Sobyanin’s deputy stole billions. And the election too.

Hey, could you powder me a little bit,

make it look cinematic? With my face, or

without my face, however you want.

[music]

And I open the door and walk in. These were

basically just pickup shots.

[music]

I kind of do this, sort of like this

kind of thing. This investigation was supposed to be

presented to you by Alexei Navalny, but

he is serving another 30-day jail term. Over

the past year, he has already spent 90 days behind bars.

That is roughly every fourth day of

the year. Almost all the candidates for

deputy are in jail. Gudkov is in jail, Galyamina is in jail,

Zhdanov is in jail, Yashin is in jail, and very, very many

activists are in jail too. Why are the authorities

doing this? It is very simple. They think

that if they lock up all the

activists, all the candidates, then people

will stop coming out to protests; shut down

half of the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation), and people will stop

putting out investigations, and the regional

campaign offices will close.

But that has never been the case, and it never will be.

So today, instead of Alexei, here we are:

Kira Yarmysh,

Ruslan Shaveddinov

and Georgy Alburov. Today, together, we will

tell you about the corrupt official who

personally bears responsibility for the

political crisis that is now

unfolding in our country. Many of you have probably

spent the last few weeks

feeling somewhat bewildered.

For decades, elections to the Moscow City Duma

had interested no one,

and suddenly they have become the biggest political

event of the year. Thousands of people at

unauthorized rallies, hunger strikes,

beatings of protesters. The biggest rally since

2012 at Sakharovo (a Moscow protest venue named after Andrei Sakharov).

What is happening?

And the most common question right now is: why not

let them run? Why have City Hall, Sobyanin,

and the election commission sunk their teeth so deeply into this Moscow City Duma race?

Why not allow a mere 3, 5, or 10

candidates? Even if all of them get elected,

nothing phenomenal will happen. Instead of

United Russia having 84% of the seats, it will have 70%.

But City Hall is going to absurd extremes, and

the logic behind it seems completely unclear.

But we have the answer to that question. It is

very simple and obvious. Within the walls of

the city duma, the mayor's office, and

the institutions under its control, every day

crimes are committed—serious

crimes, multibillion-ruble embezzlement.

This is about the personal enrichment of the highest-ranking

Moscow officials and the many-year prison terms

they could face

for it.

This is happening right now. The statutes

of limitations have not expired and will not expire for a long time.

They steal a lot, and crudely. And the only

function of the Moscow City Duma is to help

carry out these criminal schemes,

sign the paperwork, figure out how to

dress up kickbacks, and pave the way with decrees and

decisions so that the machine keeps

running and bringing in money. In theory,

the city parliament is the place where

people elected by Muscovites and independent

of the Moscow government should

oversee that government and

monitor what it does, how

our money is spent, how

our property is managed, and whether the interests of

city residents are being respected.

In practice, everything works

the opposite way. No one cares about the interests of Muscovites.

United Russia deputies,

like obedient lapdogs, carry out

Sobyanin's every whim. They meekly

nod along and help Sergei Semyonovich and

City Hall steal more and more. And

that is exactly why even one truly

independent deputy, right at the very first

session, could simply blow this entire

corrupt system to hell.

One deputy can ask a question,

file a complaint, go on

television. But he is a deputy, and that is it—

it is the end of everything. Just one such

independent deputy poses

a colossal threat of real criminal

cases, the loss of corrupt revenue streams,

the loss of personal property and positions. And

City Hall is terrified of this. Every

day, you can be sure, every day

Moscow ministers and other officials

go to sleep and wake up in fear. What if

I am the next Ulyukayev, Khoroshavin,

or Colonel Zakharchenko? What if

tomorrow at 5:00 a.m. they break into my place

with a search warrant and find my shoeboxes

stuffed with cash?

That fear, plus the desire to protect

what they have stolen, is what drives this whole

United Russia gang. And among them there is

this woman. She is more afraid than anyone else.

How many of you know who she is? I suspect

not many, and that alone should already

raise alarm bells. This is Natalia Alexeevna

Sergunina. She is the First Deputy Mayor

of Moscow. That makes her, quite

officially, the second most important and

influential person in Moscow.

