Hello everyone!
Now we’re going to break down and humiliate Finance Minister Siluanov and Deputy Defense Minister Tsalikov. Get comfortable — this doesn’t happen every day.
The day before yesterday, we published an investigation. If you somehow haven’t watched the video yet, fix that immediately — here it is:
Very briefly: we found two country houses — or rather, two construction sites. Fence to fence. This is happening in the Rublyovka village of Razdory, probably the most expensive area in the Moscow region.
The people building them are Finance Minister Siluanov and Shoigu’s deputy, General Tsalikov. Both have the same enormous problem: they could not have earned enough for this.
No way. Under no circumstances. There is simply no scenario in which they could have had enough money for this construction. And that is the main thing to remember.
The scale of it. Let’s calculate it based on their average salaries.
Siluanov’s is 38 million rubles a year on average (about $420,000 USD, averaged over 7 years). He would have had to neither eat nor drink for 33 years. Save every last kopeck, and only then would he be able to afford what he bought.
Tsalikov’s average salary over 10 years was 7.5 million rubles a year (about $83,000 USD). To buy this land on Rublyovka and build a house on it, he would have needed 128 years. Tsalikov would have had to be born in 1891, under Tsar Alexander III, start working IMMEDIATELY, and keep working right up to the present day without spending a single kopeck. And then, having somehow preserved that income through the revolutions and Stalinist repressions, today he might have been able to afford this dacha.
33 years and 128 years. As they say, think about that.
And that very same day, after looking over our investigation, these shameless scoundrels started “RESPONDING” to it.
Let’s go through their responses and preserve them here for the record.
Point 1. “It was declared.”
This is where I just want to scream: “SO WHAT?!!!” So what if it was declared, Anton Germanovich, and Ministry of Finance? I feel like tattooing a simple formula on every Putin-era crook’s forehead: “Declaration ≠ legalization.”
This new bureaucratic fashion is infuriating: “If I wrote it in my declaration, that means I acquired and earned it legally.” No. That’s not how it works. By that logic, you could declare the Taj Mahal as your property and then show up and say, “It’s mine, I declared it, kindly show me to my chambers.”
Declaring an expensive asset does not explain where it came from. Anton Germanovich Siluanov, I’m sure someone will print this post out for you, so answer properly: where did you get a hectare of land, and with what money are you building two gigantic houses on it?
Point 2. “The figures and building specifications have nothing to do with reality.”
A lie! At ACF (the Anti-Corruption Foundation), we’ve appraised so many real estate properties by now that any one of us could moonlight as a realtor.
Land.
We valued a hectare of land in Razdory at 650 million rubles (about $7.2 million USD). We got that figure from our ultra-secret source — the real estate website CIAN. There, you can find 53 listings for land for sale in Razdory. We look at the price per sotka (100 square meters) and multiply by 100, since a hectare contains 100 sotkas:
That, Anton Germanovich, is the market. That is what your land on Rublyovka is worth.
Are there listings on CIAN with lower prices? Yes. But why on earth should we use those as our benchmark? The properties being sold there are plots inside densely populated cottage developments. Plots without ministers as neighbors. And, most importantly, without another hectare of forest thrown in, which Siluanov “leases.”
The fact that we did not include the value of the adjacent 1.3 hectares that Siluanov leases is a huge favor to the minister. Because objectively, that land is also part of the property. No one except Siluanov is even allowed to set foot on it. So let’s agree that the 650 million rubles we assigned to Siluanov’s one hectare is a very modest estimate.
Houses.
Did we overestimate the size of the main house? No — if anything, we slightly underestimated it. We take out a ruler and measure the foundation area.
One floor covers 585 square meters. We could easily just multiply by three and get 1,755 square meters. But once again we were generous and rounded down to 1,500 square meters, allowing for the possibility that the floors may differ in size and shape.
The second house is harder to measure with a ruler. In the satellite image — which is the proper basis for measurement — it is still far from complete. But we found a workaround here too.
The unfinished foundation covers 388 square meters.
