Oh, what a remarkable fact we missed when we were preparing the project "Sochi 2014: An Encyclopedia of Spending". This would have been a magnificent entry in the "Paired Contracting" competition. Many thanks to Vedomosti for digging this up:
Marina, the former wife of Rosneft president Igor Sechin, became co-owner of 51% of Exect Partners Group and 49% of OHL Rus Private Limited, Vedomosti discovered: the corresponding entries in SPARK (a Russian corporate registry database) are dated December 2013. Exect is engaged in HR consulting, assessment, training, and staff development, according to its website. Exect is a supplier for the 2014 Olympics: it signed an agreement with the Games organizing committee under which it is training 35,000 personnel through 26 volunteer centers in 17 Russian cities. Rosneft, headed by Sechin, is also listed among Exect’s clients on the company website. ... OHL Rus Private Limited is a “granddaughter” company of the Spanish construction group Obrascon Huarte Lain (OHL). OHL is an engineering, construction, and infrastructure group, the fourth-largest infrastructure contractor in Latin America, operating in 30 countries, according to its website. As of 2012, OHL owned 100% of Spain’s Posmar Inversiones 2008, which in turn owned 50% of OHL Rus, while 49% belonged to Sechina. In 2012, the director of OHL Rus was Manuel Pedrosa Viciana, OHL’s executive director for Russia. OHL’s 2012 sales were €4.029 billion, with EBITDA of €1.05 billion. OHL has interests in Russia. In December 2011, OHL’s Czech subsidiary signed an agreement to work jointly on the Northern Latitudinal Railway project with the Ural Industrial — Ural Polar Corporation and the Yamal Railway Company. The contract was worth €1.95 billion, Bloomberg reported. In March 2013, OHL signed a preliminary cooperation agreement with Gennady Timchenko’s Stroytransgaz on projects to create and reconstruct Russian transport infrastructure. http://www.vedomosti.ru/politics/news/22006061/marina-sechina-trener-i-stroitel#ixzz2rmEWg1pT Let’s set aside the “infrastructure creation projects” for the moment. The Olympic volunteer story alone is wonderful enough. There is no place where these resourceful Kremlin ghouls can’t make money by muscling their way into a lucrative contract. Construction projects were not enough for them. Now they’re training volunteers too. Sochi 2014 needs 35,000 volunteers. And the contract to train them goes to—surprise—Marina Sechina.
(There should be a photo of Marina Sechina here, but let’s be honest with ourselves—there he is: V.V. Putin’s friend, a former official, a newly minted oil man, an insatiable crook, and now the chief mentor of the 2014 Olympic volunteers.) The address to Sochi volunteers on the Olympic website looks lovely and touching:
Selflessness and a willingness to help do, of course, live in Russians’ hearts. It’s just a pity that in the hearts of those who have seized power in Russia, what mostly lives is greed and the desire to profit from absolutely EVERYTHING. We’re now waiting for reports that the yogurts for the schoolchildren who will sing at the Olympic closing ceremony are being supplied by a Putin-linked offshore company at $150 apiece. We quickly drew up a graphic showing what the business empire of the “talented entrepreneur” Marina Sechina now looks like, for those who find it hard to take in information from a page of text:
At the same time, we also found the companies EnergoPromFinans and KonsaltEnergoService, which Vedomosti did not mention. That’s a great story too: here is an interesting link about "EnergoPromFinans", and here is an interesting link about "KonsaltEnergoService". Marina Sechina is quite the diversified entrepreneur: from communications and energy to personnel training. And all of it feeding off the budget, state companies, and government contracts. We will definitely add this wonderful family business around Sochi 2014 to our "Encyclopedia of Spending". And once again, I ask everyone to help spread http://sochi.fbk.info/ . The audience that matters most is the one that spends a lot of time with the zomboyashchik (slang for television, especially state propaganda TV). If your mother or aunt has an account on "Odnoklassniki" (a Russian social network), be sure to show her the site and ask her to post a link urging others to share it. The country should know those who became the winners of the Olympics before they even began. http://sochi.fbk.info/