makes sense simply to pause and note a few important points that we know as of today, including thanks to these two files containing wiretaps of Deripaska’s phone conversations.
The arrest of Nastya Rybka and her associates in Thailand is absurd by definition. There is not a single reason why a country known worldwide for its sex industry and prostitution would suddenly decide to arrest a group of foreign nationals for A YEAR over a harmless training seminar.
Now, thanks to the “wiretap,” we know that Deripaska’s lawyers and aides were doing everything they could to stuff Rybka into a Thai prison for the maximum possible term. From that same conversation, we also learn from the lawyer that the most they should have faced was a fine.
The arrest of Nastya Rybka and Alex Leslie in Russia is even more absurd. They are accused of inducing people into prostitution. The complaint was filed by this woman here, who once came to our headquarters dressed as a sheriff. Her nickname is Sasha Travka. She is the same woman who had sex with Rybka on the embankment opposite the White House (the Russian government building) as part of one of their stunts. Later she even declared a hunt for me.
I have no doubt that she filed the complaint under pressure—from some more of Deripaska’s lackeys, like Monaghan, Oganov, and Zhenya/Vitya from the boat.
I state with full responsibility that Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska should be prosecuted for inducing people into prostitution. He selects Nastya Rybka (and dozens of other girls, including minors) through castings, takes them to his country houses and yachts, and pays them for sex with himself, the official Prikhodko, and other drinking companions. In Deripaska’s interests, by Deripaska’s people, and with Deripaska’s full knowledge, an entire complex and well-oiled system for supplying prostitutes has been organized—one that Deripaska himself actively uses. The girls are paid for their services, coordinated by the oligarch’s assistants, and literally led by the hand into the bedrooms of Deripaska and whichever people he points to.
Today, the ACF will file a complaint stating that Oleg Deripaska himself must be held accountable for inducing people into prostitution.
One last thing. Tomorrow, a hearing will be held to determine the pretrial restrictions for Nastya Rybka and Alex Leslie.
At the previous hearing, Rybka already apologized to Deripaska and Prikhodko, while Leslie said that their criminal prosecution had been “ordered by Navalny and the Trump administration.”
I understand why they are doing this: they are afraid they will simply be found hanged in their cells. And, judging by everything, that is a real possibility.
I would like to address Messrs. Deripaska and Prikhodko: guys, stop screwing around. You are the ones who messed up; Rybka is not to blame for everything. You invited prostitutes onto the yacht—you should have understood that they were not going to guarantee your confidentiality. Next time, order through the FSO (Russia’s Federal Protective Service). Let this Rybka pack her things and get the hell back home to Belarus. Call off your order. Maybe you will brutally “teach” Rybka a lesson in pretrial detention or even kill her there, but that will not end well for you either. Absolutely not.