Once I offended a miner. A plain, hardworking guy. He’s been slogging away his whole life. He owns nothing, hasn’t accumulated anything—no grand stone chambers earned through righteous labor, so to speak. Since he’s such an honest worker, he joined the party of other equally honest workers—*United Russia*. Now he champions the cause of ordinary people there. I’m talking about Sergei Neverov, Deputy Speaker of the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament).
http://www.duma.gov.ru/structure/deputies/131140/ In another post, I questioned the sincerity of United Russia members who say that only people who tie their future to Russia should be elected in Russia. United Russia politicians have all conveniently “gotten elected” into cushy positions, but looking at Pekhtin or Zheleznyak, it’s hard to believe they really see their future in Russia. The post was illustrated with a photo of Neverov climbing out of a BMW worth around 7 million rubles.
Oh, what an uproar that caused. United Russia members couldn’t calm down for a week: Navalny had struck a vile blow by photographing miner Neverov’s official car. And after all, he has absolutely no-thing at all. Very poor. A real hard worker in the State Duma. Quite an awkward situation. But once the initial shock over this monstrous mistake and these unfair insults had passed, we at the Anti-Corruption Foundation decided to take a closer look at this “honest miner” and Deputy Speaker. His face is just a bit too well-fed and glossy. You don’t often see that with miners. Let’s travel to the village of Leshkovo in the Istra district of Moscow Region. Amazingly, this is exactly where Sergei Ivanovich Neverov lives—the Deputy Speaker of the State Duma, secretary of the general council of the United Russia party, great patriot, and “simple honest miner.”
This image is from Yandex Maps and is 2–3 years old; below there will be a current image from a quadcopter. Before Neverov, the plot was owned by another United Russia member—Konstantin Kosachev. Here is his 2009 declaration:
The house appears in Kosachev’s declaration in 2010. True, by that point he had already transferred almost all the land to someone else. Incidentally, Kosachev is a major opponent of ratifying Article 20 of the UN Convention against Corruption: *But Article 49 of our Constitution (and this is a legal document of direct effect) states in paragraph two: “The accused is not obliged to prove his innocence.” This contradiction with the Constitution is precisely why Article 20 was not mentioned in the interpretive statement in 2006. And nothing has changed in that respect today. Does the Communist Party want to abolish the “presumption of innocence”? Or does **someone naively believe that those who have taken the criminal path of corruption have not taken care to “launder” their assets or register them in the names of second cousins or mothers-in-law? And you are going to catch them “with your bare hands”? http://www.rg.ru/2011/07/23/kosachev-site.html Oh, what a marvelous slip about mothers-in-law. Straight out of Freud. And indeed, the simple miner Neverov, who bought the property from him, did not register all of it in his own name.
According to the cadastral register, Neverov’s land—which visually appears to be one continuous property, with no dividing fences and clearly used by a single family—consists of five plots: Plot #1, with an area of 5,875 sq. m, is registered to the “SOSNY” non-commercial dacha partnership. Plot #2, with an area of 2,484 sq. m, is registered to Olga Viktorovna Neverova, Sergei Neverov’s wife. Plot #3, with an area of 2,493 sq. m, is registered to Sergei Neverov. Plot #4, with an area of 640 sq. m, sits in the middle of the property but remains registered to Kosachev, even though a plot of the same size is listed in Neverov’s declaration as being owned by him. Plot #5, with an area of 2,490 sq. m, is*** registered to Irma Andreevna Vorozhishcheva. Also on plot #5 (and partly on #4) there is a house with an area of 614.3 sq. m (commissioned in 2010), and it too is registered to Ir***ma Andreevna Vorozhishcheva. All the people in whose names the poor miner Neverov’s property is registered are known, except for Irma Andreevna. She is a unique person in her own way. She is never mentioned on Google, she does not appear in the register of legal entities (which means she is not a founder or director of any company), she is not in the register of individual entrepreneurs, and you won’t find her in Moscow or Moscow Region databases either. No trace of her existence—or even of full namesakes, though the odds of that are close to zero—can be found at first glance. But the Anti-Corruption Foundation did not give up and decided to look for Irma Andreevna in Kemerovo Region, where Sergei Neverov was born, lived, worked, and from which he was elected to the State Duma. You can’t register multimillion-ruble real estate in the name of some completely random person; it was most likely a relative. And that turned out to be exactly the case.
The Mandatory Health Insurance Fund database from that very Novokuznetsk where, according to his official biography, Sergei Neverov resides.
