Putin's Palace. The Story of the Biggest Bribe

Hi, this is Navalny, and this is an investigation

that we came up with back when I was still in

intensive care, but we agreed right away

that we would release it only when I

returned home to Russia, to Moscow, because

we don’t want the main character

of this film to think that we’re afraid of him

and that I would be telling his

darkest secret while staying abroad,

and one of those viewers, the most

devoted fan of our work, on whose orders

I was poisoned, is Vladimir

Putin. He is definitely watching right now

and his little heart is tightening with nostalgia. We have

not just an investigation here, but in a way

a psychological portrait, you could say.

I really want to understand how an ordinary

Soviet officer turned into a madman

obsessed with money and luxury—not just

obsessed, but literally ready

to destroy a country and kill for his

chests of gold.

So this is a very symbolic

place to begin.

[music]

Not in Dresden itself, but in this inconspicuous

prefab apartment building

they sketched out their first corruption schemes—

the people who would later carry out the greatest

robbery in Russian history. They would simply

steal all the nation’s wealth.

Their leader, 33-year-old Volodya Putin, the future

richest man on the planet, lived here.

Back then, everything was simpler, and the scale

of the wrongdoing roughly matched the scale

of this building. Vladimir Vladimirovich

was occupied with how, using his official

position,

to get his hands on a nice imported boombox.

But in principle, neither the methods nor the circle

of trusted associates has changed. It’s just that

back then they were interested in boomboxes,

and now it’s huge state-owned

enterprises. They sat through official ceremonies

and read out speeches. It’s just that in

those days they worshipped Grandpa Lenin

and swore loyalty to the ideals of communism,

whereas now they cross themselves in churches and teach

us spirituality and conservatism.

Today we will see what is considered

impossible to see up close. We will go

where no one is allowed in.

We will visit Putin, and with our own

eyes we will see that this man has

completely lost his mind over luxury and wealth.

We will find out whose money, and how,

finances this luxury, and how over

the last 15 years the biggest bribe

in history has been paid, and the most

expensive palace in the world has been built.

[music]

and

[music]

Putin, a minor KGB employee now passing himself off

as a great spy, arrived in

Dresden in 1985. Wow—

an intelligence officer. He wants us to think

that. In reality, he was an ordinary employee,

not even of a secret station, but simply of the

official KGB office in

East Germany, friendly to the Soviet Union.

Germany.

Today, court propagandists love

to romanticize this period of Putin’s life:

Vladimir Vladimirovich was infiltrating

the enemy’s lair. In reality, this

building was a cozy little spot where a bunch

of idlers like Putin sat through

party meetings and presented each other with

commemorative gifts—just like now. On November 21,

1982, a smartly dressed Putin was, believe it or not,

at the Ball of Brothers-in-Arms,

an event dedicated to the friendship between the KGB and the Stasi (East Germany’s secret police),

the Great October Revolution,

and the inevitable victory of socialism throughout

the world. That day, Putin was presented with an award:

a gold badge as a symbol of friendship between

Germany and the Soviet Union. Friendship with

the Soviet Union

had become the call of every citizen’s heart

of the GDR (East Germany). And now this treasure can

be bought online for 3 euros. All evening long,

Putin and his colleagues read out

long speeches, drank Soviet brandy,

watched slides, and trembled with pride

and devotion to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism.

Less than two years later, none of it

would remain.

The Berlin Wall would be torn down,

East Germany, along with the Stasi

and the KGB offices, would cease

to exist. The system, built on lies and

repression, collapsed—but it left behind

one very important

legacy: the archives.

Despite his dreams and expectations, Putin did not

manage in Dresden to build either a career

or a fortune. But he did get acquainted with

the people who would later become

his main financial backers.

[music]

Well equipped with a white glove—you can’t

do without one—helping us is David, a correspondent for the German outlet

Correctiv.

Here we’re going to look at this photograph.

We have already seen Vladimir Putin

receiving the gold badge, but not everyone

paid attention to this gentleman here.

And this is none other than Sergei Viktorovich

Chemezov.

He is now the head of the Rostec corporation. He served

together with Putin, and so in this

photograph we see two of the richest

men in Russia—well, perhaps the richest

man in the world.

And Chemezov is definitely in the top five

richest people in our country. Thirty years later,

he is still by his side, but now as a

billionaire civil servant. It’s just very

interesting how meticulously the Germans

recorded everything. Here is the evening’s program:

it says that at 6:00 p.m. there will be a

special toast in honor of

the representatives of the host

side, and each person will be given a glass

of Soviet cognac (brandy).

Then they proceed to deliver

solemn speeches.

They praise

Comrade Lenin, praise socialism, exchange

souvenirs, and according to

the program, no later than 7:45 p.m.,

Vladimir Vladimirovich is to begin

dancing, because at 7:45 p.m. it’s time for dancing.

Here we have two little photo booklets.

This one has been shown many times on

television — you’ve seen this many times.

It is a Stasi ID card, and on it is the name

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. There is another

ID card just like it, and on it is a very

pleasant-looking man — Nikolai Petrovich

Tokarev, the man who heads Transneft.

Unlike Chemezov, he has never confirmed his work in

the KGB.

And in his official biography there is

a 20-year gap, plus work in the mining

industry.

Well, now we’ve filled in that gap. The numbers

of these ID cards differ by just one

digit.

And here is another document: a Stasi

telephone directory, and in it there is a section called “Comrades

Friends.” Let’s look here — see, the phone

numbers match for Major Tokarev and

Major Chemezov. That means they literally

sat in the same office, and their desks were

obviously next to each other.

It was here in Dresden that Putin defined

his main life principles, which would later

become the foundation of the Russian

state. First: always say one thing

and do another. Lies and hypocrisy are

the most effective working methods. Second:

corruption is the basis of trust.

Third: your real friends are the people who for many years

have stolen and cheated together with you. And

most importantly, there is never

such a thing as too much money.

[music]

Early 1990s, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Judge for yourself

how great a spy Putin really was in

Dresden if, after returning from

his posting, he was sent in Leningrad

to a rather unpromising job at

the university. His old

university friend Nikolai Yegorov also worked there.

He is one of the little-known but key

members of Putin’s most trusted circle.

In the 1970s, Yegorov and Putin sat

at the same desk together and were friends, along with

two other often overlooked

Putin classmates who were among his closest

friends at the time: Ilham Ragimov

and Viktor Myachin. What united them then

was a passion for wrestling. Let’s remember them.

In 1991, that same Yegorov

did Putin a favor that changed the future president’s life

forever: he

recommended Putin for a job at the mayor’s office

of St. Petersburg, in the Committee for External

Relations. Putin now seems terribly reluctant to recall

these pages of his biography. After all, he likes

to tell us how deeply he переживал

the collapse of the USSR — the breakup of the Soviet Union

was the greatest geopolitical

catastrophe of the century — and he condemns the 1990s

and the cynicism of the democrats, while calling everyone around him

foreign agents. I will not

name

the gang of people who were

at the helm in the 1990s, but I want to note

that during that time we completely

destroyed the social sphere,

industry, the defense sector — we lost

our defense industry.

We practically destroyed the armed

forces and brought the country to the brink of

civil war and bloodshed in the Caucasus.

And in those very years, Putin ran flat out

to work for one of the leading

democrats of that era, the radical

critic of the USSR, Anatoly Sobchak — and there it

was, at last.

A man who had dreamed of money all his life

finally got his hands on it, landing in a

position where there was plenty to steal and where bribes

were on offer. And here our Vladimir Vladimirovich

really spread his wings. The best-known and best-

investigated story is the export

licenses.

Putin was responsible for issuing such licenses

to firms that were allowed to sell

petroleum products, timber, aluminum, copper, cotton —

any raw materials abroad in exchange for food.

Literally oil in exchange for sugar,

potatoes, timber in exchange for baby food.

It was reported that in Ukraine

it had been purchased and prepared for shipment

to St. Petersburg: thousands of tons of sugar.

That is how we are getting out of the situation; let us not

speak too soon until we’ve crossed the hurdle. Putin

personally distributed the licenses and, as it later turned out,

gave them to shell companies

linked, among others, to him

and his friends. And the scheme was

elementary: raw materials went abroad,

middleman firms received the money for them,

and the food that was supposed to come by barter never arrived. This

this is our homeland.

It is the most precious thing we have. One

of Putin’s main places for making money was

the seaport — a legendary place, one of

the symbols of gangster Petersburg in the early

In the 1990s, this strategic facility

turned into a criminalized

territory where people were shot and killed

and were constantly fighting over something. The port

was controlled by one of the most notorious

crime bosses of the time, Ilya Tra

ber, nicknamed “Antikvar” (“Antique Dealer”). But the bandits

were bandits, and all the paperwork and permits

still had to be signed and processed. That was

what official Putin was doing.

Formally, he represented the interests

of the state; in reality, he was simply helping

these gangsters operating in the port

and serving their interests.

He was a useful fixer in the mayor’s office who

could help the real tough guys

solve their little problems. For example, the oil

terminal in the port—its chairman

of the board of directors, and another shareholder stake

were controlled by the head of the Tambov organized crime group

Gennady Petrov.

And Putin—here I’ll cite not just anyone,

but the head of Gazprom Neft,

Alexander Dyukov, who at the time was

the terminal’s CEO—provided the project with

serious help and support. And it is very

easy to see who else Putin was giving

serious support to: petroleum products through the

terminal were exported abroad by Gennady

Timchenko, the future billionaire,

Russia’s main oil trader and

one of Putin’s best-known friends.

Even the names of their companies

were a bit odd—Timchenko was typical of that.

I think I should keep my distance from them.

It was precisely then that the story began

of his hugely profitable business as an oil

trader—Gunvor. When Putin became

president, four of the country’s five largest

oil companies were selling

their oil abroad not directly, but

through the Swiss intermediary Gunvor.

In this way, Timchenko, without doing much of anything,

was making simply unimaginable amounts of money.

Throughout the entire existence

of Gunvor, it was believed that Putin had

a secret stake in it, and even the U.S. Treasury

officially stated that Putin had

access to Gunvor’s money. But in whose name that

stake was registered remained unclear for many years.

And then it emerged that in Gunvor

there had all along been a secret shareholder,

Pyotr Kolbin. No one understood where

this remarkable shareholder had come from, or how

a man who himself said that

he was not involved in business could have had

millions of dollars to invest in Gun

vor. And in 2016, journalists

dug up the fact that Pyotr Kolbin was Putin’s close

childhood friend. They grew up in the same

village, went to dances together,

their families were close, and it became obvious that

Kolbin had all that time been holding

Putin’s stake. So now you’re sitting there thinking:

does that mean Putin was literally being

paid bribes in envelopes? Yes. One of the

participants in the St. Petersburg gangland showdowns of the 1990s,

Maksim Fridzon,

described in an interview how the scheme

for dealing with St. Petersburg City Hall worked.

If you needed something approved, you had to

come to the Committee for External Relations,

listen to a ceremonial speech about the importance

of economic partnership, and then Putin

would simply write the required amount on a piece of paper—

the kickback.

A modest sum: $10,000 to $20,000.

And he would add that the payment—that is, the bribe—

had to be handed to his assistant, Alexei Miller.

Today, Alexei Miller needs no introduction.

For almost 20 years, he has headed

our “national treasure,” Gazprom.

