Well then, my friends. I’m sure you’ve been eagerly waiting for news about our favorites—the Effective Managers at VTB Bank. (Those who have just joined our little series can catch up on the story here: one, two, three.)
Here’s my update. The last thing we heard from VTB was their thin, nasty little voices shouting: the investigation found nothing, and all of Navalny’s so-called “facts” are baseless. Indeed, checks were carried out on the basis of my complaints (or rather, our complaints—I’m far from alone in this by now): - at the Central Administrative District police department - at the Economic Crimes Unit of the Moscow police. I won’t burden you with legal mumbo-jumbo about unlawful attachment to the case file and so on. I’ll just say this: yes, both bodies issued decisions refusing to open a criminal case. As in, supposedly there were no signs of a crime. It should be noted that VTB’s security service did a decent job here. Lately its leadership—all those half-retired former FSB generals—have been doing nothing but running around various offices and “making the problem go away.” Exactly how they did it—through cash or through administrative pressure—I don’t know for sure, but those guys were definitely hustling hard. As one police officer told me: “The bosses don’t even know where to hide from all the calls coming in from different levels.” And of course the VTB people immediately started happily sending out press releases and spreading the word through their pet shareholders’ committee. Naturally, I got quite a few bewildered letters from you, dear friends, and spent a fair amount of nerves explaining what was what. And then we quietly picked up a titanium crowbar and... One. (I already published this.)
Two. (published for the first time)
So the villains got hit hard. And the case is still ongoing. Please do not believe VTB’s fairy tales that the investigation has been closed. But—and this is very important—even though the pre-investigation check at the Economic Crimes Unit is being handled by an extremely nasty and brazen operative named Melekhin, who issued an unlawful ruling, I can’t say he did absolutely nothing. This guy produced a refusal to open a criminal case that runs to 13 pages. I’m posting it for everyone to see (the shareholders’ names, those who filed complaints together with me but do not want publicity, are crossed out in red). Any attentive reader familiar with this masterpiece of police prose will immediately see that it clearly describes the entire scheme used to commit the crime and even identifies the perpetrators (though not the masterminds, unfortunately). People were found and questioned whose existence I myself had no idea about. More than that, I am prepared to argue that the case materials show that a decision to open a criminal case was being prepared—and only thanks to all the efforts to “make the problem go away” was it turned at the last moment into a refusal to open a criminal case. Someone in uniform got a lot richer. Here you can read my complaint to the court (9 pages) against the operative’s actions. Everything is analyzed there in considerable detail. The complaint no longer has much practical meaning, of course, because the prosecutor’s office has already overturned everything that needed overturning. For those too lazy to read through all this and sort it out, here is the simplified version. So. We accuse VTB of buying 30 drilling rigs for $15 million each (through a Cypriot intermediary), when their real price was at most $10 million. That is how $150 million was stolen. (We are not considering the subleasing episode for now; that will get its own post.) And during the review, the following was established: (!!! established not by me, but by Interior Ministry operatives !!!). 1. VTB Bank’s management was fully aware of the details of the deal. The deal was approved by the bank. The bank directly participated in creating this scheme. The bank knew that the Cypriot intermediary had been created for this single transaction. The bank does not deny that the Cypriot intermediary had nothing of its own and bought the rigs using VTB’s money, only to sell them back to VTB at a 50% markup.
2. VTB Bank and its officials were aware of the price difference. At the manufacturer: $10 million. At the intermediary: $15 million. The difference is explained as follows: the Chinese side supplied only the rigs, while the intermediary supplied rigs + transport + supervision of installation + training. And this, of course, is VTB’s main weak spot. This is where we’ll squeeze them.
