Translated material
The circulation of obstinate
Abyzov, Zakharchenko, Cherkalin - what about their billions?
This spring is the time of processes in the most high -profile criminal cases, which feature the cosmic amounts belonging to the security forces and officials and turned into state revenue.
The ex-colonel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Dmitry Zakharchenko had already heard the verdict: 13 years of colony and 113 million rubles of a fine. Earlier, the treasury replenished property worth more than 9 billion rubles. In addition to the cash, which was stuffed with the apartment of the colonel and his relatives, it was about 27 apartments, two Rolls-Royas, two Mercedes and a fit of gold weighing half a kilogram.
The process over the FSB Colonel Kirill Cherkalin is still going on, but cash and values for 6.3 billion rubles have already been turned into the state’s income. At the same time, Cherkalin admitted that money, apartments, cars, necklaces, pendants, expensive bags and even cufflinks were obtained from “sources that were not provided by law”.
Former Minister of Open Government Mikhail Abyzov is under investigation. But at the suit of the General Prosecutor's Office, 32 billion rubles have already been seized from him, which, as the court decided, were received in violation of the norms of anti -corruption legislation. It is easy to notice that the civilian “minister without a portfolio” surpassed the captured security forces more than
twice. And it is he who today leads an informal rating.
True, unlike Cherkalin, Abyzov did not agree with the court decision and filed an appeal that was just considered in the Moscow City Court on Friday. The decision was recognized as legal.
The New Gazeta studied in detail the political and business activity of Mikhail Abyzov, and in many ways the position of the Prosecutor General’s Office intersects with our publications. By the way, back in 2019, Andrei Sukhotin saw in the arrest of the ex-minister the beginning of a large campaign (see No. 44 of April 22). After all, behind bars was a man who earned the first condition in the era of structural transformations of the 90s under Anatolia Chubais and overgrown with new capital into zero under Dmitry Medvedev. By this arrest, the authorities showed that she was preparing a kind of revision of the "results of the nineties." And one of the important applied goals of such a revision is the expropriation of billions bred abroad.
In this sense, the Abyzov case is more indicative than in the case of Zakharchenko and Cherkalin. After all, they kept all the money in Russia, and from the ex-minister they took most of the offshores. The security forces, maybe they steal, but they love their homeland tightly.
The political message is also this: billionaires in the government are a mistake of the “liberal” period of Dmitry Medvedev.
Indeed, Abyzov was a defiantly rich official. Already at the time of getting into the government of Dmitry Medvedev, he had a state of $ 1.3 billion (according to Forbes). Moreover, all six years, Abyzov’s incomes were mainly growing: the record was set in 2016 - more than half a billion rubles. He himself explained such amounts to payments on the dividends of companies that he - as a responsible official - allegedly transferred to trust management. Abyzov transferred the ministerial salary to charity.
The investigation and the Prosecutor General’s Office believe that the former minister from 2011 to 2014 withdrew from the Sibeko and the Regional Energy Company belonging to him with the help of proxies 4 billion rubles through the Offshore of Blacksiris controlled by him. Immediately after this, the electricity tariff in the Novosibirsk region increased by 15%, and this led to social unrest, and even from the filing of Alexei Navalny.
After leaving power back to business, Abyzov sold Sibeko just for those 32 billion rubles that were turned into state revenue. As indicated in the lawsuit of the Prosecutor General’s Office, negotiations on sale with his long -standing acquaintance Andrei Melnichenko Abyzov led back in 2017, occupying a ministerial chair (and realizing that he would lose it soon). Earlier, the Prosecutor General’s Office said that Abyzov during the work in the government was a beneficiary of about 70 companies in Estonia.
The very case when the position of Russian security forces and international investigators coincides.
According to their data, more than $ 800 million were held through the internal offshore network in the Estonian unit (details - in the material “Minister with Tolstoy Portfolio” , No. 130 of November 20, 2019).
English Version
You can read this Issue in English Here . Thank you for sharing it with your fiction in Facebook & Twitter.
In February 2019, Swedbank was in the center of the scandal associated with money laundering. According to SVT journalists, from 2008 to 2018, more than 135 billion euros of non -residents - mainly Russian clients passed through its Estonian wing. Erling Grimstad considered the Norwegian expert on money laundering that some bank employees helped their customers make financial fraud in their interests: Abyzov was just one of these customers, through whose accounts $ 860 million passed, and $ 770 million was withdrawn from Russian jurisdiction.