We overlaid that section of the foundation onto what we see in the actual footage.
The foundation more than doubled in size. 388 sq m × 2 = 776 sq m.
We can only speculate about the eventual number of floors. One floor is already there. Maybe they’ll build one more, maybe three more. To avoid guessing too much, we simply set the value of this building equal to that of the main house. We estimated each at 300 million rubles.
We could have valued them at as much as a billion rubles if we were guided by existing listings.
We settled on 300 million, including construction, finishing, and all other expenses such as landscape design. Oh, and this structure here — the garage — we didn’t even count it. We simply excluded it from the valuation.
Point 1. “A pseudo-investigation.”
Mr. Tsalikov and the Ministry of Defense: a pseudo-investigation is this:
A disgraceful, criminal pseudo-investigation for which all of you will one day answer before the law. And most likely go to prison.
What we have, by contrast, is an excellent and straightforward investigation, made possible solely because pseudo-general Tsalikov decided to hide his billion-ruble dacha and scrub his data from Rosreestr (Russia’s state property registry).
Point 2. “It was declared.”
“Declaration ≠ legalization.” That’s all I have to say.
The cost of construction equals 128 years of Tsalikov’s average salary. Now that really is all.
Point 3. “The calculations were pulled out of thin air.”
Land. I already explained in detail, using Siluanov as an example, where our valuation of 650 million rubles per hectare of Rublyovka land came from.
In Tsalikov’s case, the price tag could have been set much higher. Because his hectare comes with another 2.2 “free” hectares under lease.
So be glad it’s 650 million and not twice that.
Houses. We valued these two houses at 300 million rubles. The size of one is known down to the square meter — 1,868 sq m (it is officially registered). The second is around 250 sq m.
We gave Tsalikov the same “gift” we gave Siluanov and simply ignored the garage and the guard house.
I think that settles the question of our valuation. We assessed everything more than fairly from a market-price standpoint. If Tsalikov and Siluanov got all this for less, we’ll gladly examine the documents and focus on a different question: why exactly these officials got it below market value.
We will, of course, file formal complaints with the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Investigative Committee. We will demand the dismissal of both men on the grounds that the value of their real estate exceeds their declared income. In addition to these two gentlemen, we also plan to file complaints against Rosreestr employees for abuse of authority and deliberate falsification of registry information — specifically, the removal of Tsalikov’s full name from all records.
And finally, I have two more important additions to this investigation.
One concerns the lease of forest plots. We didn’t dig this up ourselves, but after us the Telegram channel Baza and The Insider published details about how Siluanov and Tsalikov grabbed their hectares.
According to both outlets, the price these officials pay to lease Rublyovka forest land is as follows:
Siluanov — 6,955 rubles per month (about $77 USD) for almost one and a half hectares.
Tsalikov — 11,770 rubles per year (about $130 USD) for 2.2 hectares.
That is the utterly negligible price they will continue paying for the next 46 years.
The Moscow regional government could have sold these plots for something like 1.5 to 2 billion rubles (about $16.6–22.1 million USD) and sent that money to the budget. But instead, it preferred rental income of 19,000 rubles a month.
The second concerns this funny video. A worker is carrying construction materials from Tsalikov’s plot to Siluanov’s plot. He steps over the “fence” and calmly keeps going.
Of course, everyone laughed at the idea that Siluanov was pilfering from the general. But seriously, there is only one conclusion here: this is a joint, centralized construction project. The same builders are putting up both dachas, the same contractors are involved. Siluanov and Tsalikov also took their forest plots on “lease” on the same day. They bought the land two days apart.
It’s obvious they got into this whole dacha scheme together. Beyond that, we can only speculate — who proposed it to whom, who is paying for what, what favor was being repaid, and so on. But the bottom line is this: we have two Putin officials. One controls the budget, the other controls the army. One allocates state money, the other spends it. From the outside, they ought to be sworn rivals. But in reality, here they are: building neighboring dachas together, arranging their leases together, and lying to us in their responses together.