He is clearly better at arranging bribes

than at managing a state company. In 2008,

Miller boasted that within

seven or eight years Gazprom would become the

most valuable company in the world, with

a market capitalization of $1 trillion. At that

moment, Gazprom was worth $360 billion.

Twelve years passed, and Gazprom’s market capitalization

was around $70 billion. In other words, it had not

grown

but fallen fivefold—an ideal example of how

Putin’s team has performed.

I’m not ashamed of my friends. And most importantly,

the story of official Putin

cannot be told without the story of Bank

Rossiya. Without Rossiya, there would have been no Putin.

This bank was originally created by the Leningrad

regional committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), but in 1991, when both the

CPSU and the regional committee, along with it, ceased

to exist, St. Petersburg Mayor Sobchak

ordered this bank to be reorganized,

its assets put in order, and on that basis

turned into a normal commercial

structure that would help the economy

of struggling St. Petersburg. He entrusted

this to Putin, and Putin delivered.

True, the shareholders of the new bank

turned out, almost without exception, to be Putin’s

friends—first and foremost, of course, Yuri

Kovalchuk.

He became, and to this day remains, the main

shareholder

and manager. In the early 1990s, Rossiya was

just a small bank attached to the mayor’s office, but

now it is a giant banking monster

that serves the country’s top

corrupt officials and holds their personal

money. Putin instructed the Presidential Property Management Department

to transfer there

all the wealth illegally seized, gifted,

and stolen by Putin’s gang, where it lies

safely stored. The bank has a very

resonant, symbolic name. It is called

Rossiya—“Russia.”

Despite the fact that three decades have passed since the days of the St. Petersburg

mayor’s office, many of

You hadn’t even been born yet, and yet you

know perfectly well all the participants in those

legendary events. Look at the board

of honor of just one committee that

Putin headed — it’s practically the entire

team of bribe-takers who once

split up cash from envelopes, taking

it all. Miller, Medvedev became prime minister and

president; Miller was put in charge of Gazprom,

Zubkov too became prime minister and joined Gazprom,

Sechin, the secretary and carrier of Putin’s

briefcase, became a government minister and

is now the head of Rosneft.

It’s like an unofficial Forbes list. And

then there’s Churov — he was put in place to rig

elections so that undesirable candidates would not

get elected and interfere with the stealing. Marina

also became the head of Putin’s protocol office.

In neighboring offices sat German

Gref — now head of Sberbank — Kudrin, now head

of the Accounts Chamber, Kozak, a former minister and

now, well,

a presidential envoy, and many, many

others. For more than 30 years they have been officials

and remained in power, while they like to tell us

how much they oppose the cursed ’90s. But they are

the very embodiment of everything worst

about the 1990s. These are all old, well-

known stories described by journalists

not even years later,

but right during Putin’s service in

Sobchak’s mayor’s office, scandals swirled around him,

parliamentary investigations, reports on

corruption and Putin’s schemes were written about in

newspapers, and really Putin should have

gone to prison back then, in 1996, when

he and Sobchak lost power after losing

the election. Putin, by the way, was then actively

working in Sobchak’s campaign headquarters, and

it was from that moment that he understood that

honest elections are a terrible thing, because they

can be lost. But then two guardian angels appeared for

our Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin’s first name and patronymic),

our Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Those of you who are younger can ask

people who remember the ’90s well: who back then

was the embodiment of corruption? I guarantee

you two names will come up: Pal Palych

Borodin, Yeltsin’s property manager (a senior Kremlin official),

whose kickback scandals and construction deals

filled the newspapers of that time, in

America and Switzerland, where trillions of dollars circulate.

I think that among thieves,

he was a thief of thieves.

Certainly no less — if anything, much

more — though no one writes about them anymore.

And Anatoly Borisovich Chubais — he

needs no introduction.

It is precisely these two wonderful people whom we

have to thank for the fact that since 1996

Putin

has been entrenched in the Kremlin — first in

the Presidential Property Management Department under Borodin.

As you know, the Presidential Property Management Department

of Russia is responsible for

material, technical, and financial

support for all central government bodies.

“I will oversee contractual and legal

work.” After all, he was trained as a lawyer.

And then, quoting Anatoly Chubais,

he “recommended for work in the presidential administration

a strong candidate

with whom he had worked

in St. Petersburg.” That is how Putin became head

of the Main Control Directorate of Yeltsin’s

administration. Appreciate the irony: the chief

corrupt figures of that era sat there

thinking about whom to appoint to the position

of inspector of the administration — who would

inspect, but carefully fail to notice

corruption — and they chose Putin. “This is my

profession; it interests me.” Putin

was given a state dacha in Arkhangelskoye,

and a service car. But in fact, very little

is known about his lifestyle. But

we found an excellent witness from those times,

a direct participant in all those events:

Putin’s former wife, Lyudmila. In the mid-

1990s, during a trip to Hamburg, Lyudmila Putina

became acquainted with a German

woman named Irina. A pen-pal friendship began,

and for several years they

sent each other handwritten letters in

which Lyudmila described in detail

her life. Here are those letters.

They are from 1996, 1997, and 1998. Then they stopped

communicating. The former friend even wrote

a book about her friendship with Lyudmila. It

is called

*A Spicy Friendship*. It was published in Russian in

2002, but it quickly disappeared from bookstore shelves.

Unfortunately, it contains excellent

photographs of Putin’s already very recognizable daughters,

or “these women,” as he himself

calls them.

They mentioned one woman, spat out another; we

carefully studied every word, both in

the book and in the letters themselves. Mostly there are

stories completely uninteresting to us about

personal matters, the weather, the children, horoscopes,

but there is still something important there. First of

all,

where were these letters sent from? At the top of the

page you can see a telephone number.

Lyudmila Putina sent them either from

home or from the office, as she herself

writes. That office was

the St. Petersburg Sea Port — the very one

that, thanks to the help of official

Putin, ended up in the ownership of

crime boss Ilya Traber.

So what was an official’s wife doing there? Or take

an office called Interkommerz. Warnig —

that is Matthias Warnig,

a banker and former Stasi (East German secret police) officer

who worked with Putin back in Germany and later

moved to St. Petersburg to head Dresdner

Bank.

Ludmila Putin's German friend was very

surprised by how close Putin and

Matthias Warnig were. Warnig paid for

Ludmila Putin's medical treatment abroad; he took on

the expenses and the organization of the family's

vacations. The Putins' hotels were booked

in his name. That is generally called

a bribe received in kind.

Putin works in the presidential

administration, while a German banker and former

intelligence officer is paying the expenses

of his family. It seems to me that this is exactly what

should be called, using Putin's favorite

term, a "foreign agent." We did not

invent the term ourselves.

"Foreign agent"—this law has been in force

in the United States since the 1930s, since 1938—1939.

In 1938, and these substantial

expenses by Warnig on the Putin family

were repaid many times over. Today this man is

the managing director of Nord Stream, and

also a member of the board of directors of Rosneft,

Transneft, Bank Rossiya, and Rusal, a member

of the supervisory board of VTB, and

of the administrative board of the Swiss

Gazprom. Besides the vacations, which we will

return to, what immediately stands out is

the Putin family's absolute obsession with

real estate.

By that time, they had already received one

official apartment in St. Petersburg.

Before moving to Moscow, all that worried

the Putins was whether they would get a new apartment

from the city and whether their old apartment would be taken

away from them.

Ludmila says with irritation that their

friends, the Chemezovs,

had already received a two-story apartment, and

she describes every corner of it down to the nearest

square meter. By the way, Sechin had a

very similar story, but we learn it

not from letters, but from a recently published book about

Putin. There, a mutual acquaintance of Putin and Sechin

recounts how they were settled into

official apartments after moving to

Moscow. When Vladimir Vladimirovich

came to visit Igor Ivanovich, he

asked:

"How many square meters do you have?" And

Sechin's apartment was 317 square meters, while

Putin's was 286. Sechin told his

acquaintance that Putin only said,

"Congratulations," but it felt as though

he wanted to shoot him with a precise

shot to the head. For several more weeks

after that, they did not speak. From

Ludmila's letters we learn a great deal

about Putin's life at the tail end of those

so-called wild 1990s—whom they associated with, where

they traveled. Ludmila describes every

vacation in detail. In 1996, for example, they

spent six weeks in Davos together with

the Shamalov family,

with whom, 15 years later, they would become even more closely connected.

Several times a year, the family of the official

Putin would invariably go to France—

in summer to vacation by the sea, and in winter to go

skiing.

And here is my favorite passage: Ludmila

Putin exposes a typical Putin

lie.

She describes how, in the summer of 1998, they

went to Cannes for a six-week vacation, but

on July 22, Putin suddenly had to cut short

his vacation and return to Moscow.

He was appointed director of the FSB. "Vladimir

Putin is no accident; he is a professional

equal to the full range of tasks facing

the Federal Security Service,"

as stated in the only

official biography of Putin. This episode

is described there too, but in that version

the vacation was not in Cannes but on the Baltic

Sea, and it was not the whole Putin family there, but

only Ludmila. We express surprise at

the degradation of the security services and rampant corruption,

but what is there to be surprised about if already in

1998 the head of the country's main security service

was made a bureaucrat whose family

was living for a month and a half in a hotel on

the French Riviera? Well then, with

what money? Clearly, with

corrupt money. Clearly, he was being made

director of the FSB so that those people

could have him solve their problems. Look at

this footage: a tanned Putin, having flown in

from France, sits on the day of his appointment next

to Kiriyenko and rejoices at returning to his

native home—

state security. Having taken over the FSB, Putin did

exactly what he had been put there to do: he helped

the corrupt escape responsibility.

The prosecutor general at the time, Skuratov, was digging into

the Yeltsin family, accusing them of bribery

and corruption, and to neutralize Skuratov

the FSB mounted an entire operation, the result

of which was the broadcast on federal

television of the famous tape showing

a man resembling the prosecutor

general. "You are now about to see a man

who looks very much like the Prosecutor General

of the Russian Federation in the company of

call girls. We are obliged

to warn you: this must not be viewed by children

under 18." After the publication, Putin

personally spoke out and said that this was not some

man who merely resembled Skuratov, but Skuratov

himself, and that he had to resign.

"My opinion on this matter is known. It

coincides with that of the president and

the prime minister of the country."

Yury (Yuri) was destroyed—and that is exactly what happened.

Skuratov was removed from office.

The corrupt Yeltsin family was saved,

and literally four months later, having realized

that a more reliable and kindred-spirited

person could not be found, it was precisely

the Yeltsin family—Tanya and Valya—who made Putin.

as his successor, first as prime minister and

then as president of Russia

[music]

As soon as Putin consolidated his power,

that is, brought television, the courts, and

set up a system for rigging elections,

the biggest operation to carve up

and plunder

and appropriate Russia piece by piece, giving each

friend his share, began—and continues to this day.

One gets control of Gazprom's cash flow,

another takes over oil, a third grabs

the biggest construction projects.

