The figures came in a statement released by the Russian Federal Investigative Committee on Sunday.

“Within the period analyzed, investigative agencies worked before filing charges to determine compensation for the state, citizens, and legal entities in return for damages caused by corruption,” said the statement. “The damages consisted of 7.9 billion rubles, compensated by 1.3 billion rubles [42.1 million USD]. Property totaling 1.2 billion rubles [38.9 million USD) was seized.”

According to the investigation, there were 16,603 criminal corruption cases against civil servants in 2012. Among these figures were some who held particularly high legal statuses:

• Sub-federal legislative agency deputies: 13
• Municipal electoral agency deputies: 210
• Municipal agency election officials: 261
• Judges: 2
• Electoral commission members: 19
• Prosecutors and prosecutor aides: 19
• Federal Investigative Committee employees (the same committee that released this report): 13
• Russian Interior Ministry preliminary investigation managers and investigators: 56
• Federal Drug Control Service investigators: 7
• Lawyers: 39

The release of the report coincided with International Anti-Corruption Day, which began under the auspices of the United Nations in 2003.

The report also comes on the heels of a wave of corruption cases against members of the Russian Ministry of Defense. The cases evoked such a wide resonance in Russian society that the Investigative Committee asked the ministry to refrain from “spinning” the case and turn over all relevant information to the committee.

Of all the forms of corruption that take place in Russia every day, one that tends to stay off the media radar is financial corruption. Much of the time, the banal financial machinations involved are not deemed to be as exciting as judges being bribed or ballot stuffing during elections. But financial corruption is a core feature of Russia’s current regime, and often spreads beyond the geographical boundaries that separate other types of corruption from the rest of the world. Writing for Ekho Moskvy, playwright and opposition activist Natalia Pelevine details one such instance.

Abramovich and the English Royal Treasurer
By Natalia Pelevine
October 1, 2012
Ekho Moskvy

Alisher Usmanov is leaving the business world. He made this announcement to the Reuters news agency two days ago. What’s interesting is that this announcement comes at a moment when the British Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is considering possibly investigating Usmanov within the so-called “Shuvalov Case.” The case revolves around Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s first deputy prime minister, who received a sum of USD 120 million, supposedly from a loan with a 40% annual interest rate.

I’ve often been forced to listen to people saying not to count on charges being filed against corrupt Russians, because they won’t be: the West depends on their money, and also on their oil and gas.

I disagree. First of all, Russia and its oligarchs also depend on the sale of its oil and gas, just as the other side depends on acquiring it. Secondly, in Great Britain, and that’s what we’re talking about, there is a separation of business and government, and business can’t buy or buy off the government or tailor the laws.

There is no immunity for Russian oligarchs in Great Britain, where they’re so fond of settling down. The SFO has already looked at the documents connected with Mr. Usmanov, and it looks like measures are possibly forthcoming in the foreseeable future against one of the richest people in Russia, Vladimir Lisin: his fortune is estimated at 15 billion USD, not far past that of the richest person in Russia – Alisher Usmanov. It was recently revealed that the ship that Western diplomats believe delivered weapons to the Assad regime belongs precisely to Mr. Lisin. And Lisin owns a large amount of property in Great Britain. As they say – surprise, surprise.

But while money from oligarchs can’t influence decisions in the British parliament or on Downing Street, there are influential private individuals in Great Britain who don’t want to turn down money from Russian businessmen.

It was revealed last October that royal secretary Sir Michael Peat was joining the board of directors of Evraz PLC (Roman Abramovich’s metallurgy and mining company). The company’s website says that Sir Michael is an independent member of the board of directors and a member of the audit committee, and also the company’s certified accountant. He receives 250 thousand GBP per year for his services.

Sir Michael worked for the English throne for 18 years. He was first private secretary for the Prince of Wales from 2005 to 2011. A variety of sources say that Sir Michael quit his post in the prince’s residence in order to “make more money in the City.” Now he’s continuing to work as an unpaid advisor for the prince, leading a variety of his financial projects.

