Head of the Pension Fund. Billionaire

Hi, my name is Georgy Alburov, and I’m sitting

in Alexei Navalny’s place.

And he is being held in a special detention center. The reason

for Navalny’s detention is this rally against

raising the retirement age on September 9

Whereas before, the authorities would simply grab

Alexei off the street and jail him after a protest rally,

now they’ve decided

to play it safe: two weeks before and two

weeks after. What kind of new tactic is this,

you may ask?

What’s behind this innovation? The explanation is simple:

pensions are a very important and very

painful issue.

They see the numbers. They see that 90

percent of people in Russia

are enraged by these so-called improvements

to the pension system, and they’re simply

covering themselves. And when Navalny is locked up,

what do we do? That’s right: we keep working

for ourselves and for him. Today I’m going to tell you

a story that, forgive the expression, you’d have to

make up

if it weren’t true. We’re entering

the territory of absolute absurdity and

blatant mockery. Just look.

There is the Pension Fund of the Russian

Federation.

It is a gigantic, enormous bureaucratic

machine employing and paying salaries to

110,000 people. That’s almost three

completely full Fisht Stadiums (the Olympic stadium in Sochi). In essence,

these people decide nothing, invent nothing,

and earn nothing themselves. They have

no money of their own that they are

generously sharing. They simply calculate

our pensions—a gigantic

accounting office you can come to and

ask something: why wasn’t I paid an extra

500 rubles to my meager pension

(about $5)? Well, because that’s what you’re entitled to.

Here’s your paper, sign here and

here.

[music]

In fact, they are supposed to make life easier for those

who really need it: elderly

people, benefit recipients, all kinds of people in need. It is

a service organization,

a service that is owed to you and me in return for

our taxes.

Now, who do you imagine could head such a service?

The imagination conjures up some kind of

mega-bureaucrat, a boring miser,

the sort who says, “There are many of you, and only one of me,”

some kind of deputy chief accountant in glasses and a worn

jacket.

But not at all, dear viewers.

Not at all. At the head of the Pension

Fund we have a dollar millionaire,

a lifelong career official, Anton

Viktorovich Drozdov.

He began working at the USSR Ministry of Finance in 1986.

Many of this video’s viewers,

I assume, had not even been born yet at the time.

But Drozdov was already in government service. Drozdov

is not a minister, not an adviser, not a geologist.

He simply heads an accounting—or rather,

a treasury—agency that

calculates how much of our own money should

be paid out and to whom. So let’s do some calculating

ourselves: how much money, over 32

years as an official, has

Drozdov earned? One thousand five hundred seventy-eight... Let’s start with

an apartment at Patriarch’s Ponds. In 2008,

the Drozdov family bought a seven-room

apartment with an area of 335 square meters

in an elite building on Maly Kazyonny

Lane. In the same building, by the way,

lives State Duma Speaker Volodin. We wrote about

Drozdov’s apartment in 2014, and back then

we valued it at 240 million rubles. Today,

based on the average price per

square meter on Cian (a Russian real estate website), it is worth

around 490 million rubles. We keep

full accounts, so let’s also add

two underground parking spaces in the building.

A private underground parking spot in the very center

of Moscow is a fairly

expensive pleasure: 4 million rubles apiece. And that is

his official annual salary, just so you know.

And what does Drozdov park in those garages?

Well,

his wife’s two cars: a Mercedes and a Lexus LS,

both worth 6 million rubles each, 12 million total.

But for the head of the Pension Fund,

that’s small change—just

the family’s declared income for a year and a half. Family income,

that is, including his wife’s income too.

Let’s add that to our ledger. And their next

item is not all that impressive, but for the sake

of completeness we’ll include it: an apartment near

the Garden Ring on Dolgorukovskaya Street,

with an area of 87 square meters.

It belonged to the Drozdovs

as a couple, but in 2007 it was transferred to

Anton Drozdov’s then 69-year-old mother.

The building is not elite at all, but it’s central Moscow,

so the prices match—around 30

million rubles.

We add that. And while we’re at it,

let’s add another 30 million here as well: in the same building,

there is another apartment belonging to Drozdov’s father-in-law,

his wife’s father. Very convenient—

all the elderly relatives in one building. From the apartment at

Patriarch’s Ponds it’s not far, about fifteen minutes

on foot. I’ve walked that route many times myself, but

back then I could never have imagined how much

Moscow would change

during Sergei Sobyanin’s time in office.