In fact, she may even be the first.

Mayor Sobyanin, as you can see, is more interested in

washing facades and going fishing. Sergunina, meanwhile,

is effectively the capital's top administrator.

And at the same time, ironically, she is also

the poorest official in Moscow City Hall.

Judging by her official disclosure, she lives

on nothing but her salary, and in her entire life

has earned only enough for a modest three-room apartment in

southwestern Moscow.

But Sergunina is not only ostentatiously

disinterested in money, she is also modest. She

almost never gives interviews, and her most

daring public appearance was

going on the cooking show *Smak* with Ivan Urgant,

where she cooked lazy dumplings and

spent most of the time looking embarrassed.

But you cannot privatize the walls of the old Kremlin

based on Natalya

Sergunina’s personal experience. Friends,

today we are going to make lazy

dumplings.

Do you bring anything with you to

work?

Just a kilogram of candy, otherwise

nothing else.

Listen, I actually have, um, a question

about the ownership of a certain non-residential

property.

And right there on the Moscow City Duma website, in black and

white, it says that she is responsible for all

elections at every level in Moscow.

So she is the one who stole these elections

from us. They are all guilty too, but

this unremarkable woman in particular

is personally responsible for what is happening

in the country right now. And that is not surprising,

because she is not just carrying out someone else’s

interests. The fight against independent

candidates for the Moscow City Duma is her

personal war. What is at stake is literally

everything she has. Well, more precisely, not

hers, but her family’s. Because it was in the names of

her parents, her sister, and her sister’s husband that she

registered assets worth billions in

Russia and abroad. She runs

clever schemes while pretending to be

the poor relation.

She is terribly afraid that some

independent candidate who gets into the

city duma will accidentally find out about

the corruption scheme she has been

running for years, and about how she

and her family enriched themselves. Thousands

of square meters of real estate, luxury

cars, hotels, restaurants, businesses

in Europe. And, of course, real estate

there as well.

Let’s relieve Natalya Sergunina of

that fear and talk about it right

now. And we will do it in the best

possible way: by going straight to

the scene of the crime.

[music]

Hey

[music]

[music]

How much Moscow has improved under Sergei

Semyonovich.

You are probably asking: "Why are we

always walking? Where are you taking us?" I

could take you to a million places and

calmly say: "This is the scene

of the crime," and I would be absolutely right,

because in Moscow, everything you see

around you has been stolen." Let me explain.

Our heroine today, Natalya

Sergunina, headed Moscow’s

property and land complex for nine years.

In other words, she effectively controlled

city property. Thousands of buildings

in Moscow belong to the city itself, that is,

effectively, to you and me. And

the Moscow city government is supposed to

manage them, lease them out, or

theoretically sell them at a profit. Until

last year, all of this was done under

Natalya Sergunina’s leadership.

Moscow owns a huge

number of properties, from architectural

landmarks to ordinary apartments and office

buildings. And sometimes the city authorities

decide to sell one property or another,

because that is more выгодно than

maintaining it. That is normal. There is nothing wrong

with that. And then a complex

mechanism begins. The Moscow city government issues

a decree saying that this or that building is being

sold. Officials assess it,

put it up for auction, and place

notices. Every few weeks, new

lists appear in magazines like these.

A potential buyer flips through

the magazine, finds a suitable building, and

puts down a deposit. Then they take part

in the auction. Whoever bids the most gets the

building. Moscow City Hall takes the money from

the buyer and puts it into the city

budget.

[music]

Let’s see how all this works.

Let’s test the mechanism in practice. I just so happen to have with

me, purely by chance,

an issue of *Moscow Auctions* from June

2016. We open it and look for

the lot: 15 Serebryanichesky Lane. This

building here. It is a historic building from the early 20th

century. Until 2016, it was

owned by the city, and then

the officials responsible for city property,

that is, Sergunina and her subordinates,

decided to sell this building. We take our

magazine and open it again.