At the beginning of 2012, Sir Michael strengthened his relationship with the Russian oligarch when he named Evgeny Shvidler as a member of the board of directors of his consulting company, MC Peat & Co., LLP. Shvidler is a close friend and partner of Abramovich, and owns a 3.5% share of Evraz. He is an American citizen, and owns property in London’s prestigious Belgravia region, a private plane, and other accessories, and in 2006 Abramovich gave his friend a yacht with the beautiful name “Le Grand Bleau,” with an EC-135 Eurocopter and aquarium, to boot. On January 4, 2012, the day after Shvidler was given his post on the MC Peat and Co., LLP, board of directors, the company received a loan of 2,730,000 GBP from a certain Horizon Investments AVV, registered in Aruba (see the loan agreement here).

According to records from the Aruban Department of Civil Aviation, Horizon Investments AVV was the owner of the EC-135 model of the Eurocopter helicopter, which came with Abramovich’s Le Grand Bleau yacht that he later gifted to Shvidler (see the sales agreement and information about the aircraft). According to the Aruban Chamber of Commerce, three of Horizon Investment AVV’s directors are also directors of another Aruban company, Crocus Corporation AVV. Documents from the British High Court say: “two of Mr. Abramovich’s airplanes belong to Crocus Corporation AVV, a company that is registered in Aruba, the directors of which are Maria Elia and Panagiotis Nikou of the company Meritservus.”

The Cypriot company Meritservus controls a variety of Cypriot holdings, through which, according to information from 2008, Abramovich controlled a 92% share in Sibneft.

When financial analyst Michael Weiss investigated this issue, the directors of the aforementioned company, including Mr. Demetris Ioannides, declined to comment on their connection with Abramovich.

And that’s understandable, because this is what the British High Court documents mean: “There is a network of companies registered in the British Virgin Islands and Cyprus that control businesses, at times very large ones, owned by Mr. Abramovich. These Cypriot companies officially belong to Mr. Demetris Ioannides or other Meritservus employees.”

Mr. Demetris Ioannides is also among the directors of the Cypriot company Lanebrook Ltd., which passes as a “major shareholder” of Evraz. Abramovich and Shvidler control their holdings in Evraz through Lanebrook Ltd.

To sum it up, this what we know. On October 14, 2011, Sir Michael was named as an independent member of the Evraz board of directors and member of its audit committee. On January 3, 2012, Abramovich’s friend and partner Evgeny Shvidler became a partner in Sir Michael’s company, MC Peat and Co, and a day later this company received a loan for 2,730,000 GBP from a company that controls Abramovich’s private property. During Michael Weiss’s inquiry about these transactions, Charlie Peat – Sir Michael’s son and CEO of the company – responded that the company has no relationship with Abramovich and recommended that he go talk to Shvidler himself.

Evraz’s report for 2011 indicates that a certain transaction was underway: “The Board of Directors looked into the possibility of a business agreement with the son of Sir Michael Peat that does not have an effect on the independence of Sir Michael.” If that’s so, then why make the transaction through offshore accounts and make it secretive? And wouldn’t Britain want to be concerned about transactions by the financial advisor of the Prince of Wales and oligarchs from Putin’s closer circle, which are also being made through offshore accounts?

It’s easy to lose your reputation, but harder to earn one.

In this column for Yezhednevny Zhurnal, noted satirist Viktor Shenderovich discusses an ironic but all too representative instance of corruption within the Russian government, and issues a warning to politicians who think their impunity will last forever.

Part of their Repertory
By Viktor Shenderovich
July 19, 2012
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

The St. Petersburg City Cultural Committee designated budget subsidies for non-state theaters. Out of 15.6 million rubles, 15 million went to one theater – the Andrei Mironov Russian Enterprise Theater. The theater’s artistic director, Rudolf Furmanov, is both a distant relative of Cultural Committee head Dmitri Meskhiev, and a confidant of Vladimir Putin.

This isn’t even corruption. Corruption tries to avoid sticking out and hides from the law. But this – this is a typical demonstration of lawlessness, an insistent announcement of the new rules of the game…

Yes, this is how it’s going to be – there you go! Yes, all of the allocated budget money is going to the relative of a boyar and the confidant of a khan. Yes, we wanted to spit on what you think and say. Yes, yes, and yes once again! And no matter how much you bash your head against the wall, we’re still going to have it our way.