A gang of bribe-takers and crooks from St. Petersburg City Hall

seized all the key posts and

declared themselves

brilliant managers and the saviors

of Russia. But despite the fact that our heroes

dressed themselves up and surrounded themselves with hundreds

of guards, the key principle on which

everything had rested since the wild 1990s in

St. Petersburg never went away: if you want to steal

from the budget and carve up state property,

you share with Putin. "Fine, I agree,

it's a deal," he used to say. If once upon a time

Putin would write comparatively

small sums in dollars on a slip of paper,

and Alexei Miller would collect them for him, then this time

they wrote one word on the paper. That

word was "palace." This is the biggest construction project in

the world, the most secret

and most heavily guarded site in Russia. Without

exaggeration, this is not a country house, not

a dacha, not a residence—it's an entire city,

or rather a kingdom. Here there are impregnable

fences, its own port, its own security,

a church, its own checkpoint,

a no-fly zone,

and even its own border post. It is

literally a separate state inside

Russia, and in this state there is

one sole and irreplaceable tsar: Putin.

"Wait," you may say, "we've heard about this

palace. We know it was once built for

Putin, but then, when the whole story

came out, construction was frozen and the palace

was bought by some businessman, and you're telling us

some old story."

You're mistaken. No one knows this story.

First, you have no idea

of the true scale of this palace. Second,

there was no sale at all. It was a legal

illusion, a staged performance created with the help of

several sham transactions and an active

media campaign. The only real

owner of this famous place, from the very

beginning to the present day, is Vladimir

Vladimirovich Putin.

And fourth, once you look

inside, you will understand that the president of Russia

is mentally unwell. He is obsessed with

wealth and luxury.

Imagine the Principality of Monaco: it is

small, but still a separate country. And here

there is an estate the size of 39 Monacos,

built so that it cannot be approached

by land, by sea,

or by air. The thousands of people working

there are forbidden from bringing even

a simple mobile phone with a camera.

Incoming vehicles are inspected at

several checkpoints using mirrors,

inspection pits with video cameras, and searches of trunks

and glove compartments. But we are going in anyway.

What is this—completely insane?

For many years we have shown you the property

of corrupt officials from the air,

from the outside. But the palace of the most

corrupt of them all, we will show you from the inside.

Besides a tour of the tsar's chambers, I

am sure what you are most eagerly waiting for is this: you

will learn that Putin's real palace is

not just this house, but also 7,800 hectares (78 sq km)

of land, nearly 300 hectares (3 sq km)

of vineyards in four different locations,

chateaux, wineries, oyster farms, and

endless luxury. I will tell you where

this palace came from, whose money built it,

and whose money is still paying for its construction

right now. Let's go.

[music]

Hi everyone, this is Georgy Alburov, and as you

may have noticed, we are in somewhat unusual

circumstances for us. The thing is

that we are in Krasnodar Krai,

on the Black Sea coast, literally 3

kilometers (1.9 miles) from Putin's famous palace.

We got here by a very strange route. We

changed tickets, got off at the wrong

stops, changed SIM cards, changed

phones, and carried out a whole

special operation to get here. And all

of this was done so that we would not be

followed by the police, the FSB (Russia's security service),

or officers from Center E (the anti-extremism unit), who always

do this when we come to

Krasnodar Krai.

And we managed to do it. Right now

we are a few hundred meters

from the shore, and for dozens of kilometers around,

not a single police officer knows what we

are doing here. And that's great, because

right now we are going to launch a drone and

get legendary footage for you

of Putin's palace. No one has ever seen this palace

from a drone. It is secret—so secret

that it is guarded by the Federal

Protective Service.

[music]

Everyone said it was impossible to film this, but

we thought so too—then we just went ahead and

tried.

It didn't work. We tried again, made

four attempts, but it worked only

once.

We present to you the most secret palace

in Russia: Putin's palace near Gelendzhik.

Here it is, right in front of you. This is the most

the largest private residence in Russia, and its

officially confirmed area, according to

the documents, is 17,500

square meters

There’s hardly anything to compare it to. Even the most

luxurious homes on Rublyovka (an elite suburban area near Moscow) are several times

smaller. Is this a new Versailles, or a new

Winter Palace?

A truly tsar-like place. Let’s admire it

from the outside—for now, only from the outside. Let’s

fly close enough to see

everything in detail. So what’s going on here?

Some blue tarp, windows covered up,

the pool is closed, construction materials

are lying on the ground.

Workers, barely noticeable against the backdrop of the palace,

are darting around. What’s happening? Why is there

construction here? After all, satellite images

from six years ago showed that

the palace was completely finished. We were told by

the builders that yes, everything really had been ready

for a long time—but then disaster struck.

Its name was mold and negligence. The palace

had been designed with errors: the

ventilation didn’t work, the ceiling leaked, and the

humidity was high. In short, they decided to redo everything—

absolutely everything. They stripped the walls, stripped

out the marble, removed everything valuable, literally

threw billions’ worth into the trash, and started

all over again. But what is expense and

headache for Putin is a chance for us to learn more

about his palace, because the reconstruction

involves a huge number of people, and they

were happy to tell us literally

about every meter of this grand

property. For example, there’s an arboretum there,

with rare and unique trees collected there, and

for those plants that are uncomfortable in

this climate outdoors,

a greenhouse has been built with an area of

3,500 square meters. These trees—and the plants on

the grounds in general—are constantly looked after by

a total of

around 40 gardeners. Let’s fly on

farther and we see a wall of greenery and

interior sculptures. Too bad we can’t

make out who’s there—maybe a monument

to patron Yeltsin, maybe a woodland spirit,

maybe Miller with an envelope, maybe a bust

of the goddess of theft, or a sculptural

composition titled “These Women.”

Next, a very important structure: a church. Not

the Ministry of Defense cathedral, of course, but it also doesn’t

look especially Orthodox. There’s a whole bunch of

construction trailers there; obviously

the workers live there.

We see a gigantic 80-meter

bridge. In any Russian region, the opening

of something like that would be a major event.

But here it’s simply needed to get to

the tea house. To the right we see two

helipads. Strange—there used to be

three. One was removed, and in its place they piled up

a hill—but a very strange

hill, with entrances leading inside. We spent a long time trying

to understand what was inside, and at one

point, on satellite images, we saw

the inside of this hill: a rectangle with

rounded corners measuring 56 by 26

meters. Why, that’s a hockey rink.

Of course—what kind of palace is it

if you can’t play hockey in it?

This is the first time we’ve seen an underground hockey complex.

You can recognize the owner’s bunker style.

He clearly likes sitting underground; perhaps

he imagines himself as a dwarf guarding gold

from *The Lord of the Rings*. Contractors

confirmed to us that they buried underground

an ice palace that is actually as tall as

a five-story building. Slightly shocked, we

fly on to the part of the palace that

keeps it functioning. We see

a 200-meter-long building with a tower and

air conditioners. It isn’t labeled in

the documents, but it has

petroleum products supplied to it, and from it run

heating networks—so it’s a kind of

boiler house. The huge mast farther on

handles communications: it houses both

cellular operators’ base stations and

a government communications antenna.

In the distance there’s its own gas station.

We see several utility buildings,

a garage complex, and to the right dormitories for

staff. The personnel living there are not the

highest-ranking ones:

guards and shift workers among the builders.

And next to it is the brain of the whole complex:

the headquarters building. The main managers

work in this very building. Let’s

turn a little and simply admire

the view from here. It’s very

beautiful. Before, only Putin had seen it from

a helicopter—and now you can too.

We fly off to the far side of the palace to

look at a couple more structures. Here is

a colossal fence—through that, not a single

guard from the outside is getting through. To the right is the very

building for which they built

the 80-meter bridge: it’s the guest

house,

also known as the tea house, with an area of 2.5

thousand square meters. And here is

the long-suffering amphitheater. This seemingly simple

structure has been built and rebuilt

continuously for years. The owner of the palace is clearly not

happy with the result. Maybe

the place is supposed to be better suited for

gladiatorial fights between Sechin and

Chemezov. Maybe the cellist

Roldugin is criticizing the acoustics. All we can do is

guess, but workers are constantly bustling around there.

We fly off farther. So how do you get to the beach?

Put on your swim trunks, grab your flippers,

go down through the garage? But here there is

a special entrance to a tunnel that

was built by the same people who build the metro. It is

a unique structure that allows

not only is it convenient to get to the sea

but also to take shelter in the event of war or

an attack by the residents of Gelendzhik

and this tunnel has a small

secret that one of the

builders of the palace revealed to us. Here, do you see this kind of

little door or something?

Look at this photograph — here you can see it

a bit better, and here is this spot on the tunnel

diagram

this, my friends, is a tasting room

specially disguised as part of the mountain. In

fact, it is a huge window offering

the best possible view of

the sea. Here you can enjoy a glass

of wine, and most importantly for our

national leader, this is not some kind of

balcony where you are constantly in danger, but rather

a very safe underground place where

nothing can get to you

and now for something that cannot be shown with a drone:

the scale. We were flying around right

here — this is that enormous palace

complex. The plot beneath it is 68 hectares, but

in reality, the palace grounds are about

100 times larger. This forest and mountain

area, covering 7,000 hectares (70 million square meters)

belongs to the FSB, and in

September 2020 it was entirely

leased until 2068 to the company

that owns the palace. Do you know what for? For

the implementation of research and

educational activities. In

reality, of course, the only purpose of leasing

this truly gigantic plot of land

which is three times larger than neighboring

Gelendzhik

is to create something like a buffer zone

around Putin's palace so that no one could

accidentally, while walking through these beautiful places,

come too close to the fence

of the secret facility — and not only by land

normally, to go out to sea in any boat

whether an inflatable dinghy or a yacht, you need to

follow a simple procedure: call

the local FSB border directorate and

by phone

inform them of your plans. It is a mere

formality — you can fish or swim

more or less anywhere, but not

here. Hello, we are getting ready to

go out, roughly in this

area

to pass through, approximately after the Sail Rock

formation, I think, yes — about a mile out. What is there?

Is there some kind of...

And please tell me, with this area around the cape,

is it always closed off, or only on certain days?

It's just that right now there

[music]

requires coordination with the agency for these places

with the border officers, as I understand it. And is that in writing, or

can it also be done by phone through

the duty officer?

So basically, all fishermen, because of

Putin's dacha, are simply sent around it

into the open sea, 2 kilometers from shore

and all so that no one accidentally

sees up close what exactly has been

built on that cape

and you cannot approach the dacha from the air either

above it there is an official

no-fly zone

URT-116, just like over nuclear

power plants or secret military

facilities. In the Ministry of Transport order

the address and phone number are listed for those who

are responsible for this zone. We google the address, and it turns out

that the no-fly zone over Putin's

palace is overseen by an online store

called Shustrik — or else the FSB Border Directorate

for Krasnodar Krai

Why would the FSB establish a no-fly zone

over a private palace? There can be

only one answer: this palace belongs to the

very person whose security

the FSB is responsible for. To me, that is obvious

I already said that to understand

how all of this could have been built

in secret from the whole country — and now

any normal person would cry out: underground

hockey rink and tunnels inside a mountain

— that is colossal construction work and no less

colossal sums of money that had to

be paid

Exactly right. We found it all out, and

now I will tell you. Once again, we go back

into the past, to roughly the same point where

we left off last time

It is 2005. Putin has just begun

his second term

where the palace now stands, there was an empty field

or rather, a mountain. The head of the Presidential Property Management Department,

Putin's old associate from the days of the St. Petersburg

mayor's office, Vladimir Kozhin, signs

an investment agreement to build

a children's sports and health

camp here, operating year-round. According

to the agreement, construction will be carried out jointly by

the Presidential Property Management Department and the investor,

the company Lirus

Of course, no one was going to build any camp

I keep repeating it: Putin

always lies, and back then in 2005, under the guise of

a camp, they were planning from the very start to build

a dacha. We say one thing and do another

Lirus had three shareholders

Nikolai Shamalov, that very family friend, and later

a relative by marriage, with whom Putin in 1996

spent six weeks vacationing in Davos, and

two others: KGB colonel Dmitry Gorelov, in charge of supplies,

and businessman Sergei

Kolesnikov

Why did these people suddenly decide to build

a children's camp near Gelendzhik? One of

them told us about it. Around 2005

or 2006, this idea came up — well, well,

it would be nice to build some kind of small

A little house on the Black Sea coast, but still...

a presidential term cannot last forever.

