How Gazprom Is Being Carved Up has been at the top of the rankings for the second day already. 290 comments. Many thanks to everyone who linked to it. To be honest, I had always been convinced that if some post was sitting at the top with more than a hundred comments, it had to be some kind of rigging by Yandex or SUP. The main news: it turns out that just one step away from Transinvestgaz there is a little outfit that makes a hornet’s nest look like a summer camp: The intermediary structure Trustinvestgaz appeared in 2004. One of its founders is listed as Profit Invest LLC, whose founders are listed as Zoya Usacheva and Lyudmila Galushko (as reported by Vedomosti). * Novaya Gazeta found out that Usacheva and Galushko are from St. Petersburg. * Galushko was a co-founder of Dacha Kleinmichel LLC together with Yevgeny Malov, Andrei Katkov, Alexander Krasnenkov, and other interesting St. Petersburg figures. * Katkov is a former deputy general director of Kinex; together with Malov, he worked with leading Russian oil trader and old Vladimir Putin associate Gennady Timchenko. Katkov is also a former chairman of the board of the famous St. Petersburg Bank Rossiya, whose current head and main shareholder is another longtime Putin associate, Yuri Kovalchuk. * St. Petersburg native Alexander Krasnenkov worked at Pulkovo Airport, was general director of the Astoria Hotel, then until 2003 a member of Gazprom’s management board, and until 2006 deputy general director of the state shipping company Sovcomflot. Later, Krasnenkov headed the boards of Stroytransgaz, Nortgaz, and Sibneftegaz, also joined the boards of Gazprombank and Latvijas Gaze, and headed the company Baltic LNG. * Dacha Kleinmichel is a historic mansion in the northwestern part of Kamenny Island on the bank of the Krestovka River, and the island, as is well known, is to become the residence of the Russian president. The residence is planned for completion by 2009, and in addition to state funds, money from Transneft, Lukoil, and Gazprom is being spent on it. * Lyudmila Galushko and Alexander Krasnenkov also founded Astoria Management and Consulting Group LLC. And together with Malov and Katkov, they also founded the St. Petersburg Health and Sports Complex Dunes. * In Moscow, Lyudmila Galushko and Zoya Usacheva were connected to Meridian-Art LLC, which, according to the SKRIN database, was the second co-founder of Trustinvestgaz and also owned 3.14 percent of Stroytransgaz-Invest. In 2006, Stroytransgaz-Invest was spun off from Stroytransgaz, as the shareholders’ resolution put it, “to improve transparency and efficiency in managing Stroytransgaz’s non-core assets.” F*rom here The general director of Transinvestgaz LLC (TIG) is currently the little-known Dmitry Nikolaevich Novikov; but in 2005 that post was held by Galina Alexeevna Sheremet (by sheer coincidence, Gazprom’s first deputy chairman under Vyakhirev was Vyacheslav Vasilyevich Sheremet, and one Vadim Vyacheslavovich Sheremet currently works at Gazprominvestholding under its general director A**lisher Usmanov). Together with Alisher Usmanov, Vadim Sheremet is a co-owner of the bank National Standard. In addition, the younger Sheremet is a shareholder (22%) in IKEM LLC, notable because another 22% stakes are held by Vyakhirev Jr. (Yury Removich) and Chernomyrdin Jr. (Vitaly Viktorovich), and at one time this little joint venture of the “juniors” owned more than 11% of the once-famous Imperial Bank. From here I assumed something like this would come out, but I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. These guys are so sure of their impunity that they don’t even consider basic cover-up necessary. The masters of Russia, for fuck’s sake. The most popular phrase people are starting phone calls with today is: so, have you bought yourself a bulletproof vest yet? Funny, yeah. Belykhbe*lyh ** said today with a cheerful little chuckle that he’d save a spot for me as a forest ranger in the most remote district of Kirov Region. If they really box me in, he said, at least I’ll have somewhere to hide. It’s fine. We’ll drive them into the Kirov forests ourselves. The blogosphere is behind me )))