Meet Sergey Andreyevich Terentyev.
Here is Sergey Andreyevich whispering with Putin.
Here he is hugging Miller.
Here he is kissing oligarch Timchenko.
Wait a second, you might say. Have you lost it? That’s Sechin. But no, dear friends, we’re telling you: this is Sergey Andreyevich Terentyev. And he runs Rosneft. At least, according to the official documents.
Rosneft is the country’s main oil company. And Igor Sechin has been the man in charge at Rosneft for more than 10 years. All his luxury, all his yachts, five-story apartments, enormous mansions — all of it was paid for by Rosneft. Paid for by a company half-owned by the state. In other words, by all Russian citizens. We are all Rosneft shareholders.
Do we have the right to know what salary our hired manager receives? Absolutely. We HAVE to know. Because the more Sechin gets, the fewer dividends from Rosneft will go into the state budget. The more Sechin gets, the less money remains for teachers’ salaries, road repairs, or medicines for the sick.
And knowing the income of Rosneft’s chief, everyone is free to decide for themselves whether it matches the duties he performs. Whether Sechin runs our company successfully enough to justify what he is paid.
But throughout his years at the head of Rosneft, Sechin has concealed his income. Let’s briefly go back to 2015. Alexei Navalny demanded through the courts that the government disclose the compensation of the heads of state-owned companies, including Rosneft. The court predictably rejected Navalny’s lawsuit. In Russia, the courts are for officials and the rich, not for ordinary people.
But Sechin’s lawsuit against journalists who estimated the Rosneft chief’s annual pay at tens of millions of dollars was, on the contrary, upheld by the court. Forbes was forced to publish a retraction. Since then, no one has named the exact sums sticking to Sechin’s hands.
In recent years, there have been two major leaks from the tax service containing Russians’ salary data — for 2018 and 2020. But Sechin was not in them. As the media reported, his income is hidden even in the Federal Tax Service’s internal database.
We found out that in the tax service’s official registry, Sechin is hiding under a pseudonym. You’ve already guessed it: his second identity is Sergey Andreyevich Terentyev. Terentyev’s date of birth, just like Sechin’s, is September 7, 1960.
No such person actually exists. But the passport number and taxpayer ID match Sechin’s passport number and taxpayer ID.
To classify the Rosneft chief’s salary, they created a fake identity for him. And once we uncovered this scheme, all that remained was to look up “Terentyev’s” income in the leaked data. From Rosneft alone, he received 3,071,738,456 rubles and 32 kopecks over the year.
But that is not “Terentyev’s” only source of enrichment. He received another 244 million rubles from the All-Russian Bank for Regional Development, Rosneft’s bank.
Another 2 million rubles came from Rosneftegaz, the company that holds Rosneft shares on the state’s behalf.
So Sechin’s total annual income comes to 3.317 billion rubles. One billion rubles in 5,000-ruble banknotes would fit only into a huge container like this.
Now imagine three such containers — and even they would not be enough to hold Sechin’s full annual salary. And it certainly would not fit into the little suitcase Sechin carried when, following Putin, he moved from St. Petersburg to conquer Moscow in the 1990s.
To transport all that money in cash, he would need several forklifts like these.
At this state-owned company, Igor Sechin receives a salary comparable to the entire budget of the city of Apatity in Russia’s Murmansk Region, home to nearly 49,000 people.