And the end was already near — everything had to be handed over.

You start thinking about retirement somehow, wanting something for yourself.

Those matters were discussed with Shamalov...

He was the presidential property manager.

He was showing off this plot of land.

emphasizing that he

had signed the documents allocating this

plot, and this little house suddenly

starts turning into some kind of

enormous palace. In 2010, Sergei

Kolesnikov

published an open letter in which

he called on President Medvedev to put

an end to Putin's corruption. Kolesnikov, as

someone involved in the palace construction

project,

described literally everything: what was being built and where,

whose money was used, who it was registered to, and all

the schemes involving offshore companies and bearer

shares — he laid it all out.

He published documents, financial records, contracts, and

audio recordings of negotiations between the builders and

the sponsors. All of this happened 10 years

ago, and honestly, a revelation

of that scale and credibility has probably not appeared since

then. The essence of it

was this: Kolesnikov, together with Gorelov,

founded a company called Petromed in the early 1990s.

St. Petersburg City Hall also held a stake in

that company.

The city's interests in such companies

were represented by Deputy Mayor Vladimir

Putin. In other words, Putin, Kolesnikov, and Gorelov

had known each other for many, many years. In

early 2000, Nikolai Shamalov came to Petromed

with a personal proposal from

Putin, who had just been elected president

and was looking, so to speak, to make some extra money.

The proposal, like everything Putin comes up with,

was openly corrupt, and

especially absurd considering that, upon becoming

president, Putin publicly declared that

he was beginning a fight against the oligarchs. In

our country, "oligarchs" meant

major business figures who

behind society's back tried

to influence, for example, political

decision-making. There should not be such a group of people,

he said.

The struggle there was a fight to the death.

Just look: they agreed that

oligarchs such as Abramovich and Mordashov

would donate money to Petromed, and

Petromed would spend it on healthcare,

modernizing hospitals, purchasing

equipment, and so on. But part of the agreement

was that 35 percent

of the donated sums would be sent to

a special offshore company with bearer

shares — meaning no name would appear anywhere,

but whoever held the paper

would own the company. He proposed

using this to get, let's say, oligarchs

to participate in various charitable

programs. For example, a very good

program was the supply of medical equipment.

Shamalov formulated the

condition that 35 percent of

those supplies

had to be, so to speak, set aside, and

then — and this is very important —

at the beginning, when we made the

decision, there was never any talk of palaces or

some kind of cash stash and so on. This money was

to be directed into investment projects for

development in Russia.

The shares in the offshore company were split as follows:

2 percent each went to Shamalov,

Gorelov,

and Kolesnikov himself, while 94 percent

of the shares were given to Putin — or "Mikhail Ivanovich,"

as the project participants called him

for the sake of secrecy. Where did this

"Mikhail Ivanovich" thing come from? It was so that

people could talk in the company

without using his surname, because

that attracted attention. There are

people standing nearby, and if you say

the word "Putin," for example, everyone's ears perk up

and they immediately start

catching every word. Putin was "Mikhail

Ivanovich."

And who else? Timchenko was

"Gangrena Kozha."

Professor Preobrazhensky (a character from Mikhail Bulgakov's *Heart of a Dog*). Actually, this

is called a kickback, but Putin called it

"Rosinvest."

Apparently, he doesn't know how to do projects any other way.

Originally, it was assumed that Rosinvest

would become something like the president's personal investment fund.

It would take these kickbacks from people like

Mordashov and Abramovich and then patriotically

invest them in Russian

enterprises in decline, and then

claim the credit for it and

score political points. Oh, and I almost

forgot — they hadn't yet said that with this

money they would build a palace. There really were some investment

projects at first, but

not for long. After some time, Shamalov,

who was Putin's main go-between and

the man in whose name the property in

Gelendzhik was registered, ordered all projects

except the palace to be shut down. And then we were told:

everything must be wound up.

Everything had to go. This was during the 2008 financial crisis,

they said everything had to be shut down, everything closed, because

everything had to go toward the palace. Well, I said

that I would not be a palace builder. All

the money from Rosinvest was supposed to be

redirected to the construction site in Gelendzhik.

Kolesnikov, whose plans did not include

devoting his life and

business to Putin's palace, wrote that very

letter and revealed the details.

by that point, but still

Several hundred million dollars had already been spent on the still-unfinished palace

and

the total planned budget was no less than

no less than

$1 billion. The story told

by Kolesnikov was, several years later,

confirmed both by the famous Panama

Papers and by other investigations. For

example, Reuters did a strong investigation.

Reuters

Remember there was a national project called

"Health"? Journalists traced

how our state was purchasing

expensive medical equipment

at prices far above market rates. The difference

between those prices stayed with intermediaries

who, after funneling the money through several

shell companies, ultimately transferred it to the accounts

of the firm

Lanfranco Cirillo, the Italian

architect of Putin's palace, with the description

"for the construction of a facility

on the Black Sea."

So, quite literally, we were paying

taxes so that this money could be used to treat those who

fell ill — and they took that money and spent it

on Putin's palace. Thank you very much.

On the internet, you can find several

photographs

from inside the palace itself — impressive,

of course, and leaving no doubt about

who the owner is here.

By the way, here's a detail that personally

deeply shocked me.

Look at this photo of the gate

of the residence, taken by one of the workers.

Does something about it seem vaguely familiar?

You've seen it somewhere before. Here it is: the classic

scene familiar to everyone — the storming of the Winter

Palace

from Sergei Eisenstein's film. In fact,

you can still see that eagle today

if you go to St. Petersburg

and walk up to the gates. So Putin

literally put on the gates of his personal estate

an exact copy of the tsarist eagle with a crown from

the Winter Palace. That tells us a great deal about

who this man imagines himself to be. But that is not

all. The leak was confirmed by dozens

of documents. Kolesnikov's story did not

stop this construction project of the century on the Black Sea

coast. Putin wants a palace — Putin

will get a palace. To contain the scandal and

distract public attention, they

came up with a scheme in which the palace was supposedly bought by

businessman Alexander Ponomarenko. He is

a longtime partner of Putin's friends,

the Rotenberg brothers (Putin associates known for judo). He does business with

them in real estate

and together with them owns

Sheremetyevo Airport. Ponomarenko gave several

interviews in which he said: yes, I bought all of this

for myself, and I am going to build a hotel here,

and he even confirmed to journalists that he had bought the

palace

from Shamalov for about $350 million.

And he immediately mentioned that he had structured the purchase

through his Cypriot offshore company. We

open the financial statements of that

offshore company to check, find the relevant

2011 records, and see that yes, there was a purchase, but

the palace was bought not for $350 million

but for $350,000, or 10

million rubles at that exchange rate — the price

of a two-room apartment on the outskirts of Moscow.

In other words, this was a completely sham transaction.

They did not even bother to transfer

real money. They simply appointed

a specially selected wealthy man who

would officially be considered the owner of the palace

near Gelendzhik.

From the moment Ponomarenko took up

the honorary role of front

owner, absolutely nothing changed in terms of how the palace was managed.

Nothing at all. Previously,

Shamalov was the owner of the palace, and

then he became its manager. After Shamalov,

the palace began to be managed by some

company called InvestStroy. To an uninformed

observer, this was supposed to suggest that

there was no connection to Putin left at all.

The director was a certain Balladza

Kalyanov, and the listed owners were

some Tatiana Kuznetsova and Inna

Kolpakova. The offshore company to which the palace was assigned

was represented by power of attorney by

a man named Ivan Serditov. Who are these

people? But we look at their biographies, and everything

becomes perfectly clear. Balladza

Kalyanov, then the director of the palace management

company, has now been appointed by Putin's decree

head of the Directorate

of Public Catering

within the Presidential Property Management Department of Russia.

Tatiana Kuznetsova

is the wife of Oleg Kuznetsov, who at the time was

the serving commander of Military Unit

1473 of the Federal Protective Service, which

took part in the construction of the palace

as the commissioning developer. Now

this military unit has been renamed

the more understandable Directorate for the Operation of

Property of the State Protection Agencies.

And Inna Kolpakova is the wife of Alexander

Kolpakov, who at the time was head of

a directorate within the Presidential Security Service

of Russia. The responsibilities of this unit

include the construction and management of

the head of state's residences. And now

Alexander Kolpakov

is the Presidential Property Manager of the Russian Federation

for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Ivan

Serditov was a young lawyer who at the time

worked at the law firm Egorov Puginsky

Afanasiev & Partners.

Egorov — recognize the name? That is the same Nikolai

Egorov, Putin's former university classmate, who later

got him a job at City Hall under Supchik now

angry of the head of the legal department

of the Presidential Property Management Department

and a small bonus so you understand just how

profitable it is to guard Putin's secrets, here

here on the Gelendzhik embankment, in

2015, four

4,000-square-meter houses were built side by side; one

went to manager Tatyana Kuznetsova, two

to Kolpakova, three to the palace architect, Lan

Franco Cherie l'eau 0 4; the largest one

belongs to Balat Zakari's son, so

no matter how much they tell us that

this property belongs to some businessman

that's a brazen lie. There are no

no-fly zones over businessmen's houses, they don't build

them, and FSO officers don't guard them

FSB officers

and they don't close off the sea in front of businessmen's residences

even to fishing boats. No one can have

the slightest doubt

that this is Putin's palace. Let's move on to

the interiors. This is, of course, not just a building

it's a symbol of Putin's 20 years in power, it's

what it looks like

how it's being hidden, who is paying for it

and even the fact that it has been under construction for 15

years and still can't be finished. Now

imagine you have an unlimited

amount of money

all the power and any resources you want. How would you

use it? We know many different

examples: the richest people in the world often

spend their fortunes on

charity or build

a university or a huge hospital

that will bear their name. So what dream of his own

is Putin realizing? What is all this for?

