Translated material
Jade "roof"
Illustration: Anna GoremykaJade "roof"
The 21-year-old son of the Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia became a partner of people exporting jade to China and suspected of money laundering. After this, the prosecutor's relatives acquired property worth hundreds of millions of rubles, and the investigation into the case stalled.
Mining engineer Evgeny Didikov died suddenly. In 2016, together with his colleagues, he went to Buryatia on a business trip. It was necessary to work about 180 kilometers west of Irkutsk at a deposit of jade - the “stone of life,” as it is called in China. That day, Didikov carried out almost all the orders of the chief engineer - all that remained was to see if the pillars were installed on the border of the forest area on the eastern side of the field. A local watchman dropped him off on an ATV. And when Didikov began to descend into the lowland to the border of the site, an avalanche came down from the mountain. In the end, only rescuers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations managed to find his body. Didikov was just over thirty. He left behind a wife and a child who was less than a year old.
The avalanche situation at the time and place where the mining engineer died was no secret to his employer, the Baikalquartz Samotsvety enterprise. But it did not want to pay the relatives of the deceased employee three million rubles - they asked for this money in order to somehow compensate for the loss of their breadwinner. The relatives had to appeal to the Irkutsk District Court. However, this did not help much: the court ordered the employer to pay the victims five times less than they demanded.
As Transparency International Russia found out, the BaikalquartzSamotsvety enterprise was not in poverty at all, nor were its managers and owners. At that time, they opened more than twenty bank accounts in distant Australia. Having visited the store, they could buy more than 100 thousand dollars worth of jewelry and watches at one time. So, back in 2013, Australian law enforcement officers suspected the owners of Baikalquartz Gems of money laundering through trade transactions and discrepancies between official income and expenses - and froze about $30 million in their accounts.
The Australians have not been able to receive help from Russian law enforcement agencies for several years. In the meantime, in Australia they hoped for the assistance of their Russian colleagues, the son of the Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia became a co-owner of Baikalquartz Gems.
This investigation is a joint project of Important Stories, Transparency International Russia and the Australian ABC television channel.
Australian scandal
A financial scandal involving nine Russians in Australia became known back in 2014. As Kommersant reported then, entrepreneurs from Irkutsk Andrei Gudkov, Vladimir Strelnikov, Eduard Karmadonov and Eduard Zelinsky, their wives, as well as another business partner of theirs, Sergei Kostyukov, found themselves in the center of attention of the Australian federal police. Their problems started after the police noticed how much money they were spending. The amounts did not correspond to the income declared when obtaining Australian visas. In the declarations and attached documents, the entrepreneurs indicated several tens of thousands of dollars in annual income each. Meanwhile, millions from China and Hong Kong came into their bank accounts in Australia (see the graph of how money arrived in the accounts of Russians).
Irkutsk residents led a luxurious lifestyle abroad. For example, the Karmadonov couple alone paid more than 40 thousand dollars for a vacation in Thailand and Switzerland, more than 30 thousand dollars for a hotel at a resort in Sardinia, and more than 18 thousand dollars for a hotel in Venice. At the same time, the official annual income declared by Karmadonov when applying for a visa did not exceed 25 thousand dollars. A police spokesman spoke about this in Brisbane District Court in 2013, as reported by local newspaper The Courier Mail. The court decided to freeze the bank accounts of Russians.
In Russia at that time they owned, for example, the bankrupt Angaria ice cream factory in the Irkutsk region, which could not even satisfy all the creditors’ demands “due to insufficient property.”
Gudkovs' property
Andrei Gudkov and his wife, whose bank accounts were frozen in Australia, are extremely non-public people. They spent a lot of money not only in Australia, but also in Russia and Europe. Gudkov’s wife Natalya owns a Porsche Cayenne Turbo SUV worth about 10.5 million rubles, two luxury apartments in a house on Furmanny Lane (126.3 square meters and 78.5 square meters) worth about 150 million rubles. Another apartment in the same building with an area of 108.4 square meters and a cost of about 100 million rubles was registered in the name of Natalya’s mother-in-law, Valentina Gudkova; in 2016 it was transferred to another relative.
