FSB’s Fifth Service Chief’s family is hiding assets worth hundreds of millions

The FSB’s Fifth Service is considered the main culprit of the failed Russian invasion of Ukraine: its officers were in charge of preparing the Ukrainian “fifth column” that was supposed to support the “special military operation” at the crucial moment, and provided Putin with the analysis of the country’s political situation. It turned out that in reality Ukraine was ready for resistance, no one offered any support for the Russian invasion, and that the huge funds allocated for the “fifth column” had vanished without a trace. It is not clear what happened to General Beseda who is now in charge of the Fifth Service. He is rumored to have fallen into disgrace and even to have been subjected to criminal liability, but formally he is still listed as the chief of the service. But it’s easy to guess where the money intended for bribing Ukrainian politicians went: The Insider has found out that the real estate worth hundreds of millions of rubles owned by Beseda’s family, which they could not have afforded on their official salaries, has been classified.

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Neither Sergei Beseda himself nor his family (he has two sons) have ever succeeded in business. However, The Insider found out that all the family members own expensive apartments. The general himself, according to archival data discovered by The Insider, has a 173-meter apartment in Bolshoi Sergievsky Lane registered to his name. The market value of the property is about 130 million rubles, the apartment details have been removed from the Rosreestr database.

The younger son, Alexey, 40, is fond of music and plays records in Moscow clubs. He is known as “Alexei Bes” a.k.a. Ranking Cat. This is how he is introduced in the announcement for one of his performances: “A vinyl collector and selector. Passionate about reggae and Jamaican culture since a young age. First heard King Tubby's dub mixes and realized that this music carries a powerful cultural message and the right vibe.”

Alexey Beseda

As a matter of fact, the general's son tried himself in business, he co-founded Vending Initiative LLC, which installed coffee and snack vending machines, but the firm closed back in 2018, leaving behind unpaid fines and several lost lawsuits for the failure to make payments to suppliers. Before that, Alexei Beseda had worked at Avtovazagregat OJSC in Togliatti, but the company filed for bankruptcy in 2016, around the time he returned home to Moscow. Bankruptcy of Avtovazagregat, on whose board of directors Beseda had served, went bankrupt with a scandal: the management stood trial for wage arrears and tax evasion.

Alexei's entire previous career was not dazzling either: until 2014, he ran IT Invest (now operating under the ITI Capital brand), in 2015 he registered Foton-Ik, a consulting company, but it did not bring him much money, earning a mere 1.5 million rubles in 2020. Last year the company was liquidated. Simultaneously, Alexei Beseda was earning the salary of about 300,000 rubles per month at New Investment Group LLC.

According to the leaked food delivery database the general's son ordered food deliveries to house No. 23 in Bolshoi Predtechensky Lane; information about his apartment along with its cadastral number has been removed from the Rosreestr database. The market value of his 87-meter apartment is about 30 million rubles (Alexey's wife Anastasia Gulina has no official income at all). Aleksey's family also owns 4.3 hectares of land in the upscale Akulinino village where the Navalny team once discovered Vladimir Yakunin's palace with the “fur coat storage room”. Even without the two luxury mansions, the land plot owned by the general's son's is worth about 100 million rubles.

It is worth remembering that Alexei Beseda was behind the offshore company that owned the Russian enterprise Photoelectronic Devices, which had pledged to produce matrices for thermal imaging equipment used in the armored forces and military aviation.

The company received hundreds of millions of rubles from the budget, but the project failed. The company's board of directors included Roman Rogozin, a nephew of former Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversaw the military-industrial complex and lobbied for Beseda's offshore business.

Beseda's eldest son Alexander is also linked to Rogozin; he worked for Rosoboronexport and in the government apparatus (as deputy head of the secretariat of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin), and then moved to Roscosmos following Rogozin and became head of the apparatus. He worked at Roscosmos until 2020. The general's son total income during his four years in the government (2016-17) and Roscosmos (2018-19) was 36 million rubles. His wife Tatiana Beseda works at a leasing company with an annual salary of less than 3 million rubles. But his apartments also cost more than the total official earnings, he owns apartments in Chasovaya Street (10 million rubles), Vasilievskaya Street (25 million) and Profsoyuznaya Street (60 million); all the apartments have also been removed from the Rosreestr database.

Thus, the market value of the property owned by the FSB general’s family is no less than 350 million rubles, with all the data on that property having been removed from the Rosreestr database. Beseda’s 69-year-old wife has retired. The FSB officer's income remains undisclosed, but it is known that the top-ranking FSB officers, even at the level of deputy director, earn about 6 million rubles a year.

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