In other words, they claim that delivery on DDU terms, supervision of installation, testing, and training cost $5.2 million per rig. So we go online. Spend half a day. Check transportation costs. Look up Incoterms and find out what DDU means. And so on. The especially meticulous can do this themselves, but I assure you, there is simply no way to get to $5.2 million. What you get is ten times less. Fine, double it to be generous (allowing for effective management), and you get $1 million per rig. Thirty million for everything. So where did the other $120 million of the difference go? Besides, we’re not the police. We don’t suffer from selective memory loss. We remember that out of the thirty rigs, only 3 to 5 are operating. The rest are sitting under the snow. So what exactly was all this installation supervision, testing, and so on for? 3. And the last very important point. From all these documents, it may seem unclear where the proof is of a direct link between VTB’s top management and the people who pulled this off. Operative Melekhin almost found it. Almost. He mentioned a number of names that were unfamiliar to me. But unlike him, I know how to use Google. Here is the board of directors of one of the intermediary companies:
In addition, we can see that the link between the Cypriot intermediary and VTB was handled by a certain Popov, who received a power of attorney for this deal from a certain Ms. Shamlikashvili. How he got that power of attorney is a joke in itself:
A question for those who have vacationed in Cyprus: did it often happen that people came up to you and handed you powers of attorney for transactions worth half a billion dollars? It never happened to me. But it did happen to Shamlikashvili. And it would be perfectly logical for us to google this lucky lady. Three seconds later, we know that: - Boterashvili and Shamlikashvili are spouses. - Boterashvili is for some reason described as an “influential businessman.” - Shamlikashvili worked at VTB Development (which, incidentally, is headed by Seryozha Matviyenko, the governor’s son). - Boterashvili is the First Adviser to VTB Bank OJSC. And we understand perfectly well that in this position he has the opportunity to communicate with all of VTB’s top brass, including Andrei Kostin, chairman of the management board of VTB Bank OJSC and a member of the Supreme Council of the United Russia party. The basic map of the relationships among the participants in the deal looks like this:
We drew it up quickly. For some reason the police couldn’t. So here is the stubborn fact we have in hand: communication between the unknown individuals who made $150 million from the deal and VTB Bank was handled by an adviser to the bank’s chief executive. What an interesting coincidence... I suppose we are meant to believe that the head of VTB had absolutely nothing to do with it. That’s how it is. And let’s remember that we have one trump card above all: the rigs themselves. You can’t hide them. At the end of our video, you can see what they look like. If they could simply be burned, buried, sold off, or hauled away to someone’s summer house, our Effective Managers would have done it long ago. But you can’t burn them or bury them, and Effective Managers’ summer houses are usually much farther south than the settlement of Purpe in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. The rigs have been lying there for two years and will go on lying there, embodying a “successful investment” of half a billion dollars of the bank’s shareholders’ money. Interestingly, our activity has even pushed VTB to start thinking about what to do next. One of my readers sent me a funny link. VTB Leasing posted a vacancy on one of the recruitment websites. They are looking for a “Head of Drilling Rig Operations” :) Over the past couple of months, I’ve spoken a lot with professionals in the drilling business. They all say the same thing: A price of $15 million for a Chinese rig is unreal. A hyper-mega-extra American-made rig costs ten. The market does not need 30 heavy rigs at all. The largest drilling association in the USSR had 18 such things. This was a scam from the very beginning. And now it is extremely difficult to cover up and bury. Of course, in our country anything is possible. Tomorrow Gazprom might go ahead and buy machines for $20 million apiece. And then the Effective Managers of both companies will settle up between themselves. Swap a couple of villas in Antibes. Obviously there will be thirty-three more attempts to shut all this down. We’ll be stuck in court nonstop, and so on. But overall, I have a clear feeling that we, dear LiveJournal users, have pretty firmly grabbed the EMs by the... uh... gills. Compared with the frantic movements VTB’s management is making right now, believe me, the fish in the frying pan looks almost motionless. So that’s all I have to say for now about the case of “VTB and the Secret Chamber of Drilling Rigs.” Once again, thank you to everyone who has taken part, is taking part, or plans to take part. Please share widely. The country should know its heroes.