The winner of the auction, that is, the buyer,

was Mercury LLC. The price offered

by the winner was 86 million rubles. It is rather odd,

of course, that a 1,300 sq. m building in

the city center was sold for the price of a luxury

three-room apartment. But never mind. Although this building,

of course, is historically important

and part of the cultural heritage. In the last century,

it housed a poorhouse, and later

the Simonovsky Court was located here, the very one

that a couple of days ago sent

Navalny to another 30 days of detention.

The court, of course, moved out long ago, and now

the building houses a hotel called

Kustos.

[music]

I wave this around in front of you so often

— this *Moscow Auctions* journal — that

any attentive viewer has probably noticed by now.

Next to the entry about Mercury purchasing

the building we were just at,

there are two more entries about the very same

Mercury. Let’s go to those

addresses and see what’s going on there.

The next address is 2 Tverskaya Zastava.

2.

We’re standing in the square in front of

Belorussky Station. Every day, tens of thousands

of people arrive here. And the first thing

tourists see when they step off their

Aeroexpress airport train is this three-story

building.

Mercury LLC bought this building from

the Moscow city government for 93.5 million rubles. That

works out to roughly

60,000 rubles per square meter. That’s about

what a square meter costs, for example, in

Syktyvkar. And let me remind you that we are

in one of the busiest places not only in

Moscow, but probably in all of

Russia. Let’s get a little closer and

we’ll see a familiar sign: Custos Hotel

Tverskaya.

That explains it. Let’s move on. Yeah,

it’s stuck.

[music]

The third address from my journal is Sadovaya

Samotechnaya, building 20. Another historic

building. Though there’s a bit of renovation

going on here right now. Let’s take a closer look.

Client: Mercury LLC. In this building it owns

a 610 sq. m. section. And guess

what’s located here. That’s right,

the Custos Hotel.

In all three cases, it’s important to note

the following: there were no real tenders or auctions

at all. Let’s take a careful look

at the minimum price the mayor’s office

asked for and the amount it ultimately

received. In every case, the purchase price

differs from the mayor’s minimum asking price

by exactly 466,150

rubles — not one ruble more, not one ruble less.

Why those exact figures? I have no idea.

Some kind of number magic. Of course, I wasn’t

just wandering around the city, filming myself in front of

hotels and talking about some

murky auctions and a peculiar company for no reason.

You probably already understand where I’m

going with this. So let’s not drag this out

any longer — I’ll explain everything now.

All three of these buildings, which belonged to

the city of Moscow, were sold for next to nothing by official Sergunina

to her own family. Not to friends, not to

fronts, not to acquaintances, but directly

to her closest relatives.

And the way she did it was almost

the perfect crime. The scheme was so

carefully planned and organized

that uncovering it would have been practically

impossible, if not for a chance

set of circumstances.

But we managed to crack it. Let us

show you how. So, here we have

Natalya Sergunina, and here

Irina Sergunina. Meet

Irina, our official’s younger sister.

An interior designer, a creative type.

She has no serious business interests of her own.

Sergunina’s sister’s married surname is

Safanieva. She is married to Lazar

Telmitovich Safaniev. We’ll need him

in our diagram too.

A few words about Lazar. He is the founder

of a bankrupt insurance company, and now

a co-owner of the venture fund GVA,

which invests in tech

startups. I’d tell you which ones, but

the “our companies” section on their website is empty.

But the “we” section is interesting. It includes

former head of the Presidential Administration

Voloshin, and an adviser to Natalya Sergunina at

City Hall. Further searching for any

official traces of Mr. Safaniev’s

existence produced no results.

Aside from the fund, only a couple of long-defunct companies

are registered in his name,

companies that dealt with very important things

like creating a messaging app for

government officials. Now let’s add what

Ruslan was talking about during

the walk. Here is the Department of City

Property and the entire property-and-land

complex that Sergunina headed until

recently. Here are the buildings we visited

today — three of them.

Next, we draw Mercury LLC, which bought these

buildings at auction at prices more fitting for

Syktyvkar real estate. And now

let’s add information from the official

corporate registries. Mercury LLC

is owned by the Cypriot offshore company Floristar.

Well, of course — who else but a Cypriot

offshore company would be buying up Moscow mansions?