In 2017, Natalya and Andrei Gudkov purchased an apartment on the Italian part of the Cote d'Azur - in the commune of Ospedaletti, not far from Nice and the Principality of Monaco. The seven-room apartment (184 square meters) is located in a small house on the second line from the coast. According to Transparency International Russia calculations, its cadastral value is a little more than 200 thousand euros (or 19 million rubles).
In total, the Gudkovs have more than 30 real estate properties in Russia and abroad. Their total cost exceeds a billion rubles. The Gudkovs' official income, declared when applying for a visa in Australia - several tens of thousands of dollars - raises the question: with what money was all this property purchased?
Russian entrepreneurs have long challenged in court the actions of the Australian police and the freezing of their accounts. And they even achieved a ban on disclosing the materials of the trial, thanks to which the proceedings disappeared from the public field for a long time. But, as we know, in 2017 the police continued the investigation.
Together with ABC TV channel journalists, we obtained some documents from this criminal case. In particular, in them, Australian Federal Police officer Anthony Glenn Muller noted that the legal origin of the money that ended up on the deposits of Russians in the Australian bank ANZ was not confirmed.
Support those reporting on corruptionYour donation will help us conduct more international investigationsSupport Important StoriesFor a long time, Australian law enforcement agencies have been waiting for help from their Russian colleagues. Back in late 2015, the Australian Federal Police intended to conduct an investigation together with police from Irkutsk, but, according to the British newspaper Daily Mail, it did not receive approval from the Russian authorities.
According to Russian law, requests from foreign law enforcement officers to investigate Russian citizens must be considered by the Prosecutor General's Office. We were able to discover that the family of at least one representative of this department is connected with an entrepreneur from an Australian business.
Jade Boy
As Transparency International Russia found out, the business partner of the Russians who are interested in the Australian police is Dmitry Zakharov, the son of Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia Alexei Zakharov .
In 2015, the son of the Deputy Prosecutor General became the owner of 16% of the Deo company, which owns Baikalquartz Samotsvety, one of the oldest enterprises for the extraction of semi-precious stones, in particular jade, in the Irkutsk region. The majority of the company (84%) is controlled by Andrey Gudkov, one of nine Russians named in the Australian investigation. Gudkov’s partners, whose money was frozen in Australia, were co-owners of Baikalquartz Gems until 2015.
At the time of acquiring a stake in the company, Zakharov Jr. was 21 years old and was a fourth-year student at Moscow State Law University (MSAL).
How did the son of a deputy prosecutor general become a co-owner of a jade business at a young age? And was this related to the investigation, in which Australian police officers unsuccessfully waited for help from their Russian colleagues? “Important Stories” called Dmitry Zakharov to ask him about this. Hearing the question, he interrupted the conversation and stopped answering calls. He didn't answer the voicemail either. Zakharov Sr. also did not respond to Important Stories’ request.
Business of the son of the Deputy Prosecutor General. The son of Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Zakharov has been in business since he was about twenty years old. One of his early companies, the First Elevator Company, was registered at the address of Zakharov Jr.’s apartment in the city of Zhukovsky. Dmitry Zakharov opened it in 2014, when he turned 20, and closed it in 2019, apparently without implementing a single major project. Zakharov’s business partners in this company were, in particular, the wife of the former head of the construction department of the Ministry of Defense, Maxim Chengaev.
The partner of the deputy prosecutor general’s son in another company , Digital Logistics Technologies, was banker Sergei Dolgov. In 2018, his bank FPK lost its license for repeated violations of anti-money laundering laws.
In addition, Dmitry Zakharov is registered as an individual entrepreneur. He indicated insurance as his main activity. Zakharov Jr. acquired the status of an individual entrepreneur in March 2018. And already in April, he received the status of an insurance broker for the Sogaz company, which is now headed by the nephew of the ex-Prosecutor General Anton Ustinov, who studied at the same faculty of the Saratov Law Academy with Dmitry Zakharov’s father, but graduated three years later.
