Read this excellent interview in The New Times with one of the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s regular subjects.
There’s a lot of interesting material here. There’s an absolutely delightful passage about how top officials and government members therefore need to be paid enormous salaries, which Shuvalov calls “market-rate.” When Albats points out that our top officials’ salaries are already 20 times higher than the national average (a Norwegian minister’s salary is 3.7 times the national average income, in Germany it is 7.1 times higher, in Burundi in Africa it is 15 times higher, while here it is more than 20 times higher), he launches into a speech about what wonderful super-professional superhumans these officials are. They can do anything. For example, just two days ago yet another well-connected young heir was appointed head of the Federal Agency for Fishery: 35-year-old Ilya Shestakov from St. Petersburg, the son of Shestakov, a friend of Putin’s; the two of them co-founded the Yavara-Neva judo club. Of course, we should all chip in for Shestakov’s huge salary — his family ties to the “Putin circle” are apparently a guarantee of professionalism. Once again, the issue of the miraculous $50 million Sibneft option has been glossed over — the very deal from which the Shuvalov family’s wealth and grandeur began. No one at Sibneft, or anywhere else, seemed to know anything about this option. Information about it surfaced only after the publication of evidence about Shuvalov’s corruption and bribes from Abramovich and Usmanov.
Once again, instead of an explanation: I showed the papers to the right people, everything is legal. But the most interesting part is the luxurious Austrian estate of the “civil servant” Shuvalov.
The Anti-Corruption Foundation has always said that Shuvalov was lying when he claimed he was renting it. More precisely, he was renting it — but from himself (through his own offshore company). For the past several years, Shuvalov consistently maintained that it was a rental. He gave the same information in his “anti-corruption declarations”:
If you read everything that was said and written about this estate before the *New Times* interview, you’ll see that Shuvalov always said it was rented. But now he has decided not to wait until the Anti-Corruption Foundation finds the proof, and has said it plainly.
We’re now waiting for the same kind of admission about the 420-square-meter (4,520-square-foot) apartment in London. I’d like to end this post with one more lovely quote from Shuvalov: New Times: There is a lot of talk that you may leave the government and start building a right-wing political party. Is there anything real behind these rumors? Shuvalov: My profession is public administration. My absolute priority is that right now I must carry out a specific professional agenda. * I hope the family coat of arms at Waldschlossl Burgau, Shuvalov’s Austrian estate, bears exactly this inscription: “My profession is public administration”*.