That Cypriot offshore company, in turn,

is owned by two more offshore companies from

the British Virgin Islands. This one

is worth remembering: Appington

International Limited.

Normally, a BVI offshore company is basically a dead end.

Investigation over. It’s one of the worst

jurisdictions for identifying owners —

basically impossible. But not today.

Let’s take a closer look at

Sergunina’s sister’s husband, Lazar. If

you google photos of him, you’ll mostly

find him at various Jewish

religious events. Here he is together

with Russia’s Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar

donating Torah scrolls to the Jewish community of Oryol

(a city in Russia). Look at the backdrop. What

does it say? “Ceremony of bringing in

the Torah scroll. Donor: Safaniev, Aaron”

Eliezer Bentilmit. Who is this Aaron

Eliezer? Obviously, this is our Lazar. But

why does he have such a strange name? Most

likely, it is because people often change their name

when obtaining an Israeli passport.

Moreover, not just their first name, but their surname,

first name, and patronymic entirely. From this

ceremony, we know the new name of our

Lazar: Aaron or Zer. But what is his

surname? We decided to try to

guess it. In the photos we

showed, there is another useful

clue. He dedicated the gift to his

grandmother and grandfather. Notice

the surname Aronov. And then

it is not hard to try different

combinations of names: Aaron Eliezer, Safoniev,

Aronov. And without much difficulty, we find

a real living person by the name of

Aaron Eliezer Aronov, and a company

registered to him and to Irina

Safanieva, the sister of today’s

heroine, Binga.

We add Safaniev to the chart under

his new name. But, as you can see, the two parts

of our chart still do not connect. We are

missing just one link. And that

link was never supposed to be

discovered. Look closely. Once again, we

type Aaron Aronov into Google, a.k.a.

Lazar. The first result. He is listed

as the beneficial owner of the London

company Balkan Consulting Limited. This is

a relatively new feature in the UK

corporate registry. They are fighting

all those offshore schemes and have recently

started requiring disclosure of both

owners and ultimate beneficiaries.

The owners on paper may be as many as 150

different offshore entities from the most exotic

islands, but the beneficiary is always

a person. If you want to have a company in England,

you have to disclose your first and last name. And

here is the trick. The beneficiary

of the English company, as we have already seen,

is Aaron Aronov, a.k.a. Lazar Safaniv. And

the owners of the company, meaning the holders of its

shares, are two offshore companies: Candy

Investments and the familiar Appington

International. In other words, these are his

offshore companies; he is their beneficiary.

With what pleasure I return to

the chart. Let us put that very

English company, Balkan Consulting, right here. And

let us put Candy here. We will still

need it. We do not need to draw Appington

because it is already on our chart. Through

a chain of offshore companies and Merkuriy LLC,

it owns the Moscow mansions that

we showed you, bought at auction from

the city.

I look at all this and feel delighted. Really,

like some mathematics student

who has proved a difficult theorem. It is

beautiful.

They covered their tracks with a front Russian

company, a Cypriot offshore company, an offshore company from

the British Virgin Islands,

and a passport under another name. And still we

caught them. As head of

Moscow’s property complex,

Sergunina was selling city property to the husband

of her own sister.

And now get ready, dear viewers.

This is not the end of the investigation — it is

its starting point. Ahead of us are thousands more

square meters of mansions bought from City Hall.

Restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, offices

in Moscow City, apartments, cars, and

real estate in Austria.

We have already looked at three real estate

properties that Merkuriy LLC,

controlled by Sergunina’s sister’s husband,

bought from the Moscow city government. I learned

all of this from the publication *Moskovskie Torgi*

for June. And do you know what? I also have

the July issue of *Moskovskie Torgi*

as well. So there is still a lot more

interesting material ahead of us.

Just one month after the first

batch of buildings, the scheme was pulled off a second

time, exactly the same way. Here we see the well-

known Merkuriy buying a building

of 2,300 m² in Lubyansky Proyezd.

Naturally, the Custos hotel is there.

We will not even waste time on that.

The purchase price was 136 million rubles. That is,

again, 60,000 rubles per square meter.

