Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika has written to the Kommersant newspaper, naming the person who ordered the film by Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation about his sons' business. "I have no doubt that the people who ordered this false film are (head of the Hermitage Capital investment fund) William Browder and the special services behind him. As a weighty confirmation of this, following the film's leak in Russia, a powerful, unprecedented, offensive attack was launched against me and my family members in newspapers, on television, and on the Internet in several European countries at once (Germany, Switzerland, Greece, etc.)," Chaika writes.

Earlier, the version about Browder as the customer of the FBK investigation was voiced by retired Interior Ministry investigator Pavel Karpov, who was included in the "Magnitsky list", Kommersant wrote . Karpov pointed out that Navalny's investigation was published after Russian investigators conducted searches in Cyprus in the case of the withdrawal of Gazprom shares worth 5.4 billion rubles from Russia.

Chaika also links the showing of the FBK film with the intensification of the investigation into this case. "The investigation into other crimes committed by him (Browder) and his accomplices is ongoing. A powerful investigative group has been formed for the case, and its work has been noticeably intensified. The investigation is being conducted in several countries at once. Its results will definitely have extremely undesirable consequences for Browder - and not only for him," Chaika points out.

The main goal of the head of Hermitage Capital as the customer of the film, according to Chaika, is to discredit the Prosecutor General's Office, "so that we lose the help of our colleagues, without which we will not be able to track the end points of all of Browder's financial schemes going abroad." In addition, the customers wanted to discredit "the very fact of the investigation" and "to maximally extinguish the active phase of the investigation that is currently underway, by incapacitating its initiator, or better yet, bury the case altogether." The global goal is said to be compromising "the Prosecutor General of Russia, his subordinate regional leaders, to once again declare our country as a partner with whom it is better not to deal, a country worthy of economic and other sanctions."

Browder has previously stated that he had nothing to do with the creation of Navalny's film. "I am flattered that I have been given the credit for a truly remarkable work that exposes corruption in the highest echelons of power, but in this case I had no opportunity to contribute to it," Interfax quoted him as saying.

Navalny, whose reaction is quoted by Kommersant, also refutes Chaika's version. "We expected that the Prosecutor General's Office would distract attention and invent a customer, but I am surprised that they chose him. I can say that we are not interested in Browder, and we do not understand why he comes up when discussing the connections between the relatives of the Prosecutor General's Office leadership and the Tsapkov gang," says the head of the FBK. Navalny still demands "a meaningful response to each point of our investigation," as well as Chaika's resignation and "an objective investigation."

Chaika named Browder as the customer of Navalny's film