This is really very good.
Today we received documents from the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, according to which the bank accounts of every member of my family and of ACF director Zhdanov’s family have been frozen.
This was done as part of a fabricated criminal case, the essence of which is that all donations sent to ACF by tens of thousands of people over three years, totaling 75 million rubles (about $1.2 million at the time), have been declared “laundered criminal proceeds.”
For several months now, they have refused to tell us what crime these supposedly laundered funds actually came from.
Who the victim is is also unknown.
But the organized criminal group now looks very colorful indeed.
I’m looking through the correspondence between the Investigative Committee and the Interior Ministry. And the head of the Economic Security and Anti-Corruption Directorate (hilarious) lists the names of those against whom operational measures are being carried out.
All right, I see my daughter Dasha. But who are Volkov M.L. and Zhdanova M.I.?
I write to Volkov and Zhdanov: who are these criminal relatives?
It turns out they are Mark Volkov and Masha Zhdanova, aged 2 and 3 respectively.
I keep reading. It says some VTB account belonging to Navalnaya D.A. has been frozen. But none of us has a VTB account. What is this supposed to be?
It turns out it’s a student social card that everyone gets. Children in Moscow use it to ride the metro.
I never even imagined that something like that could be frozen. But the Basmanny Court can do anything.
I keep reading the documents: the valiant police report that they have established the whereabouts of the father of ACF’s head of legal, Slava Gimadi. Ilya Eduardovich Gimadi resides at the following address:
This is truly outstanding police work. There’s just one problem: even I know that Slava’s father was a fairly well-known scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and he died 14 years ago.
And if you google “Ilya Eduardovich Gimadi”, the very first result is his obituary.
I read on. I find the section that directly explains why my relatives’ accounts were frozen:
It turns out they are “supporters of Navalny’s штаб (campaign network),” who are “possibly involved in laundering.”
So my daughter Dasha had her card frozen because she was allegedly laundering criminal proceeds while still a minor. At the time, she was actively using her school transit pass, which has now also been frozen as being connected to criminal activity.
And my mother had 18,000 rubles (about $290 at the time) frozen — her pension payment that had just come in. She too was apparently laundering money, as a “supporter of Navalny’s штаб (campaign network).”
That’s not all. I see some Ivan Igorevich Zhdanov, whose many accounts at VTB were frozen by the Basmanny Court at the request of the Investigative Committee:
I ask Zhdanov: who is this unfortunate relative?
Zhdanov replies: I don’t know any such person.
So these idiots took some random Zhdanov, who has nothing to do with our Zhdanov, and froze his accounts, seizing all his money.
Can you imagine how stunned that person must have been? What if he was abroad and left without money? What if he needed to buy medicine? What if he was on his way to buy a gift for his child? That’s it, Zhdanov — you don’t have any money anymore. Bastrykin decided so.
So yes, this is utter lawlessness, of course. No laws apply at all when it comes to ACF. But the incompetence is on exactly the same level. A crowd of fools hired because they’ll sign anything, seize anything, plant anything.
In the Beautiful Russia of the Future, police officers and investigators will be paid well, but the people working there will also be intelligent — not the kind who are incapable of googling the person they are conducting operational-search activities against.
But for now, here’s this:
Yesterday, ACF lawyer Yevgeny Zamyatin took a SUPER-COMPLAINT to Strasbourg. I’m writing it in all caps because there’s no other way to put it. It’s the result of enormous work by our lawyers — and not only ours, but also the wonderful people at the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre, who agreed to represent our interests in court completely free of charge. Here is their press release about it.
The briefest possible summary of this epic work:
On July 27 and August 3, mass protests took place in Moscow over the exclusion of opposition candidates, including supporters of Alexei Navalny, from the elections to the city’s representative body.
On August 3 at 3:14 p.m., while the rallies were underway, the Investigative Committee published a press release announcing the opening of the “ACF case.”
The investigation materials state that “unidentified persons, including employees of ACF, acting as a group by prior conspiracy, received cash funds in Russian and foreign currency from unidentified third parties in the amount of no less than 75,585,300.21 rubles, which they knew had been obtained by criminal means.” “Unidentified persons, including employees of ACF, in order to give these funds the appearance of legality, deposited them through ATMs into ACF accounts.”
Over 7 months of this “investigation,” the following has taken place: - more than 300 searches of ACF employees, Navalny штабs (campaign offices), volunteers, and their relatives; - at least 284 accounts belonging to individuals and organizations have been frozen, with no less than 55,477,077 rubles (about $880,000 at the time) seized; - and even some mysterious construction and technical forensic examination has been ordered.
The investigators had no and still have no evidence that the funds in question were of criminal origin.
There is no information whatsoever about any crime or any criminals.
There are no damages in the case, as the investigator explicitly states in the documents.
The seized equipment and money have not been returned to anyone and have been designated as physical evidence; what will happen to them next is unknown.
The case involves 141 Investigative Committee investigators in at least 45 regions of Russia. Operational support is being provided by the Interior Ministry’s Directorate “F.”
All of ACF’s lawyers worked on preparing the complaint for six months: we reviewed hundreds of files and thousands of pages of case materials. We are also being assisted by lawyers from Agora and an international team of experts.
The ACF case consists of more than 550 separate files; many of them will lead to separate applications to the ECHR, but right now we are filing the main case.
We believe the following have been violated (a rather unique combination and set of articles for a single case):
Article 6 Right to a fair trial Article 10 Freedom of expression Article 11 Freedom of assembly and association Article 13 Right to an effective remedy Article 18 Limits on the use of restrictions
So there you have it. Greetings from the members of a particularly dangerous criminal group. Don’t forget to support our штабs (campaign offices), since they have such excellent supporters.