And they will, naturally. Until one day (hello Hegel) when quantity turns into quality, the system screws up, and the khan and boyars, emboldened by their impunity, choke on their own shit and blood (check your history textbooks, virtually any chapter).

But until then everything is going to be so cool and controlled that it’s not even going to occur to anyone sawing up the budget to disguise themselves.

P.S. Under closer inspection, this dull corruption story turns out to have a paradoxical side note: the theater intends to spend a large portion of the money it’s received on a production of Evgeny Shvarts’s version of The Emperor’s New Clothes.

This should be particularly instructive in the production of dear Vladimir Vladimirovich’s confidant:

“You’re naked, you old fool! Do you understand? Naked, naked, naked! Look at the people! Look at the people! They’re lost in thought. Lost in thought, you poor buffoon! Our traditions are shaking! Smoke is billowing above the state! (the king cries out.) Shut up!…”

And the rest is in the script.

Translation by theotherrussia.org

It’s been less than a month since Vladimir Putin returned to the post of Russia’s president. In that time, he already managed to sign a degree indicating that Russia’s corrupt system of deciding which corporations should belong to the state and which should not is showing no sign of abating. As Yulia Latynina reports:

Legalizing the Loot
By Yulia Latynina
May 24, 2012
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

One of the first orders that Vladimir Putin signed as president instructed the government to “remove state investment from non-energy sector companies” by 2016. This included companies such as the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC), and Rostechnology.

This order was no accident: literally one week later, Putin demanded that Rostechnology prepare proposals to privatize the assets of this state-owned corporation within the space of a month.

If you think about it, this is a very odd piece of news.

UAC, USC, and Rostechnology are not old companies like, for instance, the Federal State Unitary Enterprise, tucked away in state-owned silos since the Yeltsin era. These are companies that were created by Putin in 2006-2007 and headed, in a number of cases, by his close friends.

In many cases, private enterprises were incorporated into these companies in a way that was, more or less, violent. And the government declared that these enterprises held an important strategic purpose and should therefore be nationalized. And now after 3-5 years it turns out that they should be privatized again.

You know, only one of two things is possible. Either the government advocates a socialist ideology, in which case it nationalizes companies like Salvador Allende, or it advocates a market ideology, in which case it privatizes them like Margaret Thatcher. But if the government first takes companies from their owners and then privatizes them again, it means that it isn’t advocating either ideology. That means it’s just stealing. So UAC, USC, and Rostechnology are not state companies. They are just an instrument with which private companies are taken from their owners and given out to Putin’s friends.

Take, for example, UAC. Until it was created, the country had to deal with the difficult but necessary process of self-organizing the aviation industry. The weak companies died off, and then the country found itself with a few strong aviation companies: the company Russian Avionics, or Irkutsk Aviation Factory, privatized by management and having fallen on the procurement for the Su in India, which they themselves modernized.

After UAC was created (in November 2006), this process was interrupted. The owner of Irkut, Aleksei Fedorov, was made a proposal he couldn’t refuse: to transfer his private shares to the state, but head the entire company. Fedorov agreed.

The main force behind the pressure on the corporation was Mikhail Pogosyan’s Sukhoi Superjet 100 project. The Superjet turned out to be a super vacuum: the plane’s development cost, according to experts, around 7 million dollars, as opposed to the 1-1.5 million dollar estimates from its competitors. The plane was three years late and turned out to be three tons heavier than promised, but, clearly, from the point of view of the “economy of ROZ” [Stanislav Belkovsky’s characterization of the corrupt nature of the Russian economy – ed.], the project was successful: Fedorov left, and Mikhail Pogosyan took his place.

Or take another instance – the company AVISMA. In 2006, Russia’s largest titanium producer was purchased by the predecessor to Rostechnology – Rosoboronexport – with a 30 percent discount and market quotations of around 1.2 billion dollars.

