Six facts about the life and business of a famous musician who, according to the Kremlin, is at the center of a new information attack on the Russian leader

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, artistic director of the St. Petersburg House of Music Sergei Roldugin, Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Russian Minister of Culture Alexander Avdeev (from left to right) during a tour of the palace of Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, where the House of Music is located, 2009 ( Photo: AP)

Announcing “another information hoax” against President Vladimir Putin on Monday, his press secretary Dmitry Peskov read out several questions from a Western news agency that, in his opinion, indicate the content of the upcoming attack. Among other things, Peskov said, journalists asked about the famous cellist Sergei Roldugin, the godfather of the president’s daughter and a friend of his youth.

old friend

Roldugin and Putin are almost the same age (65 and 63 years old, respectively), but grew up in different cities. Putin spent his childhood in Leningrad. Roldugin was born on Sakhalin, and graduated from music school in Riga; in Leningrad, he already studied at the conservatory, which he graduated from at the same time Putin graduated from Leningrad University, in 1975.

The musician was introduced to Putin by his older brother Evgeniy, Roldugin himself said in an interview with the Evening Kazan publication in 2014. According to him, Yevgeny studied with the future president at the KGB Red Banner Institute (Putin graduated from it in 1985). When exactly this acquaintance took place, he did not specify.

“My brother gave me Volodya’s phone number when I went to Leningrad to serve in the army,” Roldugin described his meeting with Putin. “I called him when I went AWOL.” Climbed over the fence. I called and Volodya arrived. On the Zaporozhets without a muffler! We rode all night."

At the time of his acquaintance with Putin, Roldugin was just over thirty. Pictured is the cellist in 1991 (Photo: Pavel Markin/TASS)

“Vovka and I sometimes went to the Philharmonic after work,” Roldugin’s memories are contained in the book about Putin “In the First Person” (2000). “He asked me how to listen to symphonic music correctly.” Also, according to him, he and Putin played football: “I played football much better. But he lost to him because he was tenacious, like a bulldog.” In the book, another well-known acquaintance of the president, St. Petersburg wrestler and now State Duma deputy from United Russia Vasily Shestakov, is also called a common friend of both. All three went to a sports camp on the eve of Putin’s departure to serve in the GDR.

Shestakov told RBC that he did not remember the circumstances of his acquaintance with Roldugin and Putin, but it was “somewhere in the eighties” in a common company. He described Roldugin as a “decent person.”

As a friend of Putin, Roldugin became the godfather of his eldest daughter Maria, The New York Times wrote in 2014.

“I know that they (Putin and Roldugin. - RBC ) are really friends,” soloist of the Mariinsky Theater Ildar Abdrazakov told RBC. “Sergei Pavlovich is a very positive person, with a wonderful sense of humor.”

Roldugin’s brother has not been lost since then either.

Evgeny Roldugin, the full namesake of Sergei’s brother, is listed on Gazprom’s official website as the director of the company’s representative office in Riga. In 2010, the publication “Marker” claimed that he was the cellist’s brother. The office telephones in Riga were not answered. Gazprom did not comment on the family ties of its manager.

Musician and philanthropist

When an RBC correspondent called Sergei Roldugin on his mobile phone, a woman answered the phone and said that he was busy at a rehearsal and would not be able to talk. Roldugin is a widely known musician, conductor and music manager.

All the time that Putin was building a political career, Roldugin was engaged in music. In 1980 he received a bronze medal at the Prague Spring International Cello Competition. From 1984 to 2003, judging by the biography on the website of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, he was the first soloist-accompanist of the cello group of the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra.

In 2002, Roldugin became vice-rector for scientific work of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and in 2003 he became rector, replacing Vladislav Chernushenko, who had headed it for a quarter of a century. The Vedomosti newspaper wrote that Roldugin could even become the next Minister of Culture, although in April 2004 this post was given to the rector of the Moscow Conservatory, Alexander Sokolov. In November 2004, Roldugin left the conservatory. In his farewell speech to the academic council, he said that he could no longer combine creative and administrative activities. The head of the Federal Agency for Culture, Mikhail Shvydkoy, then explained his departure by saying that Roldugin only wants to study music, and the post of rector takes up a lot of his time.

