We really enjoy following what happens to the subjects of our investigations. And that applies not only to people, but also to the things we uncover in connection with them. For example, that’s how we found out that Deputy Prime Minister Khloponin’s family sold a villa to oligarch Prokhorov for three times its market value. Or, for instance, we were quite surprised to learn from other reports that Igor Sechin had decided to demolish his newly built house.
But yesterday we unexpectedly came across one of the stars of our investigation in the last place we would have expected: on Avito (it was quickly deleted, but a copy remains in Google’s cache).
Seriously. Here it is.
Didn’t recognize it? How about now? Getting warmer?
This is the yacht Fotiniya — moored in Plyos, right next to Medvedev’s dacha. The yacht belonged to Dmitry Medvedev from 2009 to 2015, meaning for almost his entire presidential term. It was named after Medvedev’s very devout wife, Svetlana — Fotiniya is her church name.
In our investigation He Is Not Dimon to You, we devoted an entire chapter to this yacht. According to our estimates, it was bought by a company controlled by Medvedev for 150 million rubles. Now, at 11 years old, it is being offered for 134 million rubles (which once again shows that, unfortunately, we often underestimate the value of crooked officials’ assets). In 2015, Medvedev replaced it with a more luxurious yacht worth 865 million rubles. So something had to be done with the old one. He clearly didn’t want to put it on Avito with a listing that said, “Selling a great yacht, never crashed, never repainted, wife used it to go to church on Sundays. Dmitry M.” So it was bought by Putin’s friend and brother-in-law, Nikolai Shamalov.
He named it after his wife too — Tatyana.
And now Shamalov himself has decided to get rid of the yacht in order to buy something better, giving us the chance to take a close look at where Russian President Dmitry Medvedev spent his most successful years.
Despite its battered hull and its 10 years of age, it still looks impressive. Marble, crystal, expensive wood, leather upholstery. These days Medvedev might not even glance at something like this, dismissing it as pitifully modest, but back in 2009 he surely felt like the coolest guy in the world with this yacht.
All that remains is to thank Nikolai Shamalov for giving us the opportunity to take a good, close look at it.