This was preceded by a rather dramatic story. Sixty percent of AVISMA shares were divided equally between its two owners, Tetyukhin (“the red director”) and Bresht (“the young financier”). Another 13.4 percent of AVISMA shares belonged to Viktor Vekselberg, and between Vekselberg and the owners there was an agreement about “Russian roulette,” and it was specifically stipulated that when the company was purchased, nobody could borrow money from their own bundle.

Allow me to remind you that “Russian roulette” in this context is when you can propose that another owner buys his share at a certain price, and he in response can buy from you at the same price per share.

In May 2005, Vekselberg, having waited for an opportune moment in the market and thinking that AVISMA had less money than he did, offered to buy 60 percent of AVISMA at 96 dollars per share, which was, to put it lightly, inexpensive. However, Bresht and Tetyukhin refinanced through Renaissance and bought from Vekselberg instead.

Clearly, the oligarch found this insulting, and appealed to [Russian businessman Sergei] Chemezov. After that, the state suddenly discovered that AVISMA was a strategic company that should have belonged in the state’s coffers. Bresht and Tetyukhin were offered 700 million dollars for their bundle; they asked for 2 billion.

The matter went all the way to Putin. Putin supposedly said: “Pay them, so there’s no scandal.” But the ones who had taken AVISMA didn’t want to pay up: Bresht was supposedly called to the carpet of then-FSB head Patrushev, who, obviously, was at that moment the main arbiter to determine the price of companies listed on the market.

In the end, the case was settled in the middle: Bresht and Tetyukhin gave away their shares and left Russia, and you can’t say that 1.2 billion dollars is so little money. But you also can’t say that they would have sold any shares at that price in a sound state of mind and with a solid memory.

And now Vladimir Putin is signing an order to privatize state companies that were created 6 years ago. You have to agree that it turned out oddly. It’s not hard to guess that if the UAS assets are privatized that it could easily happen that the state would remain with the cost of developing the Superjet but that future profits from its sale will end up in the hands of future owners of its assets. Or look again at AVISMA. Six years ago it was taken into state coffers (on credit from state banks) as a strategically important enterprise, and now they’re selling it again?

The presidential order is just a continuation of the 180-degree turn in Putin’s economic policy going on before our eyes. Not long ago, all traders – let alone foreigners – were kicked out of the gas sector. And in March 2011 they sold 20 percent of Novatek to the company Total. Also recently we kicked Shell out of Sakhalin, and now Rosneft and Exxon have signed a cooperation agreement, rather similar essentially to what Mikhail Khodorkovsky was suspected of being prepared to sign.

In principle, this is how rulers behave whose thrones are tottering and who are worried about legalizing loot through privatization and through buying shares in the loot with foreign companies.

Translation by theotherrussia.org

While the history of corruption in Russia is a long one, what’s begun to change is the status of those speaking out against it. Starting with police officer Aleksei Dymovsky in November 2009, who was promptly fired and discredited by the establishment he tried to criticize, more and more whistleblowers with prominent posts have begun to step into public view.

One such figure, whose story has been lost in the flurry of events since Vladimir Putin announced his presidential run in late September, is Sochi Federal Judge Dmitri Novikov. After attempting to bring several of his colleagues to justice for appropriating public land and selling it back to the government for more than $100 million, Novikov found himself the victim of a system that he already knew was overrun by corrupt officials – but never had to face as a defendant.

As Novikov explained during a press conference last November, he was retroactively stripped of his right to immunity as a judge, “which was absurd,” and held in prison for eight months. He was then freed, all charges against him were dropped, and he was reinstated as a judge – not, however, unscathed.

“I am probably the only judge who went from being a judge to being in jail and then becoming a judge again. And what I saw there and understand – if I, a person with a decent amount of experience and a degree, don’t have the strength to fight this machine, then any of you would simply rather die than have this situation happen to you,” Novikov said.

The judge then described the months of dehumanizing torture he sustained while in jail. Among other measures taken, Novikov was made to strip naked during each interrogation, forced into a concrete box to sit under a stream of ice water for up to two hours, confined to small spaces once the doctors learned that he had claustrophobia, and deprived of air conditioning in 130 F temperatures, to the point that blood began to run from his ears. The torture went on despite the hours of testimony that Novikov voluntarily gave, but which investigators ignored and insisted never happened. “Sometimes the interrogations were held altogether without me,” he said in an interview with Express Gazeta.

