Today we’re visiting Marbella, a resort city in Spain.
We didn’t come here to stroll along white-sand beaches or bask under the scorching Spanish sun.
We came here with an important mission: to show you a lawmaker who continues to live a life of luxury, even now, during the war.
It’s a familiar picture, one we’ve all seen many times. You turn on the TV, and some smug, very wealthy pro-Putin face tells you how you’re supposed to love your country, how terrible the West is, and how you absolutely must go kill and die in a pointless war nobody needs.
In Spain, all of this came together in one story—the one we’re about to tell.
Women should be subject to conscription. Serbia could become part of Russia after a referendum. And in Ukraine, of course, there are only Nazis. We haven’t lost our minds—these are all direct quotes from a real State Duma deputy. A man who writes the laws Russians are expected to live by.
This is Alexei Chepa—you’ve probably never even heard the name before.
He has spent the past 12 years in a State Duma seat, supposedly representing impoverished regions: Vologda, Novgorod, Kostroma, Tver, and Smolensk.
But of course, he doesn’t care about those regions. Chepa is about business. He did business with arms dealer Gaydamak, who was prosecuted by French authorities for supplying weapons to Africa; he opened a luxury venue in an upscale London district with celebrity restaurateur Arkady Novikov; and he even launched the TV channels “Nostalgiya” and “Russkiy Mir” in the United States. In short, he sits in the State Duma to sort out his own business interests. And he knows the golden rule: love Putin louder than anyone else, praise the war, and you’ll be rewarded.
And we like exposing officials like him. As expected, today’s subject turned out to be not only a great lover of war, but also an equally great lover of villas in Spain, apartments in London and the U.S., and business interests across Europe.
But first, let’s address the elephant in the room: “sanctions don’t work.” The problem is that Russian officials never register anything in their own names. They put assets in the names of their children, wives, mistresses, mothers-in-law, friends—anyone but themselves. They do this so that when sanctions hit, or when someone asks, “Where did you get this?”, they can say, “Damn, it’s not even mine, it belongs to someone else.”
Let’s look at a concrete example. Here is Deputy Chepa, who has been hit with every possible Western sanction; there’s hardly a country left that hasn’t put this warmonger on its list.
And it turns out he has a little house on the Mediterranean coast—the very place we visited. Yet for some reason, the house still hasn’t been seized, even though Chepa himself is under sanctions.
And that’s because the crafty Deputy Chepa registered this house—though “house” hardly does it justice: it sits on 1 hectare (10,000 square meters) of land, and the building itself is over 1,000 square meters—under the name of his then-22-year-old son.
So this young man graduated from university and became the owner of everything behind this four-meter-high fence.
And this is what they do all the time. That’s why for years we have demanded that sanctions also cover the relatives of lawmakers, officials, and warmongers. They all need to be sanctioned, because that’s who these assets are registered to.
Standing here and looking at the fence is all well and good, but it doesn’t convey the full scale of Deputy Chepa’s Spanish estate. So let’s send up the drone and take a look.
We’re above the Mediterranean Sea. We can see the beach and some historic buildings, but the place we’re interested in lies ahead, a few hundred meters from the water.
Let’s get closer. There, hidden among the dense trees, is Chepa’s Spanish hectare.
We’re not exaggerating: the plot covers 10,725 square meters. In one corner there’s even a sports area with a full-size tennis court.
At the center of this enormous property stands a matching villa. It has two floors, and the total floor area is 1,122 square meters.
The second floor is essentially one vast terrace.
The first floor of the villa contains a living room, dining room, library, three bedrooms, and a game room. The second floor has a living room and two bedrooms. There is also a separate 35-square-meter section for security staff, with its own kitchen-dining area, bedroom, and toilet.
There are many smaller structures on the property. We can see two storage buildings measuring 40 and 20 square meters.
By the gate there is a 100-square-meter parking structure, and nearby behind the trees there is another 214-square-meter storage building.
On the other side of the property, there is a 180-square-meter guest house, and in front of it a 95-square-meter swimming pool surrounded by lounge chairs.
The total value of this Spanish estate belonging to the war-loving Deputy Chepa is about €15 million, or 1.5 billion rubles. And it was registered to a company owned by the deputy’s 22-year-old son—Betren Inversiones SL.
The company was later renamed Leniz Inversiones SL. The son still has not been sanctioned.
Do you know what struck us? Look again at the aerial footage. Notice how well everything is maintained: the pool is filled with clear water, and the lawn and plants are perfectly trimmed.
The flowers on the balcony have been watered, the house itself is open, and there’s even something sitting on the table. In short, life is bustling along—and this is already the second year of the war, mind you.
And this Spanish villa belongs to a man who did a great deal to help start this war. He bears responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Yet right now, his Spanish home is being maintained, people are working there. More than that: the Chepa family isn’t merely planning to return here after the war—they are living there right now. Look at what we managed to film.
We were able to identify the man so carefully protecting the Chepa family’s privacy. Judging by social media, he is the one helping them keep the pool and grounds in such excellent condition.
Despite being of Ukrainian origin, he has clearly found common ground with the warmonger Chepa. He even follows Chepa’s page on VKontakte (a Russian social network).
Well, the Chepa family likes relaxing by the sea—and who doesn’t? But not every seaside destination is equally welcoming to the Russian tourist. Beautiful scenery, warm water? Sure. But all around are crowds of Russophobes and Europeans gone feral from too much permissiveness, having forgotten God. Sooner or later, you start to wonder: was it really worth it?
