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Hi, people are writing to us and congratulating us
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because, thanks to our investigation,
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a corrupt official has lost her
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position. But we have mixed feelings about it,
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and I wanted to say a couple of
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words about that. On the one hand,
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Ekaterina Solotsinskaya, the former wife
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of presidential press secretary Dmitry
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Peskov, was fired from her job. The reason
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for the dismissal, according to the media, was that Solotsinskaya
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failed to declare her
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foreign company. Everyone learned about the existence
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of that company from us, when
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we released our investigation into a luxury 180-square-meter
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apartment owned by Solotsinskaya in Paris
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worth 125 million rubles (about $1.3 million). It was
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this very foreign company, Sirius, that was used to buy
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the apartment, and it belongs
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to two owners: Peskov’s former wife and
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his daughter Elizaveta. As far as is publicly known,
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the company was supposed to develop
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strategies, roughly speaking, for PR
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for Russian legal and judicial institutions. Solotsinskaya
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headed the Paris office
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of Rossotrudnichestvo (Russia’s federal agency for international humanitarian cooperation)
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in Paris.
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She was a government official, receiving a salary from our
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taxes, yet she was not allowed to own a foreign company at all,
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let alone
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own one in secret. And when we
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made our ironclad evidence public,
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the leadership of Rossotrudnichestvo simply
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had no choice but to fire her. The media
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describe a rather funny story about how she
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first threatened everyone with Ramzan Kadyrov (the head of Chechnya),
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then with Ksenia Sobchak, but in the end accepted it
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and posted on her Instagram
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a statement saying she was resigning of her own
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free will.
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As if she wasn’t fired—she quit
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herself. Are we glad she was fired?
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Absolutely. People like her have no place
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in public service.
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But that wasn’t the question we were asking. Where did
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the money come from? Our investigation was watched by
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2 million people, and I’m sure they all
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had the same main question in mind: where did this official
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get the funds to buy an apartment
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worth 125 million rubles (about $1.3 million)? After all,
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the average Russian citizen would have to
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work 297 years in order to
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earn that much money.
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And we still believe that this money
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came from corruption—from bribes
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received by Dmitry Peskov, and that those bribes
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pay for the luxurious lives of his
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many children and many
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families around the world. But this is exactly the issue
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our state has no interest in raising at all
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and is trying to brush off simply by
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firing her. Sure, they found an official with
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an unexplained 125 million rubles (about $1.3 million),
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so let’s punish her severely—remove her from
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office and let her go on living in central
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Paris and “suffer.” This is yet another example
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of how the current authorities will not take a single
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real step toward a genuine fight
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against corruption. Putin protects his
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corrupt officials, shields them, pampers them, and cherishes them
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because he is exactly the same.
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He is a corrupt figure himself and the head of this entire
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thieving system. Thank you to everyone who
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helped us spread our investigation
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about the Peskov family’s apartment in Paris.
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It was you who made this dismissal happen,
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not us. Let’s keep going
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and remember that only our joint
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actions can lead to any
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change. Subscribe to our channel—
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this is where the truth is told.