These are not the only pieces of evidence we found linking Neverov to Vorozhishcheva. For example, in the first half of the 2000s (when Sergei Neverov was already a deputy), Neverov’s wife and Irma Vorozhishcheva were registered in the same apartment in the deputies’ residential building at 1 Olof Palme Street, Moscow:
The apartment, incidentally, belongs to the Presidential Property Management Department. Also, a certain Maksim Alexandrovich Vorozhishchev, with the surname Vorozhishchev, appears among the VKontakte friends of Neverov’s daughter, Angelina:
Maksim Vorozhishchev is the son of Alexander Viktorovich Vorozhishchev.
Alexander Vorozhishchev and Olga Neverova share not only the same patronymic, but even the same date of birth. They are brother and sister. If you’re already tangled up in these family connections, let me put it plainly: Deputy Speaker of the State Duma and secretary of United Russia’s general council, the simple miner Sergei Neverov, registered his multimillion-ruble property in an elite area outside Moscow in the name of his 75-year-old mother-in-law from Novokuznetsk. That way, the State Duma website can say that Neverov has no residential property of his own, helping preserve the image of a simple miner. So how much is this property worth? Could a simple working man who has never done business in his life buy this land? Maybe he really did buy it honestly? After all, Putin says citizens’ prosperity is growing. Let’s do the math. Nearby, a large plot of land is for sale at $20,000 per sotka (100 sq. m). Let’s even ignore the fact that Neverov’s plot is on the riverbank, while the one we’re comparing it to is 300 meters away. At 140 sotkas (13,982 sq. m), at $20,000 per sotka, that comes to 90 million rubles, not counting the 640-square-meter house. Not bad for a “simple miner,” is it? Neverov is one of those deputies who stubbornly pretend to live on a single salary and declare each year exactly what a deputy officially earns (currently about 2 million rubles). Let’s look: Neverov’s income for 2006 was 1.4 million rubles; 2010, 1.9 million; 2011, 1.9 million; 2012, 2 million. His wife’s income for 2011 was 55,000 rubles; for 2012, 10.5 million rubles. There is simply no way—absolutely no way at all—for miner and United Russia politician Neverov to buy land like this on his official income. Now let’s see what Neverov declared as owned property:
No questions here (except that Neverov appears to have claimed the 640-square-meter plot that still belongs to Kosachev). Now let’s look at what Neverov declared as being in use:
We look—and do not see there: Plot #1, with an area of 5,875 sq. m. Plot #5, with an area of 2,490 sq. m. The house, with an area of 614.3 sq. m. What we do see is that the entire family has only one dwelling: an apartment of 105.5 sq. m belonging to his wife. The Novokuznetsk apartment of 67.6 sq. m (where Neverov was once registered) was recently sold. So this is the kind of United Russia Deputy Speaker we have. On paper, he owns little. Everything is registered to his mother-in-law. He eats black caviar with a golden spoon, wipes his lips, and then goes on television for another round of “WE SIMPLE PEOPLE DECLARE... I WANT TO SPEAK ON BEHALF OF THE MINERS... I LIFTED ORE WITH THESE VERY HANDS.” Now guess why the “simple miner” Sergei Neverov is so worried about my statements that I want to run for office somewhere? Probably because one of the key points of my platform is the ratification of Article 20 of the UN Convention against Corruption and the introduction into the Russian Criminal Code of an article on “Illicit Enrichment.” Then the simple miner will either have to explain where he got 90 million rubles to buy elite land, or stand trial. Neverov does not want to be in the dock. He wants to be on TV talk shows, where he can once again talk about being a “simple miner.” In light of everything written above, two things: To the simple miner Sergei Neverov: Dear miner of ours. This was your answer to a question about “Pekhting” (a term coined after a scandal involving undeclared foreign property by MP Vladimir Pekhtin): – Are you suggesting they should also give up their mandates? – I am simply advising them to act as Pekhtin did. If they believe they truly have done nothing that compromises them morally or ethically, or gives rise to certain suspicions, then let** them provide documents showing they have none of this. Or let them resign their powers first, and then provide the documents. But** as we can see, no one is doing that so far. http://slon.ru/russia/neverov-937273.xhtml Could you provide the concerned public with some explanation as to what funds you used to buy such expensive land, and why you registered it in your mother-in-law’s name? Very curious. To everyone: United Russia members are our enemies. They are thieves, hypocrites, and liars. They are people depriving our country of a future. Fighting this filth is the civic duty of every citizen. Right now, you have the opportunity to make your contribution to the fight and help prevent another United Russia politician with similarly mysterious and inexplicable assets from seizing power in the country’s largest city. They want power for one reason only: to steal. Sobyanin’s daughters need more apartments. Neverov’s mother-in-law needs more elite land. They are insatiable, and only we can stop them—no one else will. Right now, join the election campaign. Come to a campaign street stand and tell Muscovites everything you know about “United Russia” and these “simple miners” and “competent managers.” That is the only way.