Stones for China
“Baikalquartz Gems” is located half an hour from Irkutsk in the small village of Smolensk region. The history of the enterprise begins in 1966. Then it was a prospecting and exploration party under the Soviet Ministry of Geology, which discovered more than a dozen deposits of jade, charoite, lapis lazuli and other semi-precious stones. Now in Russia there are about 56 active jade deposits, most of them in Buryatia. More than ten of them were discovered by geologists of BaikalquartzSamotsvetov. The Ospinskoye deposit, where Baikalquartz Samotsvety is conducting exploration and mining under a license valid until 2024, is also located in Buryatia. Engineer Evgeny Didikov also died there, whose family “BaikalquartzSamotsvety” did not want to pay three million rubles.
The revenue of Baikalquartzsamotsvetov for 2019 exceeded 225 million rubles. On the company’s website you can buy, for example, a jade ring for 12 thousand rubles, or a large writing set with the coat of arms and flag of Russia for more than half a million. But data on the foreign economic activities of BaikalquartzSamotsvetov show that the basis of its business is export transactions.
Photo: “Baikalquartzsamotsvet”From 2013 to 2020, eight Chinese companies received more than 200 tons of raw jade worth $5.3 million under contracts with Baikalquartz Gems, according to the ImportGenius foreign trade database. That is, the average price was about 27 dollars per kilogram of unprocessed jade. But usually in China jade is priced much more expensive.
There are many varieties of jade, from white and light green to blue and even black. Green ultramarine jade and one of the most expensive and valuable - cat's eye jade are mined at the Ospinskoye deposit of BaikalquartzSamotsvetov.
“The real price of ordinary stone is about 50-100 dollars [per kilogram]. But there is a “cat’s eye” at the Ospinskoye field. I know that a large batch of “cat’s eyes” in 2015 was sold in the city of Dongning, Heilongjiang Province (there is a jade exchange there) for 15 thousand dollars per kilogram. That is, in Beijing it will already cost from 10 to 50 thousand dollars per kilogram,” says Evgeniy Kislov, head of the laboratory of geochemistry and ore-forming processes at the Geological Institute of the SB RAS.
Prosecutor with a cellar
There are no large real estate objects in the declaration of Deputy Prosecutor General Zakharov. If you believe the document from the website of the Prosecutor General's Office, he only owns a five-meter cellar. But thanks to the Australian story with Baikalquartz Gems, we learned details about the expensive property, business and extensive connections of the deputy prosecutor general’s relatives and friends. It turned out that real estate worth hundreds of millions of rubles was registered in his son and mother’s name.
The Deputy Prosecutor General's relatives and Andrei Gudkov, who became famous thanks to his Australian assets, were connected not only by the jade business. There were also luxury apartments.
In 2015, fourth-year student Dmitry Zakharov bought an apartment of 135 square meters in the Moscow residential complex “House on Smolenskaya Embankment” from Andrei Gudkov’s mother-in-law Larisa Guzhikhina. “The deluxe house is located in the Arbat area next to the British Embassy. The entrance is a two-light lobby with stained glass; the interior decoration of the halls is made of rare wood and onyx,” the realtors praised the house. On average, an apartment like Zakharov’s costs about 135 million rubles.
In 2017, Zakharov Jr. became the owner of another slightly less expensive apartment with an area of 100 square meters in the Mosfilmovsky residential complex. Its cost is about 50 million rubles.
Property of a pensioner
The mother of the Deputy Prosecutor General and grandmother of Dmitry, pensioner Valentina Zakharova, moved to the Moscow region from the Voronezh region in the early 2000s. It was then that she became actively interested in real estate, although she had never been involved in any business before. Since then, she has had several apartments at her disposal with a total value of more than half a billion rubles.
