Yesterday we published a great investigation into how the deputy mayor in charge of banning rallies and promoting Sobyanin’s greatness made a pathetic attempt to hide his country house from us. He simply erased his name from the state property registry (Rosreestr) and reassigned it to a fictional character named Ivan Ivanovich Fyodorov.
We also offered you a deal. We provide daily investigations into crooks, and you sign up for Smart Voting and vote against the United Russia crooks in the September 8 election. Judging by everything, you liked the deal. Yesterday we set an absolute record for new registrations on the site. A good deal, which means we should keep it going.
So, here is the fifth episode of the series “The Moscow Corrupt Official.” This time we’ll talk about the wonderful, smart, talented children of the deputy mayor you already know. Indigo children with a talent for somehow acquiring hundreds of millions of rubles from nowhere.
Because it’s simply impossible to fit everything about him into one episode. Let’s recap what we already know.
We have a corrupt official, Alexander Nikolayevich Gorbenko. He earns 7 million rubles a year, but his country house is worth 500 million. That’s 70 years’ worth of salary. Gorbenko has worked in Sobyanin’s government from day one and heads the Department of Regional Security and Information Policy.
You can judge the “information policy” by visiting the mayor’s office website. There is a list of 48 top officials there—deputy mayors, department heads, and so on. Photos, résumés. Gorbenko is the only one of the 48 whose biography is replaced by nothing. It has simply been deleted entirely.
But that’s not a problem. We still have our own investigation into Gorbenko from 2013. And in it—what luck!—there is a screenshot of the mayor’s office website from BEFORE Gorbenko’s biography was deleted. There is nothing especially interesting there: his employment history (he was always a salaried employee, never had a business), some awards, and information about his family. Married. One son and one daughter.
And that’s who we’ll talk about today. More precisely, we’ll still be talking about Gorbenko senior—his children will just help us do it. Because thanks to them, we will uncover another 500 million unexplained rubles IN ADDITION to the 500 million we discussed yesterday.
Let’s start with the son: Nikolai Alexandrovich Gorbenko, born in 1985.
He is very easy to find. He owns an apartment together with Irina Gorbenko (his mother) and Ivan Ivanovich Fyodorov. As a reminder, that is official Gorbenko’s alter ego, created for the purpose of hiding his property.
Judging by the corporate registry, Nikolai Gorbenko is engaged in approximately nothing. He has a sole proprietorship specializing in breeding horses, donkeys, mules, and hinnies. We won’t even get into that right now. And he has just one company: LLC “Dvizhenie” (“Movement”).
It’s worth pausing here, because this story is very revealing. In 2015, Nikolai Gorbenko’s company opened a restaurant on Bolshaya Polyanka Street. Nikolai named it after himself: “Nicholas.”
Young Gorbenko really did try hard with his restaurant—he even had to write glowing reviews of it himself all over the internet. They invited celebrities, Butman opened his jazz café there, and Moscow 24, the TV channel controlled by Papa Gorbenko, ran one flattering segment after another. But it didn’t work out. The restaurant went bust and closed. And that is where the story of the businessman son ends.
But the story of his real estate begins! Take a look at where his company is registered.
10 Trubetskaya Street. A luxury residential complex in Khamovniki, one of Moscow’s most prestigious neighborhoods. One square meter here costs 1.4 million rubles.
In this building, Nikolai acquired a 226 sq. m apartment—easy enough to calculate at just over 300 million rubles. Nikolai was 29 when he “bought” it. Let’s call things by their proper names: his bureaucrat father bought him a 300 million-ruble apartment.
Do you think I’m making baseless accusations against poor Gorbenko-Fyodorov? I have one argument. Or rather, another apartment in the very same building in Khamovniki.
174 sq. m. It belongs to Gorbenko’s daughter, Anastasia Alexandrovna Chuyashova (and her husband as well—that’s where the new surname comes from).
The apartment is worth 240 million rubles. Gorbenko’s daughter bought it at age 21. So once again, let’s call things by their proper names: her bureaucrat father gifted her a 240 million-ruble apartment.
So, in the children’s apartments alone, we found 540 million rubles’ worth of property. Another 60 million is the value of the apartment owned by the elder Gorbenkos—he bought it while serving as director of the state-owned newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
And then there’s the country house—another 500 million.
Total = 1.1 billion rubles.
Let me remind you that any decent deputy in the Moscow City Duma can simply print out yesterday’s investigation and today’s, send a couple of official inquiries, file a complaint—and that’s it. Gorbenko would be under investigation, and then he could explain for himself where he got more than a billion rubles. And that is exactly why Gorbenko bans rallies. Why his boss Sobyanin launched unprecedented repression out of nowhere. They are afraid. They have no answer if anyone asks them.
I urge you to take part in Smart Voting. It really matters. The United Russia majority in the Moscow City Duma guarantees impunity for crooks like Gorbenko. Register and vote on September 8.