Novikov’s account of the torture he endured under politically-motivated charges that were eventually thrown out would be frightening enough on its own. What he had to say about the systemic corruption that that all federal judges participate in to obtain their posts was just icing on the cake.

“The position of a judge in Sochi costs up to half a million dollars,” Novikov explained. “And who has the capacity to sell it? What makes up this sum? This sum is the sum that you give to representatives of the qualification college of judges, which ensures that you get elected; it’s the money that you give to the representatives of the president’s regional plenipotentiary, to federal inspectors, all so that your candidacy is passed by the plenipotentiary. You give a little money to the FSB, you give a little money to the procurator, you even give a little money to the presidential administration.”

He went on to explain how most judges in Sochi abuse their positions to make money off of construction ventures.

“Who in the justice system carries this out?” Novikov asked. “It’s clans. It’s clans where the dad is a judge, the mom is a judge, the son is a judge. Our procurator is another son of an investigator. Not long ago, the president passed an incredible measure to make it so that one family can’t have the mom be a judge, the dad be a lawyer, and the son be an investigator. What began to happen? All the families began to get legal divorces. All of them.”

According to Express Gazeta, numerous television executives have been filming Novikov’s story, questioning his friends and acquaintances in the process. Whether or not they help him escape another eight months of torture following a new set of charges brought against him remains to be seen.

Where the Russian justice system has failed to step up to the plate, the Financial Times has taken up the slack:

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Documents from Mr Kolesnikov, together with a Financial Times investigation, help to lift the veil on the history of Bank Rossiya, whose shareholders include several men with close links to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s supreme leader, including the son of his cousin. Yury Kovalchuk and Niko­lai Shamalov, two of its biggest shareholders, were co-founders with Mr Putin of a lakeside dacha enclave outside St Petersburg.

These men from Russia’s second city are seen by many businessmen and bankers as the core of a new generation of Putin-era oligarchs, combining wealth with links to the country’s top leadership just as their predecessors during the Boris Yeltsin years had done. This is despite Mr Putin’s pledge nearly 12 years ago to eliminate oligarchs as a class.

Now that Mr Putin plans to return as president in elections next March, after four years as prime minister under President Dmitry Medvedev, claims of a new system of crony capitalism are under scrutiny.

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The paper trail Mr Kolesnikov has disclosed to the FT appears to show for the first time how two Bank Rossiya shareholders – Mr Shamalov and Dmitry Gorelov, a former KGB colonel – received via an offshore company funds originally donated for equipment for St Petersburg hospitals, just as they bought their bank stakes.

The documents then appear to show that these same funds and offshore companies may have helped finance the first in a string of Bank Rossiya acquisitions of financial assets from Gazprom, the state-controlled gas producer. Some investors allege the deals that followed were quasi-privatisations that helped to drain billions of dollars in value out of a gas group that had come to symbolise Russia’s commodities-fuelled resurgence. Bank Rossiya rejects this as “nonsense”, saying its growth is due to its professional management and successful strategy as a universal bank. The bank’s assets stood at Rbs274bn ($8.9bn) by October 1, up from Rbs6.7bn at the start of 2004 – a compound annual growth rate of more than 60 per cent.

Read the full article at the Financial Times.

On June 22, a small group of protesters stood outside the Moscow mayor’s office holding posters reading “We had a beekeeper for a mayor and now we have a tile layer,” “put a stop to the tile aggression” and “Sobyanin! Enough digging around in the budget money!”

“There are serious grounds to suspect an element of corruption,” said Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov, present at the protest. “Stones are being laid at a rapid pace, the quality is low, the stones are swelling up, some parts are collapsing.” He called for the work to be temporarily halted until an experiment could be carried out on the tiles.

Police initially tried to detain the protesters, but chose not to in the end.

At the end of this past February, Moscow Vice Mayor Pyotr Biryukov announced plans to tear up 4 million cubic meters of sidewalk pavement and replace it with stone tiles in 2011.

