Former Crimean Attorney General Natalia Poklonskaya privatizes $730-thousand Moscow apartment

Natalia Poklonskaya is one of the few politicians in Russia with international recognition. She owes this reputation to her two years as Crimea’s first post-annexation attorney general (inspiring several Internet memes based on her demure public presence). Afterward, she moved to Moscow and served one term as a federal lawmaker in Russia’s State Duma, drawing the media’s attention for her religious conservativism and opposition to raising the country’s retirement ages (she was the only United Russia deputy to vote against the party’s unpopular pension reforms).

Poklonskaya did not run for reelection this year, but she landed on her feet, winning an appointment to serve as Russia’s ambassador to the archipelago and island nation of Cape Verde, located several hundred miles west of Africa. Before she left on this new assignment, however, she privatized her state-issued Moscow apartment, re-registering the property to herself and her daughter, according to a new investigation by iStories.

Records examined by iStories indicate that Poklonskaya’s 119-square-meter (1,280-square-foot) Moscow home is one of the apartments in the “Stalin’s Dacha” residential complex on Starovolynskaya street. The building itself is affiliated with the presidential administration. Poklonskaya is not the first state official to privatize an apartment in the complex.

Journalists estimate that Poklonskaya’s two-bedroom apartment is worth roughly 53 million rubles ($730,340) — a huge windfall for the new ambassador, whose earnings over the past six years totaled just 25.2 million rubles ($347,250), says the Declarator online database.

• When Poklonskaya privatized her state-issued Moscow apartment, she also owned a 1,014-square-meter (19,915-square-foot) plot of land and a roughly 300-square-meter (3,230-square-foot) house in Crimea’s Simferopol region.