Good news: I don’t have a sister. So the Investigative Committee can’t claim that it was her, rather than Serdyukov and his girlfriends, who stole billions from the Defense Ministry. Another piece of good news: “I do at least have other relatives” has today turned into good news for Putin and his goons (TM) in the Investigative Committee: Navalny has relatives, which means they can rattle their nerves and blackmail him since they’re planning to go protest. Yesterday, the Czech spy went to meet the German agent and got the “go-ahead”
and today came out with the following hellish statement: Criminal proceedings have been initiated against the Navalny brothers on suspicion of fraud and laundering money obtained through criminal activity. The Main Investigative Directorate of the Russian Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case against Alexei Navalny, his brother Oleg Navalny, and other persons in connection with crimes under Part 4 of Article 159 and Clauses “a” and “b” of Part 2 of Article 174.1 of the Russian Criminal Code (fraud committed by an organized group on an especially large scale, and laundering money obtained through criminal activity by a group acting in prior collusion and using their official positions). According to the investigation, Alexei Navalny created a company called Glavnoye Podpisnoye Agentstvo LLC, whose nominal founder and CEO was an acquaintance of his who had nothing to do with its actual operations. In the spring of 2008, Oleg Navalny, then head of the Domestic Mail Department at the Russian Post branch for Automated Sorting Centers, allegedly deceived representatives of a foreign-owned trading company operating in Russia into signing a contract with Glavnoye Podpisnoye Agentstvo for the transportation of mail cargo. Moreover, the transportation services were allegedly to be provided at knowingly inflated prices, and not by Navalny’s company itself, which lacked the necessary material resources, but by another transport company run by an acquaintance of Oleg Navalny. From August 2008 to May 2011, that transport company provided mail transportation services to the foreign trading company on the Yaroslavl–Moscow route. The investigation claims that the trading company transferred to the account of Glavnoye Podpisnoye Agentstvo a sum far exceeding the actual volume of transportation services. While the real cost of the cargo transportation actually carried out by the transport company was no more than 31 million rubles (about 31 million RUB), more than 55 million rubles (about 55 million RUB) was transferred to the account of Glavnoye Podpisnoye Agentstvo for supposedly rendered transportation services. Thus, Oleg and Alexei Navalny fraudulently stole more than 55 million rubles from the trading company. The brothers spent most of this sum on their own needs, and more than 19 million rubles of it, in order to launder the illegally obtained funds, was transferred by the Navalnys under fictitious pretexts and sham contracts—supposedly for the rent of non-residential premises, raw materials, and supplies—from the account of a so-called shell company to the account of the Kobyakovo Basket-Weaving Factory, whose founders included the brothers. Investigative actions are currently underway to gather additional evidence of the Navalny brothers’ involvement in the crime. My poor relatives: they searched my parents’ unfortunate basket-weaving factory, and there was constantly a picket by the pro-Kremlin youth movement “Nashi” outside their store; they filed something like 300 complaints saying “Navalny sells vodka” and ran after my parents and me with video cameras over it. And now they’ve gotten to my brother. The guy is already one of the few employees at Russian Post who actually tries to make sure packages don’t get lost (he set up and launched the first automated postal sorting center in Podolsk), but he doesn’t get promoted because of me and has been stuck forever as a deputy. And now he gets searches and interrogations on top of that. The only workplace benefit he gets from me is that, unlike the rest of Russian Post, he isn’t forced to attend “voluntary rallies in support of Putin.” And now my parents are being searched again too. My mom is so furious she even gave a comment to Ekho Moskvy (a prominent Russian radio station). Well, I won’t lie: this is unpleasant. It’s one thing when the Kremlin crooks come directly after you. You’re ready for that. Your wife is ready. It’s another when they start going after a wide circle of relatives. It’s unpleasant, and it forces you to say all sorts of encouraging things at family gatherings, and they tell you: no need, we understand everything. And you say them anyway. I dropped by to see my brother after all this uproar. In his 45-square-meter apartment in southwestern Moscow, we listened to a Channel One report about how “the brothers spent most of the 55 million on their own needs”. We laughed. Dear Vladimir Putin. You are probably very afraid that one day Alina Kabaeva will say too much during questioning. That’s why you so love going after other people’s relatives too—intimidating them, blackmailing them. It’s fine, mine will endure it. They’re ready. After the first attempts to find traces of the Kirov timber case among baskets in the Moscow suburbs, it became clear that you wouldn’t stop. And the level of lawlessness and lies became clear too. It’s obvious that you want to imprison anyone who doesn’t want their country to turn into the Russia of your dreams from this video:
http://youtu.be/1aK9KjMu7jI Do you think my relatives are going to try to talk me out of going to Lubyanka Square tomorrow and tell me to “keep my head down for a while”? No. They’re coming there themselves tomorrow too. Tomorrow at 3 p.m. Lubyanka Square. Update. Hell itself, and theater of the absurd: “P***ost of Russia” says it has nothing to do with the case against Navalny’s brother in Moscow. **December 14. INTERFAX.RU — Russian Post has no complaints against Oleg, the brother of opposition figure Alexei Navalny, and the criminal investigation does not concern its activities. “The inquiry being conducted by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has no connection to the activities of Russian Post. The company mentioned in the committee’s statement is not a contractor of the federal postal operator,” Russian Post said in a statement received by Interfax on Friday. It notes that the damage, “which, in the opinion of the investigation, may have occurred, was caused not to the postal service but to a third-party organization.” “Russian Post has no work-related complaints against Oleg Navalny,” the press release says. “As for the substance of the criminal case that has been opened, the federal postal operator can say nothing and has no connection to it,” Russian Post stated. *http://www.interfax.ru/news.asp?id=280997 You know, this is like answering the question: *So, how long has it been since you stopped drinking cognac at five in the morning? *Wait, was I drinking it at all? The Investigative Committee is cobbling together some made-up story and inserting “Russian Post” into the text of that fiction simply because my brother works there. Russian Post blinks, freaks out, and says: we have absolutely no idea what this is about. Television is broadcasting stories about 55 million. There is no formal order opening the case. Multicolored squirrels are running around and soap bubbles are popping. An elephant walks into the room and takes off its hat. Inside, instead of a rabbit, is Bastrykin’s head.