Vladimir. 67 years old. Doesn't understand what's going on.
It turns out Putin is against corruption. And he keeps telling his officials: work transparently.
But they don't listen to him and keep stealing hundreds of millions anyway.
More likely billions, in fact, because our president is saying this about the Vostochny Cosmodrome. Let me remind you: it was originally supposed to be built for 150 billion rubles. Now that figure has risen to 300 billion rubles.
Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich. Right now, just for you, I'll do something very simple. Since you've started talking about transparency. Since you demand it and have said so a hundred times. I won't even dig through the construction contracts and bombard you with numbers, although since 2012 the Anti-Corruption Foundation has been practically shouting that this cosmodrome is being looted from top to bottom.
I'll point my finger at the very, very top. Almost right next to you, and we'll talk a little about transparency.
So, the Vostochny Cosmodrome. Where, as Putin rightly tells us, everything has been stolen. Who runs it? Roscosmos. And who runs Roscosmos?
The man you appointed yourself: Dmitry Olegovich Rogozin. Along with his robot friend Fyodor, who is supposedly going to conquer deep space.
Unfortunately, we at the Anti-Corruption Foundation don't have such a cutting-edge robot. So we do things the old-fashioned way. By hand. We take the official disclosure form of Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin.
He had worked at Roscosmos for just over a year. So how much did our space executive make there?
29.5 million rubles in income for 2018. And it says so прямо: 23.5 million "from his primary place of work," meaning Roscosmos, plus another 6 million from God knows where.
2 million rubles a month. 100,000 rubles a day.
We're all for transparency. Maybe that's exactly what should be paid to a man planning to explore deep space with the help of robot Fyodor. Let's take a look at how much the head of NASA in the United States makes. Their spaceports are in much better shape, and they carry out far more launches than we do. But the director's salary there tops out at 250,000 dollars a year. That's about 16 million rubles a year — one and a half times less than our Rogozin.
This is especially interesting given that for ordinary engineers, the situation is exactly the opposite. An engineer at NASA earns on average 82,000 dollars a year, or about 430,000 rubles a month, while at a Russian Roscosmos enterprise it's 60,000 rubles a month.
But that's not all you can make in a state corporation.
Let's keep reading the disclosure. We compare the "vehicles" section for 2017 and 2018. And we see that the Rogozin family acquired no fewer than two new cars. Dmitry Olegovich himself was pleased to buy a Mercedes S560; one in a mid-range configuration costs around 12 million rubles. And his wife got richer by a whole Range Rover — that's another 8 million rubles or so.
But that's still not all. We keep looking at the disclosure, and we see a dacha.
A dacha? What dacha? It wasn't there before. But now, thanks to Roscosmos and the Vostochny Cosmodrome, it has appeared. Let's take a look.
It's located in northern Moscow, just a little beyond the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road), in the Khimki area. It is a brand-new country house belonging to Rogozin, nearly 800 square meters in size, standing on a pleasant wooded plot of 25 sotkas (about 2,500 square meters, or 0.25 hectares — also visible in Rogozin's latest disclosure). But then came a surprise. A month ago, Rogozin doubled his holdings exactly. So now it's a half-hectare plot. And work is in full swing there now, just like at the Vostochny Cosmodrome. Some kind of gazebo is going up, construction materials are everywhere, and in the back you can already see a sizable bathhouse that has been built.
But that's not all either. Rogozin's plot is connected to the neighboring one by a gate, with a worn footpath leading to it. Who is Rogozin such close friends with that he even linked their properties? And the house there is substantial too — 808 square meters. Normally, the answer to that question can be found in extracts from Rosreestr (Russia's state property registry). But not this time. Because according to the official documents, all of it is owned by a PRIVATE INDIVIDUAL.
This is exactly what I hate — it's infuriating. We run into it more and more often when investigating Russian state crooks. They hide their identities in official documents. As if they are so important and so grand that every intelligence service in the world has only one mission: to find their dacha. Rogozin did the same thing with his giant 350-square-meter apartment — he classified it too. There as well, it's all just "private individuals." And when they try this hard to hide something, it only makes us more interested in getting to the truth.
Let's look for clues. We examine everything carefully that might lead us in the right direction. Look here: on the concealed property, we noticed several cars.
One of them is a Range Rover. Exactly the same one listed in Rogozin's disclosure. Hmm. The second clue is running around next to the Range Rover — it's a dog.
A very similar dog appears on Rogozin's Twitter under the name Ponchik. And we find the third clue in this photo from Rogozin's Twitter.
As we now understand, this photo was taken right here, by this bench on the property of the PRIVATE INDIVIDUAL.
Only one question remains. Where is Nicholas the dachshund, Rogozin? The very same dachshund that Rogozin drowned, and then supposedly took home. Where is Nicholas? We can see Ponchik the shepherd dog running around. Robot Fyodor is also out in the open for everyone to see. But where is the dachshund? Two years have passed.
As for the property, one thing is clear: Rogozin has been using it for several years already. We also know who is really hiding behind the code words "private individual" — in our working archives, we found that four years ago we had already obtained an extract for this house. Back then, apparently, there was no such threat to national security, and the owner of this 800-square-meter mansion was listed under his real name.
Gennady Nikolaevich Serebryakov. This is, according to Rogozin himself, his father-in-law — his wife's father. And, lest you think he is some businessman or oligarch, it is specified there that Gennady Serebryakov is a former KGB officer (the Soviet security service). He is now 81 years old. He bought the dacha when he was 77. So there is not the slightest doubt that the money of our chief space boss was used here too.
Incidentally, another neighboring 800-square-meter house was purchased in 2017 by Rogozin's aide in the government, Valentin Semyonovich Masenkov.
Now, by an amazing coincidence, Masenkov works as Roscosmos's chief administrative officer. And his salary there, by the way, is also around 20 million rubles.
It's time to talk about money. Rogozin's property — half a hectare of land and an 800-square-meter house — is worth 200 million rubles. And that is a very conservative estimate. Right now, this neighboring empty plot is listed for sale. The asking price is more than 3 million rubles per sotka (100 square meters).
We estimate the 81-year-old father-in-law's property at 150 million rubles. That's very easy to do. We found a listing for another house, much older and less well maintained, priced at 135 million.
So, dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, I — and, I'm sure, the whole country — am putting this question to you: can you explain, from the standpoint of the transparency you demand, how the head of Roscosmos's family came to possess this property?
350 million rubles — the amount reflected in the disclosures — is three times more than Dmitry Rogozin could have earned as a public official in his entire life.
And besides, you know, even the official salary of 23 million rubles troubles us greatly. Maybe you can explain why you set the salaries of the head and deputy head of Roscosmos higher than that of the NASA administrator? We're not against a high salary, but why is it insanely high? Does our budget really have that much money to spare?
This is very important to explain, because how can you demand transparency from the people below if, at the very top, out in the open — after all, we have used nothing here except a published disclosure — the numbers simply do not add up.
And if you cannot explain it or bring transparency to it, then Dmitry Olegovich Rogozin is absolutely right to propose naming the Vostochny Cosmodrome after you. A failed project that took several years longer to build than promised. Whose cost doubled. And from whose construction billions were stolen. Of course it should bear the name "Vladimir Putin."
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