The Russian press explains the mayor’s interest in the project as connected with the fact that his wife, Irina Rubinchik, owns a stone tile business. Whether or not the stones being laid in Moscow were purchased from her company is unclear. But according to Novaya Gazeta, the entire center of Tyumen was laid with stone tiling while Sobyanin was governor of Tyumen Oblast between 2001 and 2005.

While access to the internet itself remains largely unhindered in Russia, many bloggers have come under attack – both online and in person.

In the last two years there have been several cases of technical blocking and numerous cases of content removal. The authorities have also increasingly engaged in harassment of bloggers. At least 25 cases of blogger harassment, including 11 arrests, were registered between January 2009 and May 2010, compared with seven in 2006–08. In addition, dozens of blogs have reportedly been attacked in recent years by a hacker team called the Hell Brigade.

The report did point out areas where access to the internet remains a pressing issue:

The number of internet users jumped from 1.5 million in 1999 to 46.5 million in 2010, and grew by more than 13 million in the last two years, though this still leaves Russia’s penetration rate at 33 percent, lower than the rates in Central European countries. The level of infrastructure differs significantly from place to place, and gaps are evident between urban and rural areas as well as between different types of cities. The worst access conditions can be found in the North Caucasus and the industrial towns of Siberia and the Far East.

Corruption within the federal government also plays a part in what companies control internet access across the country:

Five access providers—Comstar, Vimpelcom, ER-Telecom, AKADO, and the state-owned SvyazInvest—controlled more than 67 percent of the broadband market as of February 2010. Regional branches of SvyazInvest account for 36 percent of subscribers, up from 27.8 percent in 2008. As at the federal level, regional dominance usually depends on political connections and the tacit approval of regional authorities. Although this situation is not the direct result of legal or economic obstacles, it nonetheless reflects an element of corruption that is widespread in the telecommunications sector and other parts of the Russian economy.

Greater concern, however, was focused on blocked online content, particularly opposition-oriented websites.

Although attempts to establish a comprehensive, centralized filtering system have been abandoned, several recent cases of blocking have been reported. In December 2009, a number of ISPs blocked access to the radical Islamist website Kavkaz Center. At almost the same time, the wireless provider Yota blocked several opposition sites. The practice of exerting pressure on service providers and content producers by telephone has become increasingly common. Police and representatives of the prosecutor’s office call the owners and shareholders of websites, and anyone else in a position to remove unwanted material and ensure that the problem does not come up again. Such pressure encourages self-censorship, and most providers do not wait for court orders to remove targeted materials.

…

Content is often removed on the grounds that it violates Russia’s laws against “extremism.” Providers are punished for hosting materials that are proscribed in a list on the website of the Ministry of Justice. The list is updated on a monthly basis and included 748 items as of January 2011. The procedure for identifying extremist materials is nontransparent, leaving ample room for politically motivated content removal. There have been at least three cases of site closures, two of them temporary, on the grounds that the affected sites hosted extremist materials. In February 2010, the major opposition portal Grani.ru was checked for extremism, but the authorities apparently found nothing incriminating.

Among the most disturbing accounts in the report were cases of criminal suits and physical attacks against individual bloggers.

Since January 2009, police and the prosecutor’s office have launched at least 25 criminal cases against bloggers and forum commentators. While some cases were against individuals who posted clearly extremist content, others appear to be more politically motivated. The most severe and widely known sentence was that of Irek Murtazin, a Tatarstan blogger and journalist who received almost two years in prison in November 2009 for defamation.

…

While traditional journalists and activists have faced a series of murders and severe beatings in recent years, physical attacks on Russian bloggers and online activists have so far been comparatively limited. However, one recent event drew significant attention. In November 2010, Oleg Kashin, a reporter for the newspaper Kommersant who was also well known as a blogger, was severely beaten near his home in Moscow. His coverage of protests and political youth movements had prompted vocal responses from pro-Kremlin groups in the past, but it was not known exactly who was responsible for the attack.

Read the report in its entirety by clicking here.

The website cites the newspaper Kommersant, which Ponomarenko spoke to about the sale. The businessman said his holding company had obtained two companies – Lazurnaya Yagoda and Idokopas – that control the incomplete palatial complex.

A source knowledgeable about the deal said it was worth 350 million USD.

Kommersant was unable to reach Shamalov, a personal friend of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the owner Ponomarenko said agreed to sell him the property.

Businessman Sergei Kolesnikov, who first alleged the palace was being built with public money for Putin’s personal use, said the transfer of ownership is only a disguise and the intended purpose of the complex hasn’t changed.

Putin’s press secretary Dmitri Peskov told Kommersant the prime minister had nothing to do with the construction – not while he was president and not in his current position.

“It’s possible that the sellers were influenced by all of this press, I don’t know,” said Ponomarenko. “In general, there’s a rule – buy when there’s a scandal and sell when the news is good.”

For his part, Ponomarenko said he was simply investing money obtained from his $2 billion sale of the Novorossiysk Commercial Sea Port last year.

The article did not elaborate on what exactly was meant by the fact that the complex had been sold as a hotel.

Whatever hang-changing the Black Sea palace may go through, strong evidence remains that Putin is somehow involved. Besides the evidence laid out in Kolesnikov’s open letter to President Dmitri Medvedev at the end of last year, documents have emerged showing that Chief Vladimir Kozhin of the Office of Presidential Affairs actually signed the documents authorizing the construction in 2005, when Putin was still president.

The photographs were published by Ruleaks, a group of self-proclaimed “activists from the Pirate Party of Russia and Russian-speaking activists from other Pirate Parties around the world.” The activists organize the translation of classified documents released by Wikileaks into Russian and the publication of those and other materials on the Ruleaks website.

On a page titled “Photographs of ‘Putin’s Palace’ in Praskoveevka on the Black Sea,” several dozen photographs show a gigantic Italian-style villa, complete with colonnades, balconies, and an enclosed park with a fountain. The interior is extravagantly decorated with frescoes, elaborate chandeliers and a wealth of marble and gold trim. The palace appears to be fully furnished and includes a desk bearing the Russian coat of arms; it is identical to the desk in the prime minister’s Novo-Ogaryovo residence.

This is the first time that high-quality photographs of the villa have been published. It was previously visible from satellite imagery and photographs taken from far away, but the building’s high security made it impossible to get up close. The newly-released photographs appear to have been taken by an on-site worker.

Ruleaks underwent a DDoS attack shortly after the photographs went live on January 18, making it temporarily impossible to access the website.

The organization stipulates that it cannot confirm that the residence belongs to Vladimir Putin: “We are not prepared to confirm whose palace this is, we are only publishing photographs of the facility itself.”

The photographs come one month after St. Petersburg businessman Sergei Kolesnikov sent an open letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev alleging that a palace “for the personal use of the Prime Minister of Russia” was being built on the Black Sea. “To date this palace costs over $1 billion U.S., mainly through a combination of corruption, bribery and theft.” Kolesnikov goes on to painstakingly detail the corrupt business dealings and theft of state funds that culminated in the creation of this complex. After publishing the letter, Kolesnikov reportedly went abroad and is waiting for the president’s reaction.

The newspaper Vedomosti was able to connect with Kolesnikov and verify his claim to the allegations. Judging by the text of his letter, Kolesnikov is the former business partner of two of Putin’s friends, Nikolai Shamalov and Dmitri Gorelov. The newspaper was able to confirm that Shamalov and Gorelov did indeed have a partner named Sergei Kolesnikov. Formally, the palace belongs to Shamalov, but Kolesnikov asserts that it is intended for the prime minister. “If this palace is Shamalov’s, then why is the state spending its own money to build him roads and electrical lines?” Kolesnikov said to Vedomosti.

Putin’s press secretary, Dmitri Peskov, denied that the prime minister had any connection to the Black Sea complex. Shamalov and Gorelov did not respond to inquiries from Vedomosti.

See the full set of photographs on Ruleaks.net.

Click here for the Sergei Kolesnikov’s letter to the Russian president.