Investigators do not doubt that the then-president was implicated in a number of crimes related to embezzlement of budget funds while was serving in the government of the City of St. Petersburg. Lt. Col. Andrei Zykov, a senior investigator for special matters at the Investigation Department of the Interior Ministry, was in charge of the case. ZYKOV: From 1993 to 1995, the( Russian )government was providing substantial financial support to many businesses. They were losing money, on the verge of collapse, desperately trying to stay afloat to preserve jobs. They needed infusions of cash to pay salaries. State funds were distributed from the coffers of state-owned enterprises. There was a construction company in St. Petersburg called Twentieth Trust which had been privatized in 1991. In 1993 alone, roughly $4.5 million disappeared from the company’s books, and it was getting 80% of its revenues from the City. It appeared that it had laundered tens of millions of dollars, and in 1999 a criminal case was opened to investigate.
This became known as the “Putin affair” because, while Anatoly Sobchak was mayor of the City Putin was at that time his second in command. Every signature in regard to budget transfers would have a passed across Putin’s desk. There is a resort area in Spain called Alicante & Torrevieja, on the Costa Blanca, on the Mediterranean. Twentieth Trust became involved in building a small community of about 30 summer homes there. According to the information we gathered, Putin owned one and Sobchak had one as well. After Putin became president, a Spanish newspaper reported that between 1996 and 2000 Putin had visited the town 37 times, each time crossing the border with a false passport (during part of this time, Putin was in charge of the FSB). Apparently the government of Spain knew all about it, but did not want an international incident. ZYKOV: In August 2000, the Prosecutor General’s office issued a totally illegal order to cease the work. It had absolutely no right to do so. There were about twenty staffers working on the case and we were waiting for responses to various international inquiries we had made. They told us: “Where the President is concerned, criminal cases do not proceed.” Frankly, we were quite lucky to have been allowed to go on as long as that. There were numerous efforts to derail the investigation, and we were amazed they had not succeeded. After all, who would dare to prosecute someone like Kudrin or Putin? Had we been allowed to go forward, several criminal charges would have been filed against Putin for abuse of office under Articles 285 and 286 of the Criminal Code, and against Kudrin for taking bribes in the form of an apartment in Italy, which had also been constructed by Twentieth Trust. At that time, Kudrin was in charge of the Finance Committee in St. Petersburg. We had all the relevant documents, including faked bills that showed work on the apartment at much lower than actual cost, which were actually paid by Kudrin to cover his tracks. ZYKOV: As I said there were twenty in the group, but only three or four of them were from St. Petersburg. The rest were brought in from Novgorod, Karelia and Kaliningrad. We specifically wanted people from out of town, so it would be harder to exercise influence over them. My right-hand man was Oleg Kalinichenko, he worked on all of the really big criminal cases in St. Petersburg. He came under so much pressure as a result of his involvement in the Putin case that he had to resign from the service, and he ended up joining the church However, in 2001 he was including the “case of Putin” has come under such a press that he was forced to resign from the police and after 2 months already became a monk. As Chukovsky wrote: “When good people become exhausted from protesting the endless nonsense which dominates our lives, they turn to religion.” Of the entire group, I’m the only one who’s still able to talk about what happened. ZYKOV: Kalinichenko used to maintain a whole dossier on Putin. It showed that while serving as the Chairman of the City’s Committee on Foreign Economic Relations he routinely took bribes. And I’ve spoken to many people myself who were a party to such transactions with him. You couldn’t establish a joint venture in the City without going through Putin, and you couldn’t go through him without paying a bribe. ZYKOV: Two reasons, first you can’t simply expand an open investigation to infinity, and second you need hard proof, not just rumors. You need a sworn statement which can be used in court that states “I am so-and-so and I gave a bribe to Vladimir Vladmirovich Putin.” That’s when you can begin to address such matters, but it’s very, very difficult to obtain such a statement because the people who would need to give them have no desire to do it, they understand the risk of losing their livelihoods or even their freedom, or even their lives. ZYKOV: Kalinichenko’s dossier had material on the purchase of Putin’s apartment on Vasilievsky Island in St. Petersburg. The City had refurbished some apartments there, and it turned out that Putin, then the deputy mayor, had the desire to live in that neighborhood. So a scheme was hatched. A joint stock company called Linix owned some apartments in Vsevolozhsk, it’s not clear how. And through the direct intervention of Mayor Anatoly Sobchak and the Head of Administration for the Vasileostrovsky District, Valery Golubev, these apartments were exchanged for the ones on Vasilievsky, although the latter were far more valuable, on a one-for-one basis. The units were then distributed to various government officials, and apartment 24 in building 17 on Second Line Avenue went to Putin. ZYKOV: It went all the way back to Putin’s activities in Germany, and it implied that Putin was a double agent. It seems he dabbled in junk bonds, and when he arrived back in Leningrad he was casting about to get a chauffeur for his Volga. It showed how many of his cronies were brought into the St. Petersburg administration, and indeed had been brought into the law faculty at St. Petersburg University, where Sobchak was in charge. And Putin was close to Dmitri Medvedev at that time, and Medvedev managed to get hold of 10% of the shares of Europe’s largest pulp and paper mill, and thus to become a millionaire. And this was just Medvedev, an advisor to Putin. http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/explosive-video-documents-depth-putins-mafia-state Can you imagine what sort of money Putin had his hands on? ZYKOV: I got fired, and soon after that faced criminal investigation. This happened not immediately but a year and a half later. At that time I was involved in investigating the governor of the Nenets Autonomous District, Vladimir Butov. To investigate a senator, and at that time all governors were senators, meant you needed the permission of the Federation Council, because they were otherwise immune. When we first got information about Butov, the Council refused permission and we could do nothing. But then at the beginning of 2002, the senators lost their immunity. So I raised the issue of pursuing Butov with Deputy Attorney General Vladimir Zubrin, and I tried to gather facts pertaining to illegal conduct that occurred while Butov was a Senator. And I did this without getting approval because I knew that if I had sought approval it would have been instantly denied. I soon faced very intense pressure to cease the investigation, and I resisted it, even threatening to go to the press. I was reprimanded and this because a basis for my discharge and then criminal investigation for abuse of office. The investigation was the continued by others who concluded that Butov was as pure as the driven snow. And I became the one accused. Had it not been for this, I would have been in line for automatic promotion. Later on, they also accused me of improper seizure of documents in connection with my investigation of the Putin affair. As of 2004, the head of the Investigations Committee was Alexei Anichin, a personal friend and classmate of Putin’s. He personally approved the decision to initiate a criminal investigation against me, and it was presided over by the head of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Central District (they could not trust ordinary officers to proceed with such nonsense). The charges were totally incomprehensible and illegal, and the case was dismissed. I think they realized that to go forward with the charges would have meant an unavoidable public confrontation, and they didn’t want that.
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Reblogged this on Ann Novek–With the Sky as the Ceiling and the Heart Outdoors.
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