Meanwhile, in neighboring buildings, a square

meter costs 350,000 rubles. In the 19th century, this site

was home to the Blandov trading house, the largest

dairy producer in the Russian

Empire. This particular building

housed a cheese warehouse, a storage facility

for cheese. Now, in 2019, it is a storage facility

for nothing but Sergunina’s

money.

Let us use our favorite magazine

as a means of teleportation. We flip through this

same issue a bit further, and now we are on Petrovsky

Boulevard. And now we will see with our own eyes

what exactly Moscow City Hall

sold to Lazar Safaniev’s company for 45

million rubles.

And once again we are at a historic mansion of 800

m², where the by now well-known

hotel is located. Let us move

on. We still have a lot to do.

And here we are. These 1,500 m², again in a

historic mansion, also belong

to our Merkuriy LLC. And behind this building

there is another building that

belongs to Merkuriy: 650 m². Strangely,

our magazine says nothing about these houses.

And here comes an unexpected twist:

Moscow City Hall traded for these houses. In

2016, using the scheme already familiar to us, Merkuriy LLC

acquired premises in this

a building on Volkhonka Street with an area of 1,300 m² (about 14,000 sq ft), and

paid just 72 million rubles for it.

You have to admit, that’s very little, because

the Kremlin is nearby, and so is the Pushkin Museum

(the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts). As you can see, nothing was

built here.

[music]

Excuse me, but where is the Custos Hotel here?

There isn’t one, because in 2018 it was

officially returned and exchanged for a building

twice the size on Petrovsky Boulevard.

And that building, at 8 Karetny Ryad Street,

also belongs entirely to them.

This was all part of one big deal.

Now imagine you’re in the shoes of

Moscow City Hall. Some obscure offshore company

comes to them and

says: “A couple of years ago, we bought

a large building in the city center from you, and now

we want to give it back and exchange it for two

buildings with three times the floor space.” And

Moscow City Hall says: “Of course,

our friends from the British Virgin Islands,

give us back your 1,300 m² (about 14,000 sq ft), which you bought from

us, and we’ll give you 5,000 square meters

(about 53,800 sq ft) in return.” Deal? Shake on it?

At this point, you can’t even call it absurd. It’s

just outright

mockery. The Moscow city government and

Sergunina are not only selling off

historic buildings to their relatives,

they’re also haggling, swapping one thing

for another, smoothing over little issues.

All of this is being done at the city’s expense, at the expense of

you and me. If there were a proper

deputy in the Moscow City Duma (Moscow’s city parliament), they would have raised hell

over the fact that in their district

obscure offshore companies were buying up historic mansions

in bulk. But now

there’s no one to do that. Silence and calm.

You won’t believe it, but we didn’t even need

to look for a new issue of our favorite

magazine. The continuation of this investigation

was in the same already dog-eared July

issue where we found Lubyanka

and Petrovsky Boulevard. Look, right

nearby, among the other listings, we

see two more properties: the Bronnaya Plaza business center

on the Garden Ring and

a small building in Zamoskvorechye. They

were bought from City Hall using an identical

scheme, but the company wasn’t Mercury, it was

some outfit called Dita Plaza. Kira,

let’s start with the Property Department, like

last time. We draw in two more

properties. And Dita Plaza, which bought

them. We pull up the Russian corporate

registry and see that Dita

belongs to a Cypriot offshore company. We pull up

the Cyprus registry and see the next

owner: the offshore company BV Candy, which

is already on our chart and belongs to

Lazar Safaniev. So that we don’t

lose momentum, I’ll go ahead and add the next

stop on our tour of places tied to

Sergunina’s corruption. This

Cypriot offshore company, besides Dita Plaza, also has

another Russian subsidiary,

Alfaka Capital. Let’s see what

it owns.

Here it is: the Oktyabr Cinema. Not

all of it, though—just 40% of the shares. It’s one of

the biggest and most recognizable cinemas

in the city. Muscovites come here to watch

movies and eat popcorn, but no one ever

really stopped to think about who

actually owns it. People always just tended

to assume it was part of the Gazprom-Media

group. And that’s true—only

partly. They own 60% of the shares, and the remaining

40% had always belonged to the city.