One of the banking managers of a bank named Alexei Everson found a PIN codes calculator-this device helps to control the client’s accounts remotely. With this calculator, Everson withdrew money from Abyzov's account. Then he quit the bank and suddenly arose in a high position in a company, which was directly connected with the Russian Minister. Of course, Everson, and Abyzov, too, denied everything: according to the former minister, such investigations and arguments of the investigation were only an attempt to put pressure on him in order to knock out testimonies on other important people, as well as to achieve the seizure of his foreign property. And there are a lot of property there: one villa in Italy was estimated at 20.6 million euros.
Joint investigation of Novaya, the Center for the Study of Corruption and Organized Crime (OCCRP), the Swedish public television channel SVT and the Estonian newspaper Postimees showed that at least 38 out of 70 offshore companies in Swedbank are connected with Russia, and some of them were integrated into the main business group of Abyzov-Abyzov-Abyzov-Abyzov-Abyzov Ru-com. Moreover, from 2012 to 2018, Abyzov’s offshores took part, for example, in the purchase of shares of the largest Russian enterprise of heavy energy mass building “Elsib”. Minister Abyzov had no right to participate even indirectly, but he could not help but know about the actions of his proxies.
There are less loud, but indicative episodes that allow you to find a correlation between Abyzov’s activities in the civil service and the success of a business transferred to them.
For example, the Minister of Open Government also headed the Council on the private-state partnership of the military-industrial commission under the Government of Russia. At the same time, as businessman Abyzov was not a stranger: CJSC Promtekhnology, where he is a co-owner, produces the ORSIS T -5000 rifles and modifications on their base-VSK “Accuracy 8.6” and VSK “Accuracy 7.62”. In 2017, these rifles adopted the FSO and the FSB. By the way, the armed forces of Abyzov’s rifles refused, citing the fact that some of their components are imported, and within the framework of the import substitution program, these parts could be replaced.
In addition, Abyzov received good profit in venture investments - just during his work in the open government. Formally, he founded the BrightCapital venture fund in 2010. Then the future minister invested $ 300 million in the development of the fund. But until 2012, the fund's affairs were not as good as Abyzov would like. But as soon as he got into the ministerial chair, the picture changed. The fund invested $ 200 million in 15 startups of Silicon Valley, and in 2019 one of them-Quantenna Communications, which creates semiconductor Wi-Fi solutions-was sold for more than a billion dollars. According to the rules of the business, the fund invested in the company, which became a unicorn (that is, whose capitalization exceeded $ 1 billion), receives hundreds of percentage of profit from invested funds.
The BrightCapital Foundation invested not alone in startups, but together with the state corporations. At the same time, the coordinator of the joint innovation work of ministries and state corporations, a person “ensuring the interaction of federal authorities and development institutions” was Mikhail Abyzov.
The Investigative Committee draws a direct parallel between the withdrawal of money from Sibeko and the acquisition of Abyzov two villas in Italy.
One of the villas-IL Tesoro (“Treasure”)-with an area of 34.6 hectares with adjacent vineyards and olive gardens, is located near the city of Mass-Marittim in the Grossete Province in Tuscany, 15 km from the coast of the Ligurian Sea. We all learned from the investigation of Alexei Navalny. What not everyone knows: Abyzov was remembered in Mass-Marittim because in 2013 he arranged a huge feast right on the central square of the city on the occasion of his son's wedding. In his Moscow life, Minister Abyzov could have expelled the watch of a cheap brand - and in Italy on coffee in the next town of businessman Abyzov, he transferred his personal helicopter.
The second villa on the Abyzov Apennines, according to media reports, gave his son for adulthood. But the minister himself led to ignore the laws of Italy. Such villas are purchased for agricultural activities - breeding the same vineyards or, say, olives. However, nothing of the kind in the lands belonging to Abyzov happened: he used the villa in Tuscany as his own residence, not forgetting, however, to use all the benefits that were laid for agricultural enterprises. In general, Abyzov since 2011 has not paid 711 thousand euros of taxes to the Italian budget, so that the Italian court decided to arrest all the accounts of the company, the owner of the villa. And the Investigative Committee, having an assessment, estimated the cost of villas of 2 billion rubles, and now intends to demand the arrest of Abyzov’s entire real estate in Italy.