Little by little, it’s becoming clear what the billions of rubles that our merry company Transneft (100% state-owned!) booked under the line item “Charity” were actually spent on.
As the well-known song goes: “nothing on Earth passes without a traaaaace.” And it’s the same with the cash: sure, it was carved up long ago—Ferraris and various Maseratis smashed into Moscow lamp posts, cocaine snorted up with Courchevel girls—but traces of how that money was pumped through the system can still be found in open sources, if you’re attentive enough. In the bond prospectus approved on March 16 of this year, there is one remarkable line: The management of OAO Sibnefteprovod (a wholly owned subsidiary of Transneft) decided in 2007 to transfer 644,326 thousand rubles to the charity foundation Sodeistvie and 442,156 thousand rubles to the international charity foundation Kremlin-9. As you can see, the scheme is fairly straightforward. The theory that the money was siphoned off through thousands and thousands of small foundations and companies has not yet been confirmed. The guys were simply shoveling hundreds of millions into the same hands. One of the beneficiaries, of course, is especially striking—the Kremlin-9 foundation. Vedomosti writes today about how they tried to clarify what this outfit is all about: The foundation was created in 2001 to support employees and veterans of the Federal Protective Service (FSO, the agency responsible for protecting top state officials), according to the agency’s website. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, its founders are six Russian citizens, one of them being the chairman of the foundation’s board, Alexander Dubovitsky. He did not respond to Vedomosti’s inquiry. Though of course none of this is exactly rocket science. Let’s put the question this way: why would a super-secretive state outfit, whose employees steal by the billions (for example, during the construction of the ESPO pipeline), be kicking hundreds of millions over to a foundation set up by FSO people? The answer is obvious. We’ll keep investigating this. The cops won’t be able to wriggle out of it now and say there is no information at all about who received the aid.