Yesterday I was sitting quietly in the office, bothering no one, looking through materials for yet another investigation.
Then my wife texts me: all my accounts and cards have been blocked, there’s no money. Everywhere it says “minus 75 million rubles” (about $1 million at the time). You don’t happen to owe anyone 75 million, do you?
A minute later my mother texts: your father and I are getting text messages from the bank. All our accounts are blocked. It’s awful — our pension payments are supposed to come in the day after tomorrow. Now they’ll just be lost.
Five minutes later Zakhar writes: someone took the 30 thousand rubles (about $400 at the time) I’d saved from my account. A message came from the bank.
Zakhar has a special children’s bank card, and we give him 5,000 rubles a month (about $65 at the time); he’s been saving up for a laptop.
An hour later, Dasha writes: what’s going on over there? I went to a café for breakfast, and it turns out I have no money. Everything’s been frozen.
Then I log into online banking myself and see that all my cards are blocked too. “Order of an investigator within the framework of criminal case such-and-such.” The “minus 75 million” amount unmistakably points to the “ACF case”.
Then ACF director Zhdanov walks in and says: those bastards blocked my wife’s card.
Then ACF director Zhdanov comes in again and says: those scumbags blocked all my parents’ accounts and cards and took all their money.
And three minutes later ACF’s head of legal, Slava Gimadi, comes in laughing: oligarch Deripaska has filed a lawsuit against you too. We don’t know what for, but for some reason they wrote his name down as “Deripasko.”
That’s when I remembered: today is the anniversary of “He Is Not Dimon to You”, the investigation that destroyed the approval ratings of Medvedev, the leader of United Russia.
Putin is nervous again, worried, and stamping his feet.
People are laughing at his constitutional amendments. No one is even outraged anymore. Let them write in whatever they want. It’s obvious that with this kind of voting procedure, there’s no point even discussing the amendments on their merits. There will be total falsification — both of turnout and of the results. They could write in God, the devil, nuclear forces, or even award themselves victory in every upcoming Eurovision contest in advance.
And there are elections coming soon too. At the very least regional ones, but probably early State Duma elections as well. And Putin is terrified that you and I will do nationwide what we did in Moscow: use “Smart Voting” to push back against United Russia.
Only this time we’ll do it even better and crush them outright. The party of power is hated by the whole country; all we need is to stop splitting the vote and coordinate everyone who is against it.
Putin cannot allow that to happen — he needs to win almost all the single-member districts in order to control parliament.
The ratings are falling. They wanted them to rise so badly that they even fired Medvedev. Only two months have passed, and ACF has already not only shown that Mishustin is just as much of a thief, but also found that the new prime minister’s son-in-law was buying apartments in New York with money siphoned out of the tax service through the Magnitsky scheme.
So apparently they’ve decided on a course of financial strangulation not only for people at ACF, but for their family members too.
It’s pretty unpleasant, I won’t hide that. My parents are elderly people, pensioners. Like everyone their age, they have illnesses, medications, and so on. And now who the hell knows how they’re supposed to pay their utility bills.
My child is studying alone on the other side of the planet — and has been left without a penny. Of course she won’t go hungry, and she has a dorm room. But this is for everyone who keeps repeating that old line about how “they don’t touch the children.” Right. They don’t touch them. Sure.
We write about officials’ children, yes, but excuse me — we do so in cases where, after serving time in prison, they come to Russia and become millionaires. Or when they are given apartments worth hundreds of millions of rubles (several million U.S. dollars). There’s a slight difference, wouldn’t you agree.
The ACF case is completely fabricated, and its essence is that they simply declared all the donations that you send us to be “illegally laundered funds of unlawful origin.”
A lot of people had their accounts blocked before, but mine were left alone — I have never received a single kopeck from ACF or from any donations at all. On the contrary, I was the one sending money.
What my parents, or Zakhar, or Zhdanov’s father have to do with ACF is too absurd to even discuss.
Apparently, before, they were embarrassed to say: Navalny’s account must be blocked because he donated 1,500 rubles a month (about $20 at the time) to ACF. But now the fear of “Smart Voting” is so great that they have to wage this strangulation on every front and stop worrying about how it looks.
Now I have an appeal and a request for advice.
The appeal:
First, once again, appreciate who we are dealing with. Putin’s group likes to present itself as some kind of “corrupt people with a code of honor.” They keep selling this myth, and various so-called “system liberals” often echo it. Nothing of the sort exists — forget it. For United Russia to win, they are willing to take away my parents’ pension.
Second, ACF and the network of штабs (regional campaign offices) are being strangled much harder right now than I personally am. We need every kopeck you can spare to support us. Here is support for ACF. Here is support for the headquarters network.
The advice I need.
My finances have always been very simple. I have a sole proprietorship through which I pay taxes, then transfer the money to my personal account and use it for living expenses. I hardly ever use cash.
Obviously, the Russian banking system will not be available to me or to my relatives for the foreseeable future.
Does anyone know whether it’s possible to open the most basic accounts for family members at some foreign bank in a way that is easy, simple, fast, and doesn’t require going to the bank in person?
They’re needed just for ordinary payments — electricity, taxis, paying by card in a store.
Fully in accordance with the law, I’ll file all the required notifications about the accounts with the Central Bank or wherever such notifications are sent now. I really don’t want to get into complicated schemes — like registering a foreign company and issuing cards through it. Building that kind of infrastructure would cost more than the amount of money I’d put there.
Various bitcoins won’t work either — my parents can’t pay their utility bills with bitcoin.
Every time you open the news, everyone is writing about financial startups. Is there anything suitable out there?