This is what he arranged after 20 years in power

repressive laws, a robbed and impoverished

people, the complete destruction of politics

a rewritten constitution, people thrown in jail

now we will see the answer: for gold and

marble, for sofas and couches in the style

of Louis XIV, for mosaics and

frescoes, stained glass, a private theater, and

even a

disco. I promised you that we would get inside

Vladimir Putin's home, and we will

even though no one invited us there

one of the key

contractors who worked on outfitting

the palace will help us. He himself was so shocked and

outraged by the luxury of the decor and

the insane prices of the furniture that he sent

us a detailed architectural plan of this

property

It has everything, from the pattern designs on the floor

to the item numbers of every piece of furniture and

the placement of electrical outlets. That means we are, in

the literal sense, seeing exactly which

sofas Vladimir Putin sits on

which beds he lies in, and which tables

he sits at. Look: here is the basement

floor. There is a huge swimming pool here, a spa area

a massage room, a cosmetology

room, some kind of spa capsule

saunas and hammams, plunge pools and basins for

bathing. From the pool you can go out to

the outside

to a place marked on the plan as

"aqua disco"

To be honest, I didn't know such a thing

even existed. Here it is on the plan, and here

is its photograph: something like a fountain

where you can sit and order

drinks. And believe me, this is not even the biggest

surprise waiting for us at

Putin's residence

There are dozens of utility rooms here, without which

you simply can't do when, guys, you're living the life

of a real monarch: rooms for staff

doctors, managers, cooks, cloakrooms

for waiters, a meat-and-fish section

a vegetable section, a bakery section, an egg-processing section, and

and then, this is good, a dirt storage room: 18

square meters

Obviously, for a comfortable life

President Putin needs a lot of dirt. But more conventionally,

there is also

a cocktail hall from which you can get

either to the home theater or to

the tasting room and wine cellar

Wonderful. And on the first floor

there is a gym with tatami mats, and next to it a bunch of

interesting rooms like a reading room or

a music lounge

Do you think Putin learned

to play the piano for nothing? No, he plans

after a hard presidential day

after taking care of the people, to come into

the music lounge and play something

for the soul

[music]

Quite rightly, at this point

you might object: you just made all this up yourself

drew the plan and are showing it to us, while Putin

said at his next press conference

as usual: legalization

this isn't some investigation, it's

the laundering of materials from American

intelligence services

So before the tour, I need to

verify everything and prove to you

the authenticity of these documents. I already

said that in 2011, several photos of the palace interiors

appeared on the internet

taken by workers. When we were sent

these plans, we ourselves took them and

started comparing them with the existing photographs

to make sure that what we had before us was not

a fake. I've already shown you the aqua disco

here is the photo

here it is on the plan. But fine, that can

be seen from the outside and redrawn. Let's

look for something inside. Here is a photograph clearly

from the dining room; you can clearly see the tables and

chairs and sideboards with monograms. We

with some effort, we find this room on the floor plan. It is

the small dining room. We look closely at

the names indicated on the plan, and the label here

says 4 AAT. This, like all the

other furniture suppliers to the palace,

is a super-exclusive Italian furniture

house selling one-off pieces strictly made

to order. You can’t find a set like this on Google,

so we wrote a letter to

the AAT factory and simply asked them to send

us a catalog—and voilà.

The furniture set in the catalog looks like this:

table, chairs, sideboard—exactly the same as

in the photograph. And let’s do it once more, just to be

completely sure.

Here, for example, is a photo of a worker standing next to

a bedside table; you can see the pattern on the floor. We look for the same

one on our plans and find it in

the bedroom. We check what kind of dresser it is—here’s

the Pozzoli company.

And here is the furniture item number. We order a catalog from

this factory too—again, super-exclusive.

They don’t even have this furniture on their own website,

and once again, success: the dresser indicated on the plans

matches the dresser in the photo exactly.

There was actually a funny story with this Italian furniture.

We asked them to send us

photos of 20 or 30 pieces of furniture

that we had found on the plans, and at some point the factory’s

representatives became very

surprised and asked whether

we had been the ones who ordered exactly the same

set for the construction of a palace on the Black

Sea.

We said that, yes, that was us who ordered it there. And here is another

Italian family-run

furniture factory. Putin’s palace has

a lot of their pieces too. They even

posted photos of Putin’s palace

interiors on their website, along with a video saying

that their clients deserve the most

extraordinary interiors. And then,

apparently, they show those very clients. These

factories really do make super-

exclusive furniture in such

small quantities that they

remember all of their customers for decades.

And the prices reflect that. Here are

a couple of actual pieces of furniture from

Putin’s interiors: a leather sofa like this

costs 2 million rubles (about $22,000), and a dressing

table also costs 2 million. In the hallways

there are cheaper sofas too, apparently for

guests—for example, one for 1.5 million

rubles (about $16,500). Or there’s also a cool table with

a built-in bar for 4 million

corruption rubles. In short,

having made sure that our architectural plans

were absolutely accurate and reliable, we

commissioned a 3D visualization, and it recreated

all the interiors.

Where photos exist, the reconstruction matches the original

100 percent. But where there are no photos,

minor details may differ,

such as the color scheme or patterns.

Now let’s enter the palace through the main

entrance.

Vladimir Putin imagines himself a Russian

emperor and behaves accordingly.

An Italian architect built him

a palace in the Italian style:

a classic palazzo, with an inner courtyard

and a fountain in the center, surrounded by galleries, as if

we were not near Gelendzhik (a resort city on Russia’s Black Sea coast)

but in Bologna or Florence. From the courtyard we go

into the reading room—that’s what this room is called.

Here we can see how closely our

reconstruction resembles the original.

Photos of this room are available

online, and we can compare them. Look:

the columns, the stucco,

the chandeliers, the frescoes—they match completely, 100 percent.

And as for the golden eagles—there can never be

too many of them. Vladimir Putin,

reading in this room

*Komsomolskaya Pravda* (a mass-circulation Russian newspaper), must remember that he

is the master of Russia. And here was taken

one of the most famous photographs

from inside the palace: a carefree worker stretched out

on

a little sofa on which, later,

an august body would recline. He should

have been more careful—that little sofa costs

more than his apartment. We leave the reading room;

there’s still a lot more to see.

The doors on the right swing open, and we

find ourselves in a luxurious marble foyer with

a bar—something you usually see before entering

a theater or concert hall. And we guessed right:

rich people install home

movie theaters in their houses,

but the president of Russia built at home

a real theater, with a huge stage,

wings, dressing rooms,

and imperial boxes. I’m not joking: inside

Putin’s palace there is a full-fledged theater,

an auditorium with two levels and spectator

boxes. The lower level can be closed off with velvet

curtains.

If the owner wants a more intimate

setting, there is a balcony on the second floor with

sofas. Here Vladimir Putin’s devotion

to tradition becomes clear. Remember, in

Tsarist Russia, landowners built

their own serf theaters (private theaters staffed by serfs). Well, our

president has one too. And about his fondness

for costume parties and

dressing up, singer

Vetlitskaya said back in 2011 that she, together with

other performers, had been invited to

a private performance at Putin’s residence

in Valdai (a lake and area in northwestern Russia known for official retreats).

And imagine her surprise when

she had to perform before Putin and, apparently,

his guests, dressed in tailcoats and costumes

from the era of Catherine the Great. At the time, they paid

the performers with titles like People’s Artist

and with expensive watches and diamonds from

the most valuable item

an icon bearing the president’s personal autograph, and

what exactly he wrote on the icon remains unclear to the Japanese as well, for now

ordinary Russians make themselves comfortable

to enjoy *Pole Chudes* (*Field of Wonders*, a long-running Russian TV game show)

in the theater of the Black Sea palace, the lights go out

the light

the curtain rises, and the national leader

indulges in more refined pleasures

speaking of refined pleasures

do you know what our president is into?

you’d never believe it, but he loves hookah

let’s go to the room marked on the house plan

as the hookah lounge, and it really does look like

the best, most expensive hookah lounge in the city

of Makhachkala: couches, little tables, dimmed

lighting, the perfect atmosphere for discussing

budget matters while reclining among soft

pillows. The president and his guests can

also enjoy a show

this room is also equipped with a small

stage, and amazingly, on the stage there is

a special raised platform with a pole. We can’t even

begin to imagine what the pole is for

on the stage. Maybe it’s for a New Year’s tree

maybe for a giant shawarma, or maybe

for a performance in support of

the Constitution. If the so-called

hookah lounge surprised you, then what comes next

you’ll like even more

in his letter, Sergei Kolesnikov

to Medvedev said that inside the palace

there was a casino, but at the time no one

paid attention to those words, because

it was impossible to imagine that

the president of Russia, in his private residence,

had built a casino. Maybe he exaggerated or

embellished things—but no, a huge private casino

really does exist. The design did indeed include

a casino

but this casino is not, excuse me, not for

inviting random people in off the street. It’s

simply for passing the time. We are now

entering Vladimir Putin’s private casino

in the rest of the country, they are banned

but here, anything goes: two card tables

and of course roulette. The only question is

what they’re playing for. Surely not just money

that would be too boring. Most likely, state-owned companies

so now don’t be surprised that all

the country’s national wealth ends up being handed over

to Putin’s friends—quite possibly he

simply lost it in the casino. From the casino, through

the billiards room, we enter the game room

the first thing that strikes us is that

our president is not above simple

entertainments either—he likes to dance. Here

there is a dance arcade machine with

a huge screen

the rest of the room is filled

with slot machines. For a true

patriot, his own personal Black Sea

Las Vegas. This space is called the hall

of amusement games, where one-armed

bandits (slot machines) stand next to gilded

armchairs costing 700,000 rubles each (about $7,700), and

and here is probably the favorite room

of the president of Russia—the place where Putin

outplays everyone

but there are no globes here, no maps of military

operations. Instead, there are toy racing

cars. For his little electric

friends, a special room has been set aside

the size of a one-room apartment

here, on a special track, the world’s leading

geopolitical strategist of our time

performs amazing maneuvers, overtaking

his rivals on the turns and unfailingly

emerging as the winner of the great race

a little embarrassed, but still

we head up to the second floor, to the holy

of holies

the bedroom of the supreme commander-in-chief

the president of Russia, Vladimir

Vladimirovich Putin. Though in fact, the word “chambers”

would be more fitting. Everything here follows

the finest aristocratic rules—not like

your place, where you open the door and see the bed right away

first there is a sitting room, a sofa, and an armchair. Here

he relaxes before relaxing, and only

from here can one enter the boudoir

we make our way inside. Catherine II (the Russian empress) would have

seen a lot in her lifetime

a wild empress—or in our

case, a wild emperor. Those are exactly the

words that come to mind when

you see all this gold, velvet, canopies

but also the obligatory television

opposite the bed, so as not to miss important

news on Channel One (Russia’s main state TV channel)

it was right here, in Putin’s bedroom, near

this dresser, that this

photograph was taken. We’re not the only ones who are

so indiscreet. From the monarch’s bedchamber, one can

enter yet another, even more private

sitting room. Perhaps not even Sechin (Igor Sechin, a powerful Putin ally) has

been here. And there is another door: behind it, a dressing room, and

through that, one can reach the bathroom

where around the jacuzzi stand

marble columns. I don’t know how many

square meters you need for sleeping, but in

the palace near Gelendzhik, the master bedroom

was allotted 260 square meters, and it seems the time has come

to say: we have shown you

Putin’s palace, his bedroom, the casino, the hookahs

the disco, the toy cars

subscribe to our channel and

share this. But the thing is, in fact

his holdings on the Black Sea

are not limited to this palace

complex alone. Putin’s palace

is much bigger than what we have seen

and imagined

[music]

right here, in the village of Divnomorskoye, there is

186 hectares of land (about 460 acres), of which we see only 32

that are used for vineyards, but

what beautiful rows—like laser-guided berries

acquired them as his property in 2010.