However, the administrative work only increased. In 2005, an old friend came to the president with the idea of building a St. Petersburg House of Music, and, according to Roldugin himself, the president liked this idea . In the same year, the Ministry of Culture transferred to the House of Music the building of the palace of Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich on the embankment of the Moika River. The palace was restored with funds from the Konstantinovsky charitable foundation and from the city budget, which invested 800 million rubles in it. In 2008, Putin attended the opening of the restored House of Music.

The renovation of the building of the palace of Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, which became the Roldugin House of Music, in 2009 pleased Putin (center), who approved this project (Photo: Dmitry Astakhov/TASS)

In addition to all of the above, Roldugin is also the chairman of the board and founder of the Talent and Success Foundation. This foundation, together with the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Sports, is the founder of the Sirius charitable foundation. “In Sochi, on the basis of the Olympic buildings, an educational center for gifted children of Russia has been created. Children from 11 to 15 years old who have demonstrated talent in sports, natural sciences, music and ballet are selected there. Children come to Sochi, and the best Russian professors, teachers and trainers in their field are invited to them,” described the work of “Sirius” Roldugin in an interview with the Belcanto.ru portal. This project was invented by Putin, the musician emphasized in his interview.

Sergei is very fond of philanthropic activities and always talks about helping talented youth, recalls his friend Shestakov. “Once, he and I even came up with a club where we would practice sambo and classical music, but for some reason this idea was never implemented,” he says.

However, while doing administrative work, the famous cellist still did not forget music - at least when it helped friendship. Speaking to the New York Times in 2014, Roldugin recalled how the year before, at Putin’s request, he came with three young performers (violin, piano and clarinet) to the presidential residence in Novo-Ogarevo to give a private chamber concert. They played Mozart, Weber and Tchaikovsky, Roldugin recalled. Putin liked it so much that the next evening he asked the musicians to play again - for exactly the same few high-ranking listeners. “These were very famous people... almost all of them were under sanctions,” is how the musician described the audience, without naming names.

Partner of the President's Friends

Roldugin is not only a friend of the head of state, he is connected by business with many other St. Petersburg acquaintances of the president (about Roldugin’s participation in the capital of Rossiya Bank together with Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Kovalchuk and others, see below).

In the 1990s, Sergei Roldugin, together with Vladimir Putin’s classmate Nikolai Egorov, was listed as one of the founders of the Petrointeroil company. Political scientist Vladimir Pribylovsky wrote about this in his study. Roldugin owned 50% of the company, Egorov directly owned 10%, and controlled another 17% through St. Petersburg Intertrade. Vladimir Yakovlev and Nikolai Khrameshkin each had 10% in Petrointeroil. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, Petrointeroil was actually registered in August 1993, and in 2006 it was liquidated. What the company did is not indicated in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities extract; there is also no data on who was among the founders of the company in the extract.

Egorov’s representative did not respond to RBC’s request at the time of publication of the material.

St. Petersburg lawyer Nikolai Egorov is famous for giving Putin's political career a boost by recommending him to then St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak to work on the foreign relations committee. Egorov’s scientific advisor, Yuri Tolstoy, wrote about this fact in an essay for the lawyer’s 60th anniversary (published in the journal “Jurisprudence” in 2007). During the presidential elections in 2000, Egorov was Putin's confidant. Back in the early 1990s, Egorov, together with his partners, created the law firm “Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasyev and Partners,” which, among other things, represented the interests of the Russian side in the case of the murder of Chechen separatist Zelimkhan Yandarbiev in Qatar, allegedly by GRU agents.

Roldugin said that he organized chamber concerts for the president’s “narrow circle of friends.” In the photo - with Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin in 2010 (Photo: PhotoXPress)

Shareholder of a “personal bank for a narrow circle of associates”

Roldugin owns a 3.2% stake in Rossiya Bank, according to information published on the bank’s website. He is accompanied by Yuri Kovalchuk, Gennady Timchenko, Nikolai Shamalov, Alexey Mordashov and others. This bank came under US sanctions in 2014; the Barack Obama administration calls it a “personal bank for a narrow circle” of people close to Putin.