Now it is a comfortable European-style city,

clean and beautiful. So, on our

Drozdov family asset counter, we have five hundred

seventy million rubles at market

prices. You can probably already guess that I’m not

going to leave you without the crown jewel of our

accounting. This is exactly what I meant when

I said this is a story you’d have to

make up

if it had not been officially

recorded by Rosreestr (Russia’s state real estate registry), now we

rise into the air over an elite residential community on

Rublyovka (an ultra-wealthy area outside Moscow)

beautiful houses, a lake, a gated country

community. We approach the plot we need and

find there the dacha of Anton Drozdov’s mother-in-law

we are talking about Natalia Andreyevna Dymfinskaya

born in 1939, so she should now be

79 years old, and as often happens with

elderly relatives of senior

officials, her life only really began after retirement

On December 30, 2009, at the age of

70, she received as a gift

a plot of 33 sotkas (3,300 square meters / 0.33 hectares), a house measuring

617 square meters, and a garage of 128

square meters — enough space to easily fit

about five cars. She received all this from her

daughter Olga Dymfinskaya, the wife of official

Drozdov. The date of this New Year’s gift

was not chosen by accident. Had the official remained the owner of

this property for just one more day,

the house would have had to be listed in his asset declaration, and

why expose in a declaration real estate for which

you officially have no money at all

not even remotely enough money? And then

the jewel of jewels

the cherry on top of the jewel. In short, so that you

understand this is not some vegetable garden with

garden beds, but a super-elite location

all you have to do is look over the fence

Do you see that enormous construction site? It is being built by

Boris Rotenberg, one of the richest

men in Russia and one of Putin’s closest friends

What could be more symbolic than a pensioner,

the mother-in-law of the head of the Pension Fund, sharing a fence with

one of Russia’s richest men, who made

his fortune from state contracts? You could

stop right here

but a couple of formalities remain. First,

we need to add to our running tally of

Drozdov’s wealth another 400

million rubles — that is what

a similar house in this community would cost. And

we should record the total at 907

million rubles, or fourteen and a half

million dollars. Without much effort,

simply from open sources, we

found that the head of the Pension Fund has

property worth nearly 1 billion rubles

1 billion rubles. Second, for the record,

Drozdov’s official salary is just

over 300,000 rubles a month, about 4

million rubles a year

his family’s total income over the last 9

years is 78 million rubles —

10 times less than the value of their real estate

So how do you explain that? And you know what

really infuriates me?

Most of all, we understand perfectly well

that this Drozdov decides nothing; everything for him is decided by

Putin. Putin came up with

raising the retirement age. Putin brought

the pension system to the brink of default

Putin spent all the money on

his palaces, on wars, on his cronies, while

Drozdov is just an administrator, a functionary

But if he had even a shred of conscience

after all, he heads an organization that

hands out a pitiful

13,000 rubles a month to the elderly and boasts of an annual increase of

1,000. When he reports a triumphant

pension increase of next to nothing, and then

gets into his official BMW and drives to a 7-

room apartment in the most expensive

district of Moscow — does nothing

stir inside him? And when some payment of

a couple thousand rubles for a single mother of a child

with disabilities is issued, does he remember the two and a half

million rubles a year that he spends

on his own children’s school?

An excellent question. Since we have come

to the subject of his children’s education,

Drozdov never spared money. For many years

in a row, he paid 2.5

million rubles a year for two children to study at

a Moscow private school, and that is

the lion’s share of his annual salary, let me remind you

But now only his son remains at the school

while his older daughter has gone abroad to study

at the prestigious Scottish

University of St Andrews

That is where, for example, the heir to the

British throne, Prince William, studied

The annual tuition, if converted

into rubles,

is 1.5 million — and that is without housing and

other expenses. The man has not spent a single day

in business, not one day, and yet he has

a 7-room apartment at Patriarch’s Ponds, children

abroad, and a mother-in-law on Rublyovka — and this is

the head of the Pension Fund. This is an Orwellian

plot — you could not invent this on purpose

but it is true

This is what we, our families, our

elderly relatives — all of us — live with every

day. A former teacher, a doctor, an engineer

are often forced to go hungry after 40 years of

backbreaking work, while walking the same streets

as the billionaire head of the Pension Fund

This is not just corruption — it is blatant

injustice

It is naked brutality. This government — Putin,

Medvedev, the ministers, the deputies — they

have held power in the country for 20

years. They have managed to acquire yachts,

palaces, planes, vineyards. They

blew all the money on senseless

wars and endless mega-construction projects

and now they say: we have no more money

so we will take it from you, raise

the retirement age, and steal from you

the very last of what you have. They did not even try to pretend — simply

there is no money, so we will find it

we will find the money, we will make them. On September 9, we

have the opportunity to go out into the streets and

ask this government: how did this happen, and

Say: we no longer want to support you.

Start with yourselves—sell

your villas, your yachts, your Mercedes.

Put your sneakers up on Avito (a Russian online classifieds platform).

Stop stealing, after all, we

are not going to believe crooks who

stole and squandered everything, and now run around

lamenting that there is no money left. If you

think the same and are not going

to answer for someone else’s theft, then come out

into the streets of your city on September 9.

Take part in the nationwide

protest against raising the retirement

age. If you are in Moscow, come at

2:00 p.m. to Tverskaya Street.

Tell those in power to start with themselves.