And another 150 hectares (about 370 acres) around it are

leased by her. It’s a fairly well-known

winery. They have a website where you can

see these exact landscapes, only beautifully

shot for promotional brochures. There is also

a photo of the winery itself — a small

facility, but a very charming one. There it is,

right in front of us. Its area is

5,200 square meters (about 56,000 square feet), and the building is

entirely wooden. Inside, for the

wine as it matures, classical music plays

around the clock. It is believed that

this makes the wine better. There is also

a helipad, measuring

60 by 60 meters. Well, what winery

could possibly do without a helipad?

The property also has special communications, by the way. I’m not

sure why, but I can imagine it

could be very convenient when someone on

the other end of the secure line

urgently needs a bottle or two.

Flying away from the winery, we see a fence and a checkpoint.

A facility within a facility — as we have already seen

from the example of Putin’s palace — is standard

practice. It allows them to isolate

the winery’s service staff from

the dacha staff and protect secret

facilities from prying eyes.

We fly over the vineyards and realize

that yes, there is definitely something to hide.

A huge dacha — or “chateau,” as it is

called in the documents. The building has

an unusual shape, with a large number of

balconies and open terraces.

Its area is 2,400 square meters (about 25,800 square feet). Next to it is a spa

complex with an area of 3,200

square meters (about 34,400 square feet), with a large veranda.

There is also an artificial pond here, and on the pond

small birdhouses.

Why does Putin need another dacha just 10

kilometers (about 6 miles) from the enormous palace?

One of the project’s developers described it to us

like this: you sit with a glass of red wine and

admire the sea views at sunset.

Apparently, in nearby Praskoveevka,

where a special room was built into the rock

for sunset tastings, the sunsets somehow weren’t enough.

Together with the palace, these

vineyards were sold in 2011 to

Ponomarenko.

But then the story takes an interesting turn.

Just four months later, Ponomarenko himself

also sold them — and not to just anyone, but to

a representative of the Party of Growth,

business ombudsman Boris Titov.

For the next six years, he formally

owned these vineyards,

launched wine production, after which in

2018 both it and the vineyards returned

to Putin’s friends. Interestingly,

all the time Titov was

the owner, he treated journalists to his

wine and generally made an active show of the fact that

this was his new long-term project.

Legally, however, this estate continued

to be controlled by management companies already familiar to us,

and by Putin’s associates:

Nikolai Shamalov, Tatyana

Kuznetsova,

Inna Kolpakova, and Ivan Serdyuk.

So what about

Titov?

Well,

Titov also got something

out of taking part in this

cover operation. Just one year after

his Abrau-Durso became the owner of

Lazurnaya Yagoda, Vladimir Putin

appointed Boris Titov by decree

as business ombudsman. That position was even

created especially for him,

so that he could protect business — Putin-style. Which, in this case,

is understandable: businesspeople do love to complain and

look for protection, of course, of course.

To continue our story, we need to

take a close look at this bottle of wine.

It was bottled at this very winery. The

label says: “Exclusive wine,”

“Usadba Divnomorskoye, produced using

the best European technologies from

grapes

grown in the terroir near the city of

Gelendzhik, on rocky slopes

descending toward the Black Sea coast, in

the midst of a relict pine forest.”

But the producer listed here is not, oddly enough,

Lazurnaya Yagoda, but another company: LLC

Divnomorye.

And here we uncover yet another Putin-related

deal worth many, many billions of rubles.

The wine is actually produced not by

Lazurnaya Yagoda, but by this very company,

Divnomorye. It leases from Yagoda

a production building and a 2,000-square-meter (about 21,500-square-foot)

warehouse, grows grapes, and sells

it under the Usadba Divnomorskoye brand.

It’s a small business — around 150,000 bottles.

For comparison, Abrau-Durso produces

39 million bottles.

But despite that, in 2018

someone gave Divnomorye an interest-free

loan of 7.5 billion rubles

for a tiny winery. Someone

gratuitously provided an amount equal to two and a half annual

budgets of Gelendzhik. And these benefactors —

and at the same time the sole

owner of Divnomorye — was 42-year-old

Vladimir Kolbin. There is nothing remarkable

in this man’s biography: he works

as a hired director at the Gelendzhik

seaport. He is certainly not poor,

but he does not look like an oligarch. Here is his 330-square-meter

house in Gelendzhik, half a kilometer

from the sea. The house was bought a year earlier, in December

2019. You’ll agree, this is not the residence of a

billionaire. And here is his 200-square-meter

house in the Leningrad Region.

Even more modestly: where could he possibly have gotten it from?

Seven and a half billion.

It came from his father. Vladimir Kolbin is

the son of Pyotr Kolbin, that very childhood friend

of Putin, with whom he used to

go to village dances together, and who

later became one of the president’s financial proxies.

In 2018, the elder Kolbin

died, but it is obvious that his role

as the holder of Putin’s money passed

to his son by inheritance. And one more

interesting detail:

Divnomorskoye Estate wine from this

completely unknown small

winery, despite the total absence of

any serious advertising,

has a very special status. I

don’t think many of you have ever tasted it

or even seen it. That’s because you,

dear viewers, do not attend receptions at

the Kremlin. We found several photos

of menus from recent Kremlin receptions.

Victory Day, 2019: they served salads with

Kamchatka crab, scallops, and Chardonnay

from Divnomorskoye Estate. Or on

National Unity Day, looking at the menu, the very same

selection. Putin personally treats his

friends to this wine. Comrades from China, Xi

Jinping, and over this same Chardonnay

they discuss deeper integration with

Lukashenko. At first, winemaking was for

Putin simply one of those status symbols, a kind of

luxury hobby.

But the desire of those around him to curry favor, and

the unlimited amount of money, led

to the inevitable: the hobby spun

out of control. A second set of

vineyards was planted, and they turned out to be even

larger and even more expensive than the ones we

have just seen, and at their center

we discovered an entire wine super-factory.

The new vineyards are located on the

opposite side of the palace, 9

kilometers away, in the village of Krinitsa. In the 19th century,

a group of Narodnaya Volya activists (members of a 19th-century Russian revolutionary movement) came here, and

Tolstoyans (followers of Leo Tolstoy) along with them.

They organized a commune here, and in 18

86 they planted the first

vineyards. One hundred and thirty years later, replacing the

Tolstoyans came this gentleman

from St. Petersburg, Nikolai Yegorov, who

sat at the same desk as Putin in

college. His company, Axis Investments, in

2015 leased 140 hectares (1.4 square kilometers)

of land right here. And now look at these

disturbing images. Who is this man beaten nearly

to death? Perhaps the leader

of a terrorist cell who was

captured somewhere in the woods, a dangerous bandit?

No. This is a well-known Krasnodar environmental activist,

Suren Gazaryan’s colleague, Rudomakha.

The photograph was taken after he was beaten

by unidentified men. They broke

his skull and nose; he suffered chemical burns to the eyes and

a host of other injuries. It happened immediately

after he and his colleagues went on an

environmental inspection to Krinitsa.

The environmentalists went there to find out who

was illegally cutting down the forest there, and

they discovered a gigantic construction site, fences,

six guard posts, and a church in the Byzantine

style.

After the attack on Rudomakha, journalists at

Novaya Gazeta discovered that this

unusual church had been imported from

Greece, and this was done by the already many times

mentioned manager of the palace and

Putin’s other vineyards, the wife

of the head of a military unit,

Tatyana Arnoldovna Kuznetsova.

Journalists even sent an inquiry to Axis

demanding comment on what Kuznetsova

was doing there.

They were told directly that Kuznetsova was

the technical client for the entire project,

that is, the person who, on behalf of the property owner,

oversees the construction. Like a broken record,

I can only repeat for the third

time: these vineyards are in fact

part of Putin’s estate. The palace

was registered to one person,

the vineyards in Divnomorsk to another, and these ones

to a third.

But the same people manage all of it. Let’s

take a better look from the air at what is hidden

behind the high fences. What kind of another

construction project of the century is unfolding

right now? We are flying from the Black Sea to

yet another set of vineyards belonging to Vladimir

Vladimirovich Putin in the village of Krinitsa. The three

fields before you are only a small

part of them, just 18 hectares (0.18 square kilometers).

To the right there is an area twice as large. All

the land around the vineyards is also

Putin’s: 140 hectares (1.4 square kilometers). Up ahead there

we can see a huge construction site, and we fly

closer to look. Hundreds of workers here are building

a huge, ultra-modern winery.

Some of the builders live in these

prefabricated structures; others are brought in daily

by bus. The project costs

3 billion rubles a year.

An unbelievably expensive hobby, but most importantly,

at someone else’s expense.

We fly on. The building on the right is one of the

two

checkpoints. Its area is 830

square meters. The huge gates

allow any trucks to pass through this building.

A little to the right is

the administrative and service building.

We turn and see a 1,200-square-meter

energy center building. It is from this

building that the entire winery will

be supplied with electricity and thermal

energy. And now we are directly above

the garage for agricultural machinery,

1,150 square meters. We shift slightly and turn above

the grounds, now fully landscaped, and

we can see the winery itself. According to the documents, its

area is 13,700 square meters (about 147,500 square feet), which is

only 4,000 square meters less than Putin's

palace.

The new wine complex, although it is not yet

finished, already has an official name:

the Old Provence Wine Estate.

If at the winery in Divnomorskoye, for

Putin's wine, recorded classical music plays around the clock,

then here

there is enough room for an entire

symphony orchestra—the envy of

the finest Tuscan wineries. Impressive,

isn't it? But I'm about to impress you even

more. We found a company that

supplies equipment for

this winery, and in its customs

declarations it stated that the items

it was importing from abroad

were intended for the winery

in Krinitsa. In total, we found 58 declarations.

That is just a drop in the ocean of purchases made during

the construction of the winery, but even they are staggering

to the core.

A vase made of tempered glass,

cone-shaped: 30,000 euros, or about 2

million rubles.

A suspended chandelier with a system of

decorative leaves: 2.7 million rubles.

A fabric sofa with 20 cushions: more than 3

million rubles. A coffee table with

a molten-metal finish: 4.3

million rubles—a coffee table priced like

a two-room apartment in Balashikha (a suburb of Moscow).

"I am the richest man not only in

Europe, but in the world." And a few more

special items—not as expensive, but

perfectly illustrating the world Putin

lives in: an Italian toilet brush for

700 euros, or 62,000 rubles, and

a toilet paper holder for 1,038

euros,

or 92,000 rubles. 150,000 rubles for a brush

and a toilet paper holder for just

one bathroom—and there are, of course,

dozens of them. And this is not a residence, not a dacha (country house),

this is a winery. Putin will not live here; he

will just drop by from time to time, walk among

the vineyards, praise the terroir,

and say what a blessing it all is. But just in

case, in the bathroom he will be greeted by

a brush and paper holder worth 150,000

rubles.

The annual pension of the average Russian

pensioner—in a single one of Putin's bathrooms, which

he may never even use. "We

will be able to increase old-age pensions each year

for non-working pensioners

by an average of 1,000 rubles." But the wine estate does not

end there. The company Axis Investments

has a twin company,

Apex Yug, and through it we find another 150

hectares of vineyards 2 kilometers

west of Divnomorskoye. So

the total area of Putin's holdings

has grown to 530 hectares. And before we

go too far from Krinitsa, this

plot that we saw during our

flyover is leased by a company

called Southern Citadel, and this too is

part of Putin's Black Sea empire.