Maybe the native Black Sea coast would be calmer? As the saying goes, home walls help. But either the realtor was a fraud, or the scatterbrained son got everything mixed up, because instead of buying Black Sea property near Novorossiysk or even Adler, they bought it on the opposite shore of the Black Sea—in Bulgaria, in the very lair of the EU and NATO.
Just to be safe, they decided to hide it well. We’re sure the ownership scheme inspired tremendous admiration in Bulgaria. Chepa’s son Daniil, again at the age of 22, registered a Belize offshore company in his own name (Erwina International Limited), and that Belize offshore company owned a Cyprus offshore company (Leamore Investments Limited).
And that Cyprus offshore company, in turn, owned a Bulgarian company—“Vertigo Bulgaria.”
And that company was then used to register this handsome office building in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria.
The building has 19 floors and a total area of 19,000 square meters. The interiors are, of course, not done in the style of a Vologda merchant estate, but, as the website puts it, in a modern Italian style. The building also comes with parking for 350 cars. The office center is worth €10 million, or 1 billion rubles.
And how could one not notice this wonderful detail in the Bulgarian documents of Chepa’s young son: it turns out he is a permanent resident of… the United Kingdom!
Just like the rest of the family. Here is his sister, 36-year-old Anastasia Chepa:
She is also a UK resident. She lives in her own apartment worth £1 million (about 120 million rubles) in the very center of London—just 200 meters from Buckingham Palace.
They decided to settle in the center of “decadent Europe” long ago—back in 2006. That was when our Deputy Chepa bought this apartment, registering it in his own name and that of his then-19-year-old daughter Anastasia.
And in 2013 he got rid of the London property. Well, “got rid of” is not quite right—he simply transferred it to his daughter, who still owns the apartment today.
And do you know which country Chepa hates even more than any European power? The United States. According to him, it has secret biolabs, and the enemies there are so terrible that Russians should, just to be safe, be banned from entering the green card lottery—so they can’t go off to those godless States.
According to Chepa, the real culprit behind the war is not Putin, but America as well.
In 2010, a year before being elected to the State Duma, Chepa bought an apartment in Miami for $2.5 million, in a prestigious high-rise with a pool on the oceanfront.
For some reason, the deputy failed to declare this foreign property, and when the deception came to light, he simply transferred the American apartment to his niece, who owned it until recently. So apparently his hatred of America conceals some personal grievance. Maybe they served him stale seafood in Miami, or maybe the apartment came with a pool that was too cold.
By now, you’d think it would be clear how this works. Russian officials are cunning. They steal and register everything not in their own names, but in the names of their relatives. They don’t care about sanctions—they just transfer assets to family members, who then go on buying villas in Europe and spending time in the United States with stolen money.
There is a very simple way to fight this injustice: sanctions should target not only officials and oligarchs, but also the people around them—their children, nieces and nephews, sons-in-law, in-laws, whoever it may be. There are precedents, and they are very telling.
In the United Kingdom, Sergey Lavrov’s 26-year-old stepdaughter was found to own an apartment worth half a billion rubles.
And after public pressure and pickets demanding sanctions, it worked: both the apartment and the stepdaughter ended up under sanctions.
Alisher Usmanov’s yacht “Dilbar” (one of the largest yachts in the world, by the way) turned out to be registered in his sister’s name. No problem—the yacht and the sister both ended up under sanctions.
Putin’s chief missile adviser, Boris Obnosov, registered multimillion-dollar property in the Czech Republic in his son-in-law’s name. Once again, the solution proved simple—after our investigation, both the son-in-law and all the property were placed under sanctions.
These official tricks can be fought, and we urge European and American authorities to do so more actively—instead of imposing pointless sanctions on Russians fleeing the war by banning them from entering in their own cars or depriving them of the right to study at European universities.
Beyond the story of ineffective sanctions, this is also a story about how everything really works in today’s Russia. You’re a State Duma deputy, you steal millions, vote for war, vote for mobilization, send other people’s children off to war every day. They go there to kill and die for reasons no one can explain, while your own son, at 22, receives a vast estate on the Mediterranean coast from you and never goes anywhere near the trenches.
He’ll sit here while you die for their palaces. That is how power works today. That is how everything in Russia works now. Hypocrisy is everywhere with these people.
While Deputy Chepa and his colleagues in the State Duma lecture us every evening from TV screens about patriotism and the defense of supposedly traditional values, the son of today’s hero is indeed engaged in defending them.
Chepa’s son—the very one in whose name, at age 22, a hectare of Spanish land and a giant villa were registered—became the founder and director of the “Creation Foundation for the Protection of Traditional Values.”
What goes on in these people’s heads? You have a house in Spain, your sister lives in London, your father is a deputy with an apartment in Miami, and now you’re a defender of traditional values?
So in Putinist, “patriotic” terms, traditional values mean a hectare of land on a peninsula.
Deputy Chepa is simply a vivid—an exceptionally vivid—example of the model Putin-era deputy of 2023. He sits comfortably in his State Duma chair, fully supported by our money, and spends his time glorifying war.
He happily tells us about the hostile West that must be destroyed, yet of course that is exactly where he and his children own property. Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria—patriotic Chepa and his family have mansions, apartments, and buildings there.
For Chepa and people like him, losing their luxurious lifestyle is a frightening prospect. That is why all of them must be sanctioned, and we will do everything we can to make that happen.
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Freedom for Alexei Navalny! No to war!