Roldugin himself says (he is quoted by The New York Times) that he does not have millions, and his entire paper fortune, which The New York Times estimated in 2014 at $350 million, was formed thanks to the fact that many years ago he bought a stake “in a small bank run by people close to his old friend Vladimir Putin."

Now the capital of Rossiya Bank is 57.4 billion rubles. Managing Partner of the National Agency for Financial Research Pavel Samiev, who previously, as director of the Expert RA agency, assigned ratings to Russia, proposes to evaluate the bank at a multiplier of 0.3 to capital (Bank St. Petersburg trades with such a multiplier, which is comparable to "Russia" according to financial indicators). In this case, Roldugin’s share can be estimated at 550 million rubles. without taking into account the discount for the non-publicity of the bank and its inclusion in the sanctions list.

The bank pays dividends. For 2014, he paid 220 rubles. per share, or 559 million rubles, Roldugin’s share accounted for 18 million rubles.

RBC's interlocutor, familiar with Rossiya's management, claims that Roldugin never took part in managing the bank.

Regional media tycoon

Since November 2005, Roldugin, together with his partner in the Non-Profit Partnership “Support for Children’s Sports” Vladislav Kopylov, owned the Priboy company in equal shares, and from November 2009 to November 2012, the partners were listed as co-founders of the Volna company (SPARK data, company phone numbers match up). In October 2015, “Priboy” was liquidated, and “Volna” has been controlled since 2012 by the son of the ex-head of the Baltic Media Group (BMG) Oleg Rudnov, Sergei.

What were “Volna” and “Priboy” doing? In the 2000s, the companies played an important role in the media life of St. Petersburg, as through them Roldugin and Kopylov allegedly controlled BMG. In 2003, the media group was organized and headed by St. Petersburg journalist and media manager Oleg Rudnov. It included Radio Baltika, the 100 TV channel (now Life 78), the newspapers Nevskoe Vremya, Smena, Vecherniy Peterburg and the Baltic Information Agency.

As rector of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, in 2003, Roldugin awarded a diploma of honorary professor to Beatles member Paul McCartney (pictured right) (Photo: PhotoXPress)

In 2004, Priboy received 100% of the shares of the Baltika company, the telephone number of which coincides with the data of the radio station of the same name, part of BMG. Priboi controlled Baltika until 2007, after which Volna acquired 100% of the company through a chain of owners. In July 2015, Baltika ended up being owned by the News SPB company (75% belongs to Oleg Rudnov’s son Sergei, and 25% to Aram Gabrelyanov).

Gabrelyanov has long been cooperating with the National Media Group (NMG), founded in 2008 by the same Yuri Kovalchuk and his partners from Severstal and Surgutneftegaz. NMG does not disclose the shares of the owners, however, before the imposition of sanctions by the US Treasury, Kovalchuk was considered the controlling shareholder of the holding.

Gabrelyanov, describing to RBC his entry into the Baltika business, said that he acquired 25% of the entire Baltic media group from Sergei Rudnov. Gabrelyanov does not know about the Rudnovs’ business relations with Roldugin and Kopylov; he did not disclose the amount of his transaction.

An employee of Volna suggested that RBC contact the legal department, after which the company stopped answering calls.

Football functionary

Perhaps Roldugin is also related to another important side of the life of the Northern capital - sports.

Although the Priboy company of Roldugin and Kopylov was liquidated in October 2015, it is still listed as the founder of the non-profit organization “Fund for Development and Support of Media” (the new founders of the fund are not yet reflected in the databases). The telephone number of this fund coincides with the telephone number of Volna and Priboy, as well as the Baltika radio station.

According to SPARK, this fund owns 10.8% in the Zenit football club. Gazprombank has a controlling stake in the club (more than 51%). Two other holders of large stakes are Gazprom Transgaz and Sibur Holding. According to financial statements, in 2014 Zenit received revenue of 6.1 billion rubles. and a net loss of 5.2 billion rubles.

Zenit representative Zhanna Dembo told RBC that the fund is still a shareholder of the club. “The Media Development and Support Fund has historically been a shareholder of the Zenit club, even before Gazprombank appeared among the co-owners. This fund was created by Oleg Rudnov,” she said.

Information dump: what is known about the president’s friend Sergei Roldugin