Officially, this company is engaged in

breeding oysters and mussels.

Why they lease this small

plot in Krinitsa with utility buildings, we

do not understand. But we do understand why they

lease this enormous marine

area—and this one, and this one. These waters

were transferred to the company on the condition

that it would cultivate oysters and mussels there. But not

a single mollusk, judging by its annual

report, ever made it to market.

But under the pretext of this business, they can

forbid people from approaching the palace by

water. And merely for mentioning this

oyster farm, oligarch Mikhail

Prokhorov once fired

the management of his media outlet

RBC.

[music]

So, we have seen the enormous bribe

that was given to Putin. Now all that remains

is to figure out who exactly

paid for it

and how our president-for-life

registers his secret assets. We have

thousands of bank transfers, contracts,

powers of attorney, registration

documents, and testimony from those who worked on this

construction site. That is more than

enough for us to, first, prove that this

palace and these vineyards are one

single legal and financial system;

the same people pay for everything; and second,

to demonstrate how

Putin's common fund works: people chip in,

the money goes through special companies,

gets mixed together, and is then spent on

the national leader's amusements. We will

see how it works. Let's start with who it

belongs to—

or rather, in whose name it is registered. We should give

credit where it's due: considering that among the public this

place is known as nothing other than Putin's Palace,

the level of secrecy is

impressive. Here is the winery in

Divnomorskoye; here are the vineyards in Krinitsa;

here is another vineyard not far from

Divnomorskoye; the oysters; and here is the palace. All of them

are registered to specially created

joint-stock companies in which

the trail of money ends. These joint-stock

companies conceal their owners, and all

five companies, formally unrelated to one another,

chose the same

registrar: Asur Center for Management and

Registration in St. Petersburg. This company

a specially created pocket

registrar controlled

by Putin's friend Kovalchuk; there, in one

place, information is kept about the real

shareholders of all our dealership companies

as well as all the other known

assets of Kovalchuk, Bank Rossiya,

the National Media Group, and so on.

This Kovalchuk registrar was created

specifically so that it would be impossible

to say exactly who owns what.

So we have to prove it by other

means: through accounting statements, through

annual reports, through powers of attorney, and

so on. Let's unfold our scheme.

The vineyards: we have already established that

Divnomorye belongs to Kolbin, while Lazurnaya

Yagoda, which owns the vineyards and

the château,

belongs to the non-profit partnership

Development of Agrarian Initiatives. This is

a special fund linked below.

And to that same circle, and to our old

acquaintance Gennady Timchenko — or rather, not

ours, but Putin's old acquaintance from

the 1990s. Axis and Apex, together with their toilet

brushes... Putin and Egorov in 2019

sold them 300 hectares of land

and an almost fully built super-factory

and established vineyards.

Agrarian Initiatives paid the previous

owner, Egorov, only 60

million rubles. Here we need to pause briefly

and explain the point

of the scheme involving non-profit partnerships. I

hope you all remember our film *He Is Not Dimon to You*

about Medvedev — he also

had all his secret dachas registered

to non-profit foundations.

Putin uses the same scheme, only

on a much larger scale. The point is that

it is easiest to transfer money into such funds.

Since they are non-commercial, that means

there is no need to pay taxes. In other words,

it is effectively a wallet — or rather, a chest

for collecting funds — and they do not even

pretend to carry out any

activity. Let's take a look.

Here is the annual reporting that non-profit organizations

are required to submit to the Ministry of Justice.

This is the report of Kolbin's, shall we say, Chertkovsky

Development of Agrarian Initiatives. As you can see,

judging by these figures, their agrarian

initiatives are so-so — more precisely, they do not exist.

But if you open the annual

financial statements, the picture

is completely different: tens of billions

of rubles in the accounts, and as we can see, they

come in as donations and transfers.

The fund receives not only money as donations,

but also company shares; rights

of claim under loan agreements are assigned to it. In the fund's accounts

so much money has accumulated that

interest on deposits alone brings in 650

million rubles a year. And Timchenko and

Kolbin have another similar

fund financing these very same

projects: the Fund for the Development of the Market for Effective

Investments. It is the same story there.

In the accounts of an unknown outfit with

one staff employee, there are 21 billion

rubles. We are left with

the oysters and the palace. According to the official version, in

both cases the owner is Ponomarenko.

The last time the palace was re-registered was in

2017. At that time, the offshore Savoyan was replaced

by the Russian joint-stock company Binom.

The old owner, the offshore, was

represented by proxy by a certain Natalia

Tikhomirova, and the new owner was also

represented by Natalia Tikhomirova. She is also

the director of Binom and the director of the oyster

operation Southern Citadel as well.

Amazing — it is as if they are selling

to themselves. There is a lot that is surprising about joint-stock company Binom

in general. For example, how

do you imagine a company that

owns the most expensive residence in the world?

A company that, however illegally,

however fraudulently, nevertheless owns

the presidential palace? I am willing to bet that

it is not like this.

We are in St. Petersburg, in an ordinary residential

district somewhere not far from the edge of the city.

It is right here, in a very modest

business center, that the company rents space.

Binom is located right

here.

It is right here, behind this window, that

tens of billions of rubles are moving around. Here the company

rents less than ten

square meters. That is not enough even for

one employee. If the real

owner is being hidden from us, then we can at least

look at who represents his

interests at shareholders' meetings.

That is, the key person at Binom, whose

signature is used to make all

decisions, is a certain Alexander

Samosyuk. We can also study

the powers of attorney, that is, understand which lawyers

work for Binom and who can

sign documents. We get a few more

names.

From this, we compiled a list of five

people managing the company Binom:

director Tikhomirova, the shareholder's representatives,

and three lawyers. Do you know what all of them

have in common?

They are all full-time employees of another company,

Akcept, owned by Mikhail Lvovich Shelomov.

So who is this new character who

looks like the most important figure in the palace ownership scheme?

A clue can be found right on

Vladimir Putin's official website: the mother

of Vladimir Putin, Maria Ivanovna Shelomova,

was a very gentle, kind

person. Putin's mother, Maria Ivanovna,

He had a full brother, Ivan Ivanovich.

And Mikhail Shelomov is his grandson, that is,

Putin's first cousin once removed, Mikhail.

Shelomov was born in 1968. In the late 1980s,

and in the 1990s he worked on construction sites.

Then he got a job as a photographer at a photo studio.

Shelomov's career was not going well.

So badly, in fact, that he was literally placed

into whatever job they could find for him through connections.

In 2002, they asked for Shelomov to be placed

in the state shipping company

Sovcomflot.

Let's hear from the person who

personally hired him and

can tell us about it. You were the head of Sovcomflot,

Yes, I was.

From 2001 to 2004. And Shelomov

worked at Sovcomflot, so you

must have hired him? Yes, basically I did hire him.

I hired him.

Sometime, I think, around the turn of 2001 and 2002.

I don't remember exactly now, but yes.

Tell us, because he is such a

completely remarkable person.

How did he end up with you at all?

Well, given the nature of my work,

I often dealt with personnel matters.

That is, practically every member of the board of

directors, one way or another, lobbied for

someone.

That included Igor Ivanovich

Sechin. We were not especially close,

but when we met, at some point he asked me

to find a job for someone in

St. Petersburg. So I asked: was he deck crew

or engine-room crew, so I would know where to send him?

He said, "You'll figure it out yourself," and handed me

a folder with his details.

I looked through the folder,

skimmed it, and thought, all right,

I'll pass it on to the director of our

St. Petersburg office.

Let him meet with him, talk to him,

see what kind of person he is. He might even

turn him down if it's not his profile. So he

met with him, spoke to him, and then at some point

I received

or rather, I got a call from Sechin. At the time I was somehow

overseeing ship construction, and we were still building vessels,

including tankers at Korean shipyards, so he

was used in line with his own, so to speak,

professional skills in photography.

That is, he was simply documenting

the shipbuilding process here and there,

plus doing various

odd jobs in the office, helping out where needed.

That was basically what he did.

Later I myself thought I should

ask Mikhail why there was suddenly

so much interest in his person: first a minister

personally asks me about him, then someone else

asks me to take care of Shelomov.

I asked Mikhail, just so I would know

for the future how to respond to such initiatives.

And I said, tell me a little about yourself:

who are you?

But only then, in great secrecy,

he said that he was one of Putin's closest relatives.

And at the same time, in the very

early 2000s, during

Putin's first presidential term, the very modestly

living Shelomov

began to grow fabulously rich. It was to that very

company,

Accept, that stakes were assigned in Putin's pet bank, Bank Rossiya,

and in Russia's largest

insurance company, SOGAZ.

Even back then, that was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Shelomov should have been considered one of

the richest people in the country, but all that time

he continued to work as an ordinary salaried

employee at Sovcomflot, going to the office every day.

He lived in a modest townhouse on the outskirts of

St. Petersburg, and he still lives there.

Because that wealth does not belong to him.

It is simply registered in his name—what Putin

stole or received as bribes. Remember,

before New Year's there was a news story:

a Kyrgyz boy wrote a letter to Putin

as if to Ded Moroz (the Russian New Year gift-giver, similar to Santa Claus) and asked for

as a gift

Gazprom shares. Putin noticed the letter,

and they turned it into a whole media event.

Everyone had a cute little laugh about it.

But unfortunately, instead of shares, the boy was given

a Tula pryanik (traditional Russian gingerbread) and a portrait of President

Putin.

[music]

videos

[music]

Tula gingerbread, a thermal mug—gifts from

the presidential administration were delivered through

Ded Moroz, along with a portrait autographed by

Vladimir Putin and wishes to study well.

But he could, in principle, have given him a share or two.

After all, Putin's family has plenty of those shares.

We discovered that

Putin's nephew Shelomov

through that same company, Accept, is the owner of

39 million Gazprom shares.

Gazprom shares.

That is about 0.2% of the entire

state corporation, and the market value of those

shares exceeds 8 billion rubles.

And from this alone, Shelomov earns

more than half a billion rubles a year.

For example, in 2018 he received from

the "national treasure"

650 million rubles—and not just Tula gingerbread, I hope.

I don't want to be a millionaire.

[music]

Having studied 15 years of this property's history, we

understand that whose name the palace is registered under

does not matter at all. There have been all sorts of

owners. What matters is who manages this

palace. If earlier, before

2017, these were people connected with

FSO (Russia's Federal Protective Service).

And the people from the Presidential Property Management Department now...

the palace is managed by a company belonging to the cousin

of Putin's close blood relative,

a family member in whose name, for years,

Putin's most secret assets have been registered

assets.

[music]

We've now reached the most interesting

part.

As we walk at night, remember where we started:

the main rule of Putin's corruption

is to keep money with people you've known for a long time.

We analyzed more than 100,000

bank transfers involving companies and individuals

involved in the scheme financing the palace,

and now we're ready to reveal the names

of Putin's main financial bagmen throughout

this entire video.

While talking about Putin, I've mentioned a whole lot of

completely different people who seemingly have nothing

connecting them, but now you'll understand

why they're all here. They all came together

on the Black Sea coast to deliver

the biggest bribe in the world. Here are our

companies from the familiar entity in whose name

the vineyards and the palace are registered. Let's start with

the vineyards and the château in Divnomorskoye, the company

AO Divnomorye, which produces the wine

Usadba Divnomorskoye. More than 8

billion rubles were provided by Vladimir Kolbin,

the son of Vladimir Putin's childhood friend Pyotr

Kolbin, to the company Lazurnaya Yagoda, which

owns the vineyards and the château itself.

