Putin’s family, friends amass vast wealth
RUSSIA: A relative of President Vladimir Putin who earns US$8500 (NZ$12,300) a year has amassed a personal fortune of US$573 million, while his inner circle has accumulated total wealth of nearly US$24 billion, according to a report by a group of investigative journalists
They said that Mikhail Shelomov, 49, the son of Putin’s cousin Lyubov Shelomova, holds most of his wealth in shares in large corporations connected to the Russian leader’s inner circle. The group, called the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), alleged that Shelomov was one of a trio of Russians who ‘‘hold enormous assets, they stay out of the public eye, [and] seem largely unaware of their own companies’’.
Roman Shleynov, regional director of OCCRP, alleged that the three individuals, who have close links to Putin, had accumulated huge fortunes despite having only a limited grasp of business.
Russian official records show that Shelomov’s assets are controlled by a company based in St Petersburg called Accept. In an interview in 2009 Shelomov told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper that Accept was his personal project and that state officials had nothing to do with his business.
Reporters from OCCRP learnt that at the end of last year, Accept became a 50 per cent co-owner in a company called Igora Drive, which is building a racetrack near St Petersburg at an estimated cost of US$200m. The track will be situated close to the Igora ski resort, which is used by Putin and which was the secret venue for his younger daughter’s wedding in 2013.
A co-owner of the track is Yury Kovalchuk, a billionaire described by the United States Treasury as Putin’s ‘‘personal banker’’ when he was added to a sanctions list three years ago.
Shelomov, who works for a subsidiary of a state-run company that ships oil products, denies any wrongdoing. When contacted by OCCRP and asked about the racetrack he expressed surprise, saying: ‘‘Why are you asking me?’’
Reminded that his business owned half of the company building the track, he added: ‘‘I’ve heard of it, of course, but not more.’’
OCCRP said he was connected to the president via a web of business ties, as well as the family link.
Since 2004 Accept has received an US$18m loan without a repayment schedule from a Panamanian company, and acquired a stake in Bank Rossiya, whose majority shareholders are Kovalchuk and Gennady Timchenko, another USsanctioned tycoon and friend of Putin.
Accept acquired a 12.5 per cent stake worth US$14.6m in Sogaz, the insurance company of the state energy giant Gazprom. It also took over a company called Platinum with assets of US$324m in 2009, which is connected to a bank run by the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, friends and former judo partners of Putin, who have won large state construction contracts.
The total value of assets that Accept has come to own in the past 13 years is US$573m, OCCRP concluded.
When it was put to Shelomov that people in modest jobs like his did not usually build up such fortunes, he said ‘‘there may be different reasons’’ but declined to elaborate.
OCCRP said the two other men in the trio were Sergei Roldugin, 66, a cellist and godfather to Putin’s older daughter, and Petr Kolbin, a childhood friend of the president.
The so-called Panama Papers leak last year – when millions of documents from the offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca were shared online – showed that Roldugin directly or indirectly owned several companies in tax havens with cashflows of up to US$2b. They received funds from Russian state-controlled banks and companies owned by Putin’s business friends.
Kolbin, a former butcher who has said he is not involved in business, became a shareholder in a company then co-owned by Timchenko, Russia’s third-richest man. The company, Gunvor, once traded about a third of Russian oil.
The Kremlin has vehemently denied that Putin has a personal fortune.
In April he declared a salary of 8,858,432 roubles – about NZ$220,000 – for 2016. Last year Putin said that Roldugin had handled large sums of money because he was buying antique instruments which he intended to donate to the state. He added that people accusing him of benefiting from his friendship with billionaires were ‘‘simply trying to muddy the waters’’.
He added: ‘‘Someone out there from among my friends is engaged in some business. The question is: does this money from these offshore accounts reach officials, including the president?’’
Shleynov told the independent Russian Dozhd TV channel: ‘‘Shelomov is the son of Putin’s cousin.
‘‘He was never a public figure. He doesn’t have a secretary, he picks up his own phone . . . It’s clear that this person is not an oligarch, but nonetheless it’s time to include him in the Forbes list [of richest people] because we calculated that his assets are worth more than half a billion dollars,’’ Shleynov said.
OCCRP estimated that the total wealth of Putin’s inner circle of ‘‘a mix of family members, old friends, and friends who became family members’’ stands at nearly US24b. Their most successful businesses are either linked to the largely state-controlled oil and gas sector or connected to other state corporations, it said.
Two members of the circle are the father and son Nikolai and Kirill Shamalov.
The elder Shamalov is a banker who first became close to Putin in St Petersburg in the 1990s. His son married the president’s younger daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, at Igora. –