RUSSIA: PANAMA LEAK TARGETED PUTIN
Documents don’t mention president but include friends
MOSCOW Russia said Monday that President Vladimir Putin was the main target of an unprecedented media leak into the financial activity of wealthy individuals who hold accounts offshore.
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told the Russian news agen- cy Interfax that it was “obvious” the aim of the anonymous release of more than 11 million documents belonging to Mossack Fonseca, a law firm in Panama, was to undermine the president before parliamentary elections likely to be held in September. Peskov said Putin had not committed any crime.
Though Putin’s name does not appear in any of the records published Sunday in a massive coordinated investigation among dozens of media groups, the paper trail does show that many of his associates and close friends — including musician Sergei Roldugin, godfather to his daughter Maria and the man who intro- duced him to his wife, Lyudmilla — made millions from deals that would have been hard to do without his knowledge. Before the leak, the Kremlin said it was aware that an organization was trying to smear the president.
An unnamed spokesman for businessman Arkady Rotenberg confirmed to the RBC news service that Rotenberg had given loans to Roldugin, but the loans were commercial and several times smaller than the ones alleged in the documents just released. According to the report, Roldugin controlled two offshore companies — Sonnette Overseas and International Media Oversees — which received loans from three offshore companies belonging to Rotenberg totaling $185 million.
Russian state-owned television largely ignored the reports, except for the NTV station. “It is clear that the degree of Putinophobia has reached a level where it is ... impossible to say anything good about Russia, about its successes,” Putin spokesman Peskov said, according to NTV.
A handful of activists held protests Monday near the Kremlin, holding up signs calling for Putin’s impeachment.
Russian member of parliament Alexander Tarnavsky said as much as 80% of the Russian economy is controlled by offshore companies, the TASS news agency reported.
Russia’s state Duma has pledged to fight this problem and bring capital back into the country.