Petka Kolbin — Putin’s wallet

It’s not exactly great to retell other people’s investigations, while

not talking about your own, but here, sorry,

I simply can’t let it pass, because this time they really

nailed old man Putin himself.

Yesterday, the TV channel Dozhd (TV Rain) released an absolutely explosive investigation

about yet another one of his front men.

I absolutely do not want to take away from TV Rain

their traffic, clicks, likes, and approval, so in the description

to this video you’ll find a link to the original investigation,

and now I’ll just briefly explain the most interesting parts and

say plainly what this is all about.

TV Rain has, essentially, finally solved the mystery of one of the

most baffling and mysterious things created during the time

Putin has been in power.

It is the company Gunvor.

What did it do?

It sold Russian oil, and it did so

in a very cunning way.

It took oil from the four largest Russian

producers, companies such as Rosneft, Surgutneftegaz,

Gazprom Neft, and TNK, and resold it abroad.

In other words, it was a pure middleman.

It did absolutely nothing, just resold the oil.

And the company itself was based not in Russia, but in Switzerland

and enjoyed preferential tax treatment there, and to Russia’s budget

it paid not a single kopek.

At one point, through Gunvor there was exported

almost a third of all Russian oil—that is, an enormous share of the oil going to the West,

and in this way the mysterious Swiss middleman

was making many billions of dollars, I repeat, without

Again, without doing anything at all.

In general, it had long been clear to everyone that this was a Putin-era

corruption scheme, because there was no point whatsoever in this

middleman; it appeared along with Putin and thanks to

Putin. Representatives of the oil companies said openly behind the scenes

that they were being forced to sell oil through Gunvor, and I

can personally confirm this, because I myself sued

almost all of these oil companies, demanding that

they explain why they were giving part of their profits to this

middleman.

And most importantly, the head of the company, a guy named Gennady Timchenko, is

an old, well-known friend of Vladimir Putin, and that too was hardly

a secret.

But there was one mysterious shareholder in Gunvor, and for many years

no one even knew his name, so many people had doubts,

saying: maybe he was some kind of oil-industry professional,

a professional commodities trader, and that it was precisely

thanks to his unique work and unique expertise that one could explain why

Gunvor was making so much money, and why oil companies were being made to sell through it.

After some time, it emerged that the mysterious shareholder

was named Pyotr Kolbin, which also explained nothing to anyone

— because no one on the market knew anyone by that name.

The Kremlin said that this Kolbin was unknown to them and had absolutely no connection to Putin.

And now TV Rain has finally explained to us who he is, and

that is the essence of their investigation.

It turned out that the mysterious billionaire Kolbin was

not just a friend of Putin, but actually a childhood friend of Putin’s.

Their fathers were friends,

and every summer they lived at their dachas in neighboring houses.

The whole point of Kolbin is that he is an extremely trusted

associate of Vladimir Putin, and he has no professional

or business qualifications; he knows nothing about oil and

before Putin’s presidency, do you know what he was? You’ll

laugh: a butcher.

So it became completely clear that the third real

shareholder of Gunvor, who made billions

from our oil, was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin himself, who

put those shares in his friend’s name, and the friend simply serves as

a wallet.

And in the same investigation, TV Rain gave an example of how

Putin uses this wallet to pay his personal expenses.

For example, Kolbin, together with another Gunvor shareholder,

Gennady Timchenko, bought two luxury apartments on Old Arbat

and then transferred them to a woman named Anna Zatsepilina, who

turned out to be the grandmother of Alina Kabaeva.

That’s the kind of terrific investigation this was, one that

once again proved to us that 1. Russia’s leadership, including

Putin himself, is personally involved in corruption, 2. they possess personal

fortunes worth billions of dollars, and 3. they view

the national wealth of our country—oil, gas,

and other raw materials—as a source of personal enrichment.

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