One thought kept bothering me—really weighing on me—while we were working on the investigation "Yacht. Plane. Girl".
Asker-Zade works for the TV channel "Rossiya 1" (Russia-1, a state television channel). And they raise money there for children's medical treatment. Those famous 100-ruble donation text messages. And it doesn't matter to them who is collecting the money or where: lying propagandists on a state-subsidized channel or decent people. If you don't raise the money, the children will die.
What infuriates me is the sheer mismatch between what a state banker and a state TV host spend on their luxurious lives and what has to be raised for medical treatment.
Look: the money raised through those text messages goes to Rusfond. It is a very large and wonderful organization—the biggest charitable foundation in the country.
I went to the website and found out that over its entire existence—23 years—Rusfond has raised 13.9 billion rubles.
And that figure—enormous at first glance—just floored me. It means that ONE damn thief of a state banker stole from us and blew on ONE mistress the same amount that the country's main charitable foundation has raised in its entire history.
In our investigation, we list Asker-Zade's assets at around 12 billion rubles.
And that's not counting what we didn't find, or the money in bank accounts, after all. There is obviously a lot of it.
Can you imagine what the total would be if you added up how much is stolen in ALL state banks and state corporations for ALL mistresses and ALL wives?
Charity is a great and noble cause. And yes, one does not prevent the other: we need both to fight corruption and to support charitable work.
But, guys, until Russia gets a government that will crack down on at least the biggest and most brazen thieves, people like Kostin, we will not be able to solve any of these problems.
No amount of donation texts or kind wealthy people will solve these problems. There is enough money in our country to treat everyone. We just need to stop stealing.
Please write and tell me what you think about this, and if you support it, be sure to help spread our investigation. Maybe it will make someone else stop and think.