Putin Allies Aided Russian Mafia in Spain, Prosecutors Say: "“This Petrov probe could change the narrative of Putin in the West -- from being a Stalinist tyrant defending the interests of his country to being a product of gangster Petersburg who united authorities with organized crime,” said Stanislav Belkovsky..."
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Some of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, including the chairman of OAO Gazprom, a deputy premier and two former ministers, helped one of Russia’s largest criminal groups operate out of Spain for more than a decade, prosecutors in Madrid say.
Members of St. Petersburg’s Tambov crime syndicate moved into Spain in 1996, when Putin was deputy mayor of the former czarist capital, to launder proceeds from their illicit activities, Juan Carrau and Jose Grinda wrote in a petition to the Central Court on May 29, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg News.
The 488-page complaint, the product of a decade of investigations into the spread of Russian organized crime during the Putin era, portrays links between the criminal enterprise and top law-enforcement officials and policy makers in Moscow. The petition, based on thousands of wiretaps, bank transfers and property transactions, is a formal request to charge 27 people with money laundering, fraud and other crimes. Approval by a judge would clear the way for a trial, but Spain doesn’t try people in absentia.
The only Russian official facing possible charges is Vladislav Reznik, a member of Putin’s ruling United Russia party and the deputy head of the finance committee in the lower house of parliament. The complaint, earlier reported by Spain’s El Mundo and ABC newspapers, says Reznik helped the alleged leader of the enterprise, Gennady Petrov, get his associates appointed to key posts in Russia in exchange for assets in Spain. Prosecutors are seeking to confiscate a property they say Reznik owns on the resort island of Majorca.
‘Clear Penetration’
“The criminal organization headed by Petrov managed to achieve a clear penetration of the state structures in his country, not only with the lawmaker Reznik but with several ministers,” the prosecutors say in the petition.
Putin himself is mentioned by name three times in the document, including in a partial transcript of a call between two alleged Tambov operatives in 2007. The men are discussing an issue with a hotel in the Alicante region and one refers to a house that he says Putin owns in nearby Torrevieja.
Putin himself is mentioned by name three times in the document
Photographer: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
“This is total nonsense,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said of the Spanish allegations. “It’s beyond the realm of reason.”
Reznik, in an interview in Moscow, denied any wrongdoing. He said his relationship with Petrov is “purely social” and that he would welcome the opportunity to travel to Spain and clear his name if a trial takes place.
Bank Rossiya
While accusations of graft are not uncommon in Russia, which is tied with Nigeria in Transparency International’s corruption perception ranking, few investigations have identified so many senior officials by name. The highest-ranking person publicly sanctioned under the U.S. Magnitsky Act, enacted in 2012 to punish Russians deemed complicit in the prison death of an accountant who alleged large-scale theft by officials, is a deputy general prosecutor.
Petrov was an early shareholder in Bank Rossiya, the St. Petersburg lender set up by some of Putin’s oldest allies and the first company sanctioned by the U.S. after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. Spanish police arrested Petrov during a raid on his Majorca villa in 2008. He was later allowed to travel to Russia but never returned. Russia doesn’t allow the extradition of its citizens.
A lawyer for Petrov, Roberto Mazorriaga, said by e-mail that prosecutors haven’t provided any evidence to support their allegations.
‘Mafia’ State
Investigators in Spain have been at the vanguard of the fight against Russian organized crime, warning fellow NATO members for years of the dangers posed by what they call state-sanctioned syndicates, an issue