Then in 2013, the Property Department

decided to sell the shares at auction for 700

million rubles. But they couldn’t find any buyers

and ended up selling them for 430 million

rubles.

The city’s stake in the Oktyabr Cinema was bought by

an unknown company that seemed to come out of nowhere

and was registered to who-knows-whom,

called Alfaka Capital. Just don’t confuse it

with Alfa Capital, the one associated with

Alfa Group and the bank. This was just a company with

the same name, registered and

listed under Alexander Nekaev

Dobrynin, born in 1980, who had a vocational education.

At the same time as acquiring the country’s main

cinema, he was only occupied with

working as the director of a small

car repair shop. In short, this company—50% of which

was immediately transferred to a Safaniev offshore

company—somehow found half a billion

rubles, bought the city’s stake, and to this

day, apparently, continues to

own it.

Well then, dear viewers, you’re probably

already tired of hearing about the real estate of

Sergunina and her family. We’ve already found five

hotels, one building of as-yet unclear

purpose, and an entire cinema. They alone have

14,000 m² (about 150,700 sq ft) of premises. And that, let me remind you,

was all bought from the city. You’re

tired, we’re tired, but we still

have to keep going.

What’s next? Next we have something else

that Natalia Sergunina is seriously

interested in and actively involved in. And if she

gets involved in something, then sooner or later it will most likely

be taken away from the city

and end up in the hands of her relatives. That’s

what happened with VDNKh (the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy) too.

[music]

If for some reason you ever decide to search

online—I honestly don’t know why

you would need to—the name Natalia

Sergunina, you’ll discover

something very curious. Most of her

comments are devoted to this place.

This is VDNH (the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, a major Moscow exhibition complex). At VDNH they opened this, at VDNH

they’ll open everything: some kind of exhibitions,

celebrations, festivals. Natalia Sergunina loves

commenting on all of it. It feels like

VDNH occupies some kind of special

place in her life. And probably

that’s true, because it is here, at

VDNH, that her sister Irina Safanieva

somehow mysteriously ended up with

control of no fewer than two pavilions.

And now my investigative team and I

are going to prove it. Kira and Ruslan will go to

the Ottepel restaurant. It used to be the pavilion

for sericulture. And I, together with my friend

Akula, will go to the Moscow Sky restaurant.

It is the former Glavkonditer pavilion.

Let’s go.

[music]

It only looks like we’re having a great

time. In fact, the team of the

Anti-Corruption Foundation is carrying out

serious fieldwork. We are here

to get hold of this receipt.

We study it carefully and notice that in

both restaurants we are served by the same

legal entity: LLC Vladim.

The pavilion leases are registered to this same

Vladim and to another company, LLC Taurus.

If we add them to the chart, we will see

the following. The restaurant legal entities are inseparably

linked to the companies that

won the city hall auctions: Mercury and

Ditoplaza. The same people, the same

directors, switching places. But

much more fun than digging through boring

corporate registries is this. This is the website

portfolio of designer Irina Sergunina

Safonieva. Here we see a list of her

projects. We can see both the Ottepel restaurant and

Moscow Sky. And here is the publication *Russia

Heritage*, edited by Alexander

Beglov. By the way, it contains two spreads

devoted to the creative genius of Irina

Safanieva, an interior designer,

who, before the restaurants at VDNH, had designed

nothing except her own apartments

and the apartments of her friends.

In that same portfolio, you can find

another property whose design

was handled by Irina Safanieva. It is another

restaurant. True, this one belonged not to

the city, but to her personally. Well, more precisely,

it used to. We are in the very center of Moscow.

This is Tsvetnoy Boulevard, and behind me

is the ultra-luxury residential complex "Legend

of Tsvetnoy." You may have heard of it because of

such illustrious residents as

TV host Dmitry Kiselyov or Moscow’s deputy mayor

for housing and utilities, Pyotr Berkov. He

somehow managed to buy an entire penthouse here

of more than 1,000 square meters. And here too

there is a commercial space owned by

Natalia Sergunina’s sister. She used to have

her own restaurant here, WhyTime, but

then it went bankrupt, and now

someone else’s restaurant is there. Nevertheless,

the premises, with an area of more than 300

square meters, remain in her

ownership.