Valentina Zakharova exchanged one of these apartments in the center of Moscow, on Furmanny Lane, in 2012 from Tatyana Radionova, the mother of the head of Rosprirodnadzor Svetlana Radionova (Alexey Navalny spoke about her in his investigation in 2020). Svetlana Radionova also studied at the Saratov Law Faculty, where Alexey Zakharov graduated. At the time of acquisition, the apartment was valued at 86 million rubles. In 2017, Natalya Gudkova, the wife of Andrei Gudkov, the same one whose accounts were frozen in Australia, bought this apartment from the mother of the Deputy Prosecutor General.
Pensioner Zakharova also has a house in the elite village of Mitropolye in the Pushkinsky urban district of the Moscow region. The village is located near the village of Sofrino, where an enterprise producing artistic utensils for the Russian Orthodox Church is located.
In the Metropolitan region, a small plot of land measuring 1,360 square meters is registered to the 78-year-old mother of the Deputy Prosecutor General. Almost its entire territory is occupied by a four-story house with an area of 707 square meters. But a look at the site from above makes it clear that the territory of the Zakharovs’ country residence is much larger. Adjacent to the house is another plot of 2,700 square meters. There is another house on it, the owner of which is not listed by Rosreestr. These two plots have a common entrance, paths are laid between the houses, and their territory is fenced with a single fence. (Administrative address of the house: Mitropole village, Svobody Street, 57).
Find out more about the property of officialsSubscribe to the "Important Stories" newsletterNot far from Valentina Zakharova’s residence, literally two houses away, her friend, the mother of the head of Rosprirodnadzor Tatyana Radionova, settled.
But this is not all of the pensioner’s real estate. The mother of the Deputy Prosecutor General also has a luxurious apartment in the elite residential complex Knightsbridge Private Park, built four years ago, in the Khamovniki district of Moscow. Judging by data from Rosreestr, Valentina Zakharova owns a 227-meter apartment worth about 300 million rubles and three parking spaces worth approximately 7.5 million rubles each.
By the way, Zakharov’s long-time associate, former first deputy prosecutor of the Moscow region Valery Voinov, who now works as the head of the personnel department of the General Prosecutor’s Office, bought an apartment in the same building. He bought an apartment in Knightsbridge Private Park almost simultaneously with Zakharova. But now, instead of his last name, Rosreestr says “Russian Federation”.
Family connections
Pensioner Valentina Zakharova is so wealthy that she regularly helps her relatives. For example, her daughter, sister of Deputy Prosecutor General Tatyana Semushkina, received from her in 2016 as a gift an apartment with an area of 146.5 square meters in the Moscow district of Khovrino on Dybenko Street.
Tatyana is married to Roman Semushkin, who heads the Office of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Western Administrative District of Moscow. Semushkin’s work was supervised by the prosecutor of the same district, Grigory Radionov, the brother of the head of Rosprirodnadzor, Svetlana Radionova.
The Russian Prosecutor General's Office did not respond to Important Stories' questions about the business connections and property of the deputy prosecutor general's relatives, or why in some cases this property connected the prosecutor's family with money laundering suspects in Australia.
Representatives of BaikalquartzSamotsvet also did not answer questions from Important Stories about the Australian case and how the son of the Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia turned out to be a co-owner of the enterprise.
“There is a law in Australia that requires banks to report cash transactions of $10,000 or more to AUSTRAC,” says Russell Wilson, a former financial intelligence lawyer and board member of Transparency International Australia. The expert notes that if the Australian Federal Police paid attention to the situation, this may mean that interaction between law enforcement agencies of Russia and Australia could begin in the case. But, apparently, this interaction was not continued - or the investigation touched on a “politically sensitive” issue. Wilson notes that in Australia, information about a court case is rarely kept private, perhaps in this case because of politics, or perhaps because the investigation is still ongoing.
*This material was created with the participation of ANO Center TI-R and its general director Ilya Shumanov. The organization is included in the list of NPOs performing the functions of “foreign agents.” By law, we are required to indicate this, otherwise our colleagues may be fined. Important Stories believes such laws are unconstitutional.
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