Russia’s property registry declassifies real estate records related to former attorney general’s family

The Federal Service for State Registration, Cadastre, and Cartography (Rosreestr) has made changes to the records on properties belonging to Artem and Igor Chaika, the sons of Russia’s former Attorney General Yuri Chaika.

The state property registry now lists their real names on the property records in question — until recently, these documents listed the property owners as “Private Individual” and the “Russian Federation.” These records attracted media attention in the past after the owners’ identities were hidden with a seemingly random combination of letters and numbers: Artem and Igor Chaika’s names were replaced with “LSDUZ” (ЛСДУ3) and “IFYAU9” (ЙФЯУ9), respectively.

According to Open Media, the two brothers own seven properties in the Moscow region’s Odintsovsky District, not far from the Rublevo-Uspenskoe highway. Igor Chaika owns two townhouses and land in the cottage village Gorky-8, as well as a 60-acre land plot in the village of Uspenskoe. Artem Chaika owns a 1,950-square-meter (20,989-square-foot) house in Uspensko and 43 acres of land. There are also various outbuildings registered to the brothers, which were classified until recently.

An unnamed source from Rosreestr told Open Media that the records on the Chaika family’s real estate holdings were declassified after Yuri Chaika left the post of attorney general in January and lost the status of a specially protected person.

That said, records on several properties linked to Yuri Chaika’s family remain classified. For example, the “Russian Federation” is listed as the owner of two apartments in Krasnogorsk, which were registered to Igor Chaika from 2008–2019. According to Open Media only current information has been declassified, whereas archival data remains hidden.

• Artem and Igor Chaika became widely known after opposition figure Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation released a video called “Chaika” in 2015, investigating the business interests of Yuri Chaika’s family. In its investigation, the FBK argued that Igor Chaika could be involved in raider seizures of businesses. Yuri Chaika, who was working as the Russian Attorney General at the time, claimed that someone had “ordered” the FBK’s investigation.
• In 2016, the FBK revealed that Rosreestr had classified records on properties belonging to Chaika’s sons, replacing their names with the aforementioned combination of letters and numbers “LSDUZ” and “IFYAU9.”