Such a property is worth 470 million rubles.

It remains a mystery where, at that time,

the 32-year-old sister of Sobyanin’s deputy

who had never been noticed in any business activity

got half a billion rubles for such an investment.

That is the question.

And here’s another great question. Want to know

where the Sergunina sisters’ father,

a retiree and former military prosecutor,

got 215 million rubles to buy 350 square meters in the

City of Capitals tower in Moscow City?

Their residential real estate situation is pretty good too.

True, lately the Sergunins have started

re-registering it from themselves to

their closest friends and to nominees

known to us. But that will not stop us from

telling you about this real estate. In

2011 alone, the Sergunins bought a 136-square-meter

apartment in the Neskuchny Sad residential complex. That’s 68 million rubles.

And a couple of months before that, they also bought

a penthouse of 289

square meters in this building. Price: 180 million rubles.

Their car fleet is doing just fine too. Two

Mercedes cars for the mother, one for the father, two for the

sister, and three for the sister’s husband. The

Sergunin family drives exclusively

Mercedes vehicles. We did not find cars of any other brand

among them. But the most expensive assets, as we already

know, they hide abroad. Judging by

the filings of the English company

of Lazar Safaniev, he is the owner

of some tangible real estate asset

worth £10.5 million, or 826 million rubles.

What exactly it is and where it is located, we,

unfortunately, were unable to find out. If you

happen to know, you know what to do—

write to us.

And of course, what Moscow official would be complete

without European real estate? The

Sergunins have it too. And it was found

very easily. We already mentioned the company

of Lazar and Irina Safaniev. It is, by the way,

located in Austria. The documents list

the legal address as Gregor Mendelstrasse

34, Vienna. We immediately decided to see what

was there. And there is a private house purchased in 2015.

To film this house,

we turned to our special

correspondent, who had already helped us

film the homes of Moscow United Russia party members

in Vienna.

Alexei, what are you doing?

You won’t believe it, but I’m getting undressed in the bushes

in the city of Vienna, and yes, that sounds suspicious,

I agree. But the thing is, in this

city there are so many crooks from United Russia (the ruling political party) that

we have plenty of people to film. And we have just

finished filming our piece about deputy

Metelsky. And there is one more, one more crook

an investigation that will come out later. But

so that I don't have to make a special trip, I

have jeans, and I have a shirt.

I'm going to change now, so it looks like I didn't

shoot everything in one day, but that these were two

completely different investigations. So, I've

changed in the bushes, and now in a festive

red shirt I'm ready to head to the house

of the Moscow deputy mayor, which

is located right on the corner of this park.

Money has one very important

quality: it can transform. Well,

for example, you have 100 rubles in your pocket.

You can turn it into ice cream. Or

take another situation: you have

100 rubles in your pocket, but you have to pay it

as taxes into the budget of the Moscow

city government. In the Moscow city government's budget,

it will be stolen. It will be stolen, for example, by the family

of the deputy mayor. And in the end it will turn

into this absolutely

stunning €2 million building. You step out into the

park. You leave the park and immediately

end up there. This building belongs

to the family of Moscow Deputy Mayor

Natalya Sergunina. Formally, on paper,

it lists her sister Irina and that sister's husband,

Lazar. So, roughly speaking,

this building belongs to Muscovites. It

was built with money that was stolen from

them by Sobyanin's deputy. But if

an ordinary Muscovite comes here, I'm afraid they

won't be let in through these iron gates.

Great house. Thank you, Alexei. But

it's too early to head back. The Sergunins have

a couple more places in Vienna that we

absolutely have to visit. Besides the company

that owns the €2 million house,

there is another company called Laser

Technology.

How are investigations done? In fact,

it's all much simpler than you might

think. Right now, we know

only one fact. We can see it from the

registry: the family of the Moscow

deputy mayor, Sobyanin's deputy,

owns a company in Austria, Laser

Technology. Beyond that, for now, we

know absolutely nothing. What assets it has,

we know nothing. So we just,

well, do the one obvious thing.

We walk up to the office and look at the signs.

This is Austria, after all—they have signs here.

We look for where Technology is. Not here,

not here, not here, not here. Aha, there it is, look.

Laser multimedia Technology. And

the office number is listed.

Now we keep looking at the

signs. Maybe we'll see something

interesting.

Would you look at that—the exact same office number. And

here's something connected to Alice in

Wonderland. If we go to this

website, we'll very easily confirm

that the family of our wonderful

deputy mayor is organizing an Alice in

Wonderland show in Austria. You see, the entire facade

of a shopping center in the city center is covered

with ads for this very show, which

belongs to the family of a Moscow deputy mayor.

What happens here is an astonishing

transformation: a business into which

corrupt Moscow money has been invested,

stolen money, is turned into

nice, respectable Austrian money. And now

an Austrian police officer is walking toward us

right now—he's going to ask what we're doing here.

Can you film him, Zhora?

And when the Austrian police come and

ask,

what money they're using to buy all these

houses, hotels, and so on, the Sergunin family

will say: "No, no, no, we're not

Moscow corrupt officials. We didn't steal

this money in faraway Russia. We

earned it from a wonderful Alice in

Wonderland show."

See how colorful everything is. At Alice in

Wonderland. We came in here, and there's

construction going on. Ah, they haven't thrown us out yet

because apparently they're used to

Russian-speaking people. But here we are

filming. This is the reception area of this theme

park. Here there will be, look, Alice in

Wonderland. Wonderful books,

workers are working. It will open soon, and

the people who find themselves in Vienna and

spend money here will have no

idea that this money will end up

in the hands of Moscow crooks.

Time to sum up. Brazenly lies,

shamelessly steals, treats us like

idiots. At the beginning of that sentence

you can just leave a blank space and

then fill in surnames. Putin,

Sobyanin, Volodin, Gorbunov, Mitelsky.

And now Sergunina too.

A young woman who was entrusted with

running our city, our

property, has looted everything just as

banally and just as brazenly as all

those other veteran Moscow

crooks. There's no difference. They tell us

about fairs and festivals and all that. Just

look at her.

Given that this time Easter

coincides,

it will be interesting for everyone. For example, as part of

our children's activities, kids will be able, in the

chalet, to bake cookies, um, according to

French Easter traditions,

English Easter traditions. So

you're very welcome.

Meanwhile, her own relatives are opening offshore companies in the British

Virgin Islands

to snap up Moscow property for

next to nothing. And she sings Sobyanin's praises.

The very best brand: Made in Moscow.

Satellites, machine tools,

chocolate, and bread.

Meanwhile, square meters in Moscow City, colorful

penthouses, Mercedes cars, and homes in Austria are just raining down

on her sister and her father.

Altogether, Natalia Sergunina’s family

has been showered with property worth a total of

6.5 billion rubles (about $100 million).

And now she has stolen our elections too.

Ten thousand square meters (10,000 m²)

of historic mansions, stolen

by the Sergunin family. Any independent court could return that

to the city.

The Austrian real estate bought with

unexplained income may someday

be seized, but for elections, for freedom,

for the chance to see not

crooked United Russia party members, but decent people on the ballot,

that is something we still have to fight for.

And that is exactly what the candidates are doing, exactly

what tens of thousands of people at

rallies are doing. That is exactly what we are doing too, including

through our investigations. We too

have dug in, and we will not give up our freedom

and our future. Join us right now.

It’s very simple.

This year, elections will take place not only in

Moscow, but also in more than twenty

regions. And we must do everything we can to

break United Russia’s monopoly there.

Smart Voting is our election strategy.

We, the voters, must

unite and vote for

the candidate who has the best

chance of defeating the United Russia candidate. Who should that be?

Register on the website, and we will identify

the candidate who is most likely

to win, and in September

we will send you their name. All you will need to do

is come to your polling station and cast your

vote for them. This is the most effective and

best way to get back at United

Russia and throw it out of its comfortable

parliamentary seats. And if you are in

Moscow, come to the rally in the city center on August 3.

Here is the Facebook group,

there is a link to it right in the description.

Subscribe, follow the updates,

and see you on August 3.