The largest amount of money came from the Russian company

Ora Tron: more than 2 billion rubles.

Ora Tron belongs to the St. Petersburg businessman

Alexander Plekhov. He is a very

interesting and very far from accidental figure.

Remember the billions of dollars that

were found in the accounts of Putin's childhood friend,

the cellist Roldugin? That was

the investigation into the Panama Papers.

And all that money, supposedly earned for his work, he

spent on buying musical

instruments abroad and bringing them to

Russia. For some reason, those billions

were being transferred by state companies and oligarchs.

He apparently left it all to others and didn't

really have much idea what he owned. In other words,

what was found then were literally Putin's personal

billions, his offshore wallets.

So, Alexander Plekhov was the manager

of these offshore companies by power of attorney, and another

offshore company that oligarchs were paying into,

including Mordashov and Rotenberg, was actually registered

in Plekhov's own name. Plekhov's Ora

Tron, by the way, gave money not only to

Lazurnaya Yagoda, but also to Divnomorye and Yuzhnaya

Citadel, which was supposed to breed

oysters and mussels.

In St. Petersburg, Plekhov runs his business with

another of Putin's friends and his neighbor at the dacha (country house),

Yury Kovalchuk. Kovalchuk

appears in our chart together with a whole

cloud of offshore companies — an entire web of firms

that he controls and uses to move

money back and forth. These offshore companies

are used to finance the personal

assets of the Kovalchuk brothers, such as a house in

Gelendzhik, property in Leningrad Region, planes and

helicopters, and many other assets

attributed both to Kovalchuk and

to Putin himself. One offshore company that stands out here is

Forths, which also provided money to

Divnomorye

and to the oyster business, but the most — 1.5

billion rubles — went to Lazurnaya Yagoda. It also

appeared in the Panama Papers; through it,

through it

Roldugin's companies funneled money from

offshore accounts back into Russia, into the Russian

bank account of this company.

But that's not all the money on which

Lazurnaya Yagoda survives and grows grapes.

It is also maintained by the state

corporation Rosneft, headed by Putin's chief

protégé, who once, back in the days of

the St. Petersburg mayor's office, carried Putin's

briefcase and is now, for some reason, considered

the great and terrible Igor Ivanovich Sechin.

A lease agreement was signed between Lazurnaya Yagoda and a

Rosneft subsidiary.

Under it, the state corporation

pays the winery 40 million rubles per

month to lease who-knows-what from

Lazurnaya Yagoda. It simply has nothing that

could possibly be worth that kind of money for that kind of

sum. For that amount, right now, you could rent office space

covering 14,000 square meters

— several top floors of a skyscraper in

Moscow City. And through these kind of

"efficient" lease payments,

Lazurnaya Yagoda

received from the state and Rosneft

almost 2 billion rubles. Let's pause here,

because this is the most important

part of the scheme, and it needs to be fully understood.

There are companies belonging to two billionaires,

Timchenko

and Kolbin. They themselves have already put so much money into these companies

that they can't even spend it all,

so they just place it on deposit

in the bank — and still more money keeps being thrown in

by billionaire Kovalchuk, and

the cellist Roldugin,

and the state company Rosneft.

Why? Because what we have before us is that very

legendary Putin slush fund.

The kind you read about in books about thieves-in-law (high-ranking criminal bosses in the post-Soviet underworld)

— the same thing exists in the Kremlin too.

Putin's businessmen pay tribute to their

boss,

and he spends the money however he sees fit.

Next, there are other vineyards and a winery in

Krinitsa. They are being built with money from several

people. First of all, Putin's

business partner from the 1990s, Gennady Timchenko.

He provided 33 billion rubles, and another 3...

...billion. Putin's deskmate,

Nikolai Yegorov.

I've already mentioned him many times in this

video, and you might get the impression that

Yegorov is some major oligarch. No,

Yegorov is a lawyer; he is a partner at a law

firm. Considering that Yegorov's entire fortune

is estimated at 5 billion

rubles, it turns out that more than half

of everything he earned over his lifetime was spent on

the winery in Krinitsa, and then he even sold

it for 50 million rubles. But besides the money

for the vineyard that Yegorov personally put in,

he didn't stop there. Remember the story about

Putin's university friends? There were

this same Yegorov, plus Ilgam Ragimov

and Viktor Khmarin. So, in

2015, the three of them created a company in St. Petersburg called

Investment Solutions, and that company also

issued another 2 billion rubles in loans for the super-

winery in Krinitsa. But that wasn't the biggest

expense of Putin's former classmates' companies. In

2019, Investment

Solutions gave 2.5 billion

rubles to Binom, the palace owner, and then

in 2020 another 2.6 billion—for a total of 5

billion rubles. Alas,

even that money was not enough for the reconstruction

and the new underground hockey complex. Almost

as much again—4.3 billion rubles—

was received by Binom from our first

hero today,

Putin's colleague from the Dresden KGB office,

Nikolai Tokarev. More precisely, not from

Tokarev himself, but from the state-owned company

Transneft,

which he heads. The same scheme as with

Rosneft and Lazurnaya Yagoda: fictitious

rent, but on a much larger scale.

A Transneft subsidiary transfers

to the account of the palace in Praskoveyevka 120

million rubles a month.

120 million. Since Transneft

is, after all, a fully state-owned

company, they are forced to justify

why they are funneling such enormous sums

into renting an amphitheater in the village of

Praskoveyevka. So once a year

the company's head, Nikolai Tokarev, comes here

to be photographed and pretend

that he is holding some kind of work

meetings here. But these meetings take place

not in the reading room and not in the music

salon,

but here, in a specially built compound

for the staff. Or here, Tokarev

is filmed on the helipad. You can hear him say:

"non-trivial other approaches... organization

of work... which is exactly what we are doing... many

processes had to be run in parallel..."

He came, posed for the camera,

paid the money, and left. In total, from

Transneft structures, to the account of the

company that owns the palace, there came 4

billion 300 million rubles over three

years. Thus, the state-owned

Transneft is one of the largest

sponsors of the construction of Putin's

palace. In just the last three years,

by the most conservative estimates alone,

and based on very incomplete data that we have

at our disposal, into the accounts of the palace and

the vineyards there have flowed 35 billion

rubles. This is money that is being spent right

now on reconstruction, on the construction

of a winery,

and on the day-to-day upkeep of this

enormous estate. And that is in addition to

the $1 billion that had already been

invested in construction by 2017. Thus,

if you ask, so how much does

Putin's palace near

Gelendzhik ultimately cost, answering that question

won't be easy, because such

facilities, with tunnels carved into

the rock and underground hockey rinks,

simply are not sold. But we can

estimate the minimum cost:

how much money has been spent on it in total.

Already 100 bill...

rubles. That is why we call this the

largest bribe in the world. Putin's friends,

having received from him the right to steal in

Russia whatever they want,

have repaid him in many ways, but in

particular they chipped in, collected 100

billion rubles, and built their

boss a palace with that money. Look once again

at this scheme. You have to admit, it looks

rather complicated even for such a not-so-simple

undertaking as the secret construction of the

most expensive palace in the world, with vineyards.

But what if I told you that this is only

a small part of what actually exists?

In reality, you could add to the scheme

several dozen more companies and offshore entities

that pay for other secret assets of

Putin and his family,

using the very same money from the very same

people. After all, the needs of our

modest president are by no means

limited to the Black Sea

palace alone. And what about the relatives? You don't

expect them to live like ordinary

people on a salary, do you? Everyone

needs housing, everyone needs a plane,

everyone needs a yacht. All of this has to

be paid for, which means a financial

scheme is needed,

and people to fill that scheme with money.

This common fund, the basics of which I have described to you,

is used by Putin in order to

cover the expenses of family members. The

bigger the family, the bigger the expenses, and Putin,

as befits a man

who imagines himself a monarch, has a rather

rich and eventful private life. Quite

recently...

The publication Proekt told us

a remarkable story from the life of this

deeply religious man, a guardian of

millennia-old conservative values.

It turns out that in St. Petersburg there lives

a woman named Svetlana Krivonogikh.

When she was just an attractive

young woman, she has now turned into

an incredibly wealthy woman, a shareholder in

Bank Rossiya, and no one can understand how

Krivonogikh, who once worked as

a cleaner, came into such good fortune.

And here is that good fortune:

and

in

Krivonogikh was introduced to Putin in the late

1990s, and in 2003, according to Proekt,

she gave birth to his daughter, Elizaveta.

[music]

A few months after that, she

became the owner of a 450-square-meter

apartment, having received it

from Kovalchuk and other acquaintances of Putin

from the Ozero dacha cooperative. Then there were

more apartments,

again from Putin's old friends.

For example, this 200-square-meter one, 300 meters

from the Hermitage, and it went to

Krivonogikh from Gennady Timchenko, whom

the newspaper Kommersant called in 2005

a friend of Putin, listed right after

Kovalchuk. After Krivonogikh

gave birth to Putin's child, a whole range of assets was registered in her name,

including 3 percent

of Bank Rossiya shares, and these

assets are financed

through exactly the same scheme we have already

written to you about.

For example, money from Accept goes to her

companies Ozon and Pulse. Ozon is the Igora resort

in the Leningrad region,

and Pulse is Svetlana's 40-meter yacht.

The offshore company Forst, known to us as

having provided money for the vineyards in

Divnomorskoye, also issued loans to

another Krivonogikh company, Profit, and this

company owns the Leningrad Center in

Tauride Garden in St. Petersburg. So we

confirm Proekt's investigation:

a random woman could not be part of this

scheme.

This is yet another example of how Putin's

friends rob the entire country and, as a token of

gratitude, support Putin's

mistress and her child. Putin's private life

concerns only him, and if he wants

he can have 20 families for all we care. What we

are drawing attention to is something else:

his passionate relationships are paid for

with bribes and corruption. But is that really

normal in a country with 20 million people living in poverty?

He buys a yacht for his mistress—well,

never mind the yacht. Krivonogikh's yacht and apartments

look like mere trifles compared with

the upkeep of the famous gymnast and

the woman with the most enigmatic

status in Russia, Alina Kabaeva.

Well, it will not be surprising if I say

that I like them all. In 2008, an entire newspaper,

Moskovsky Korrespondent,

was shut down because it published an article about

Putin's relationship with Kabaeva. This is a forbidden

topic for everyone, but the truth does not

change because of that: billions in stolen money are spent on supporting another of Putin's women.

Billions in stolen money are spent on her upkeep.

We can simply see from the documents that Alina

Kabaeva is inseparable from our scheme. From

Gennady Timchenko, Alina Kabaeva's grandmother

received a 200-square-meter apartment in

St. Petersburg.

Four days earlier, another figure in

our scheme—or rather, his father at the time—

signed over to that same grandmother two

neighboring apartments on Arbat, 300 square meters

each. Businessman Grigory Baevsky,

who can be called just as much a

nominee for the Rotenbergs as Ponomarenko,

in August 2013 transferred to Kabaeva's grandmother

half a hectare of land on Rublyovka (an elite suburban area near Moscow)

and two houses on it, measuring 1,400 and 1,700 square meters,

and five years later the neighboring plot was bought