Analysis: A realm fit for a tsar
n an autumn day in September 2010, Sergei Kolesnikov slipped out of his condominium in a row of town houses in St Petersburg. To avoid attracting attention among his neighbours, a secretive clique of financiers, he carried just a small bag. He hurried to the airport and bought tickets to Turkey and then the US.
Mr Kolesnikov had reason to be cautious. For 17 years, he had worked closely with several of these financiers as they helped transform a little-known St Petersburg-based bank – Bank Rossiya – into one of Russia’s most powerful financial empires, themselves becoming very wealthy along the way. But, disillusioned with how things had developed, Mr Kolesnikov was preparing to tell the inside story of their rise.
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.
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.
Appetites in an energy boom
Mr Kolesnikov’s tale nonetheless provides a glimpse into a quiet transformation inside Mr Putin’s regime over the eight years after he cemented his hold on power. He had cowed big business with the 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Yukos oilman, and removed the last vestige of political competition by ending regional governors’ elections in 2004.
The transfers from Gazprom that benefited Bank Rossiya highlight the subsequent lack of checks and balances over Mr Putin’s power, critics say – and the growing appetites of his inner circle amid Russia’s energy boom. Most tellingly, Mr Kolesnikov’s tale threatens to belie the austere image Mr Putin has sought to present, with Mr Shamalov – one of the Bank Rossiya shareholders Mr Kolesnikov worked with – apparently seeking to build a lavish palace for his “tsar”.
Mr Kolesnikov claims those who dealt with him initially nicknamed Mr Putin “boss”, then “tsar”. “First it was a joke but then it was serious. Only he could decide everything. A transformation was going on,” Mr Kolesnikov claims. “After the second presidential election in 2004, this understanding that he could rule forever began to appear. You understand all this with Medvedev was based on finding a way for him to remain.”
Documents Mr Kolesnikov has shown to the FT provide some support for his claims that money sent from offshore companies involved in the Bank Rossiya transactions was later transferred, through other companies, to pay for construction work on a Black Sea resort complex now claimed to have been intended as a secret palace for Mr Putin.
Mr Kolesnikov, who oversaw many of the payments as a business partner of Mr Gorelov and Mr Shamalov, and whose name is on many documents reviewed by the FT, first made claims in an open letter to Mr Medvedev late last year. He alleged at the time that Mr Putin had instructed Mr Shamalov to set aside part of the medical donation cash for investments in the economy but that other projects were dropped to focus on the Black Sea retreat. That blossomed into an Italian-style palace fitted with three helipads, a summer amphitheatre, a marina and a teahouse with swimming pools, he claimed.
Mr Putin’s spokesman and Mr Shamalov dismissed these claims, initially reported in the Washington Post. However, the links now emerging between all these transactions pose troubling questions. If Mr Shamalov controlled the money to build the palace, was he acting on Mr Putin’s behalf in the acquisition of stakes in Bank Rossiya and its expansion too?
Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin’s spokesman, says the prime minister had no connection to any of it. “Putin never had and does not have any connection to Bank Rossiya, nor to any transactions or deals through any of the offshore companies or companies that are mentioned,” Mr Peskov says. “He has no connection to the growth of the bank I can officially say this is nonsense.” All kinds of “insinuations” are being stoked ahead of parliamentary elections on Sunday, he adds.
Mr Shamalov dismisses the claims as “inventions”, declining to respond further. Mr Gorelov confirms some of the Bank Rossiya-related transactions but says he acquired his holding in the bank with legitimate profits from his medical equipment business, and is the sole beneficiary of the stake.
Mr Kolesnikov has no documentary evidence the transactions were conducted on Mr Putin’s behalf. But he points to how the same chain of offshore companies was involved in transferring funds that were subsequently channelled to companies he says were working on the palace project. As a former KGB officer, he adds, Mr Putin “was taught especially never to leave any trace. There are no such documents” with his name on.
FT™ ©2011The Financial Times Limited 2011. You may share using our article tools.
И так далее, и так далее... Это не вся статья, только отрывок. Редакцией FT ™ статья заявлена как журналистское расследование. То есть редакция несёт полную юридическую ответственность за то, что написано в статье.