I love this kind of thing.
Remember senator and hockey player Fetisov’s record-setting 1,051-square-meter apartment? It is worth 785 million rubles (about US$24 million at the time), even though over the course of his entire brilliant — and I mean genuinely brilliant, without irony — NHL career, Fetisov earned $4,800,000 in salary.
Even if he later made ten times as much from advertising and coaching, the source of the money used to buy a huge amount of real estate around the world is completely inexplicable. There are mild suspicions connected to the fact that hockey player Fetisov has been a state official since 2002, but for now let’s keep those suspicions to ourselves. In any case, the formal violation is that Senator Fetisov of United Russia (the ruling political party) concealed his apartment — the size of half a hockey rink — and failed to list it in his disclosure form. Fetisov himself has kept completely silent the whole time, but his assistant immediately said: "there is no apartment", which flatly contradicted the official registry records clearly showing that the apartment does exist and is registered in the senator’s wife’s name. Media outlets have the right to submit requests demanding an asset review, and we asked some of them to do so (many thanks to them for that). And today, this is the news we get: *The Federation Council commission overseeing disclosure forms reviewed Senator Vyacheslav Fetisov’s assets after opposition politician Alexei Navalny discovered an undeclared apartment in central Moscow belonging to his wife. “Fetisov gave exhaustive explanations regarding this situation. We have no further questions for him on this matter,” the commission told Interfax. How exactly Vyacheslav Fetisov explained the fact that for two years in a row he failed to list his wife’s 1,000-square-meter apartment in his disclosure form is not stated in the agency’s report. It is also unknown how Fetisov explained where the money came from to purchase the property. http://lenta.ru/news/2013/10/15/fetisov/ Just wonderful. They have no more questions for him. The crooks discussed their hidden real estate in a closed circle, and somehow had no questions for one another. So the Federation Council had no questions. The Anti-Corruption Foundation had questions, and still does. And Russian citizens probably still have questions too. They’ve become completely brazen. Since the media had the formal right to demand that the Federation Council conduct this review, I urge all media outlets not to let this situation slide so easily. The review materials must be obtained and made public, so everyone can see what exactly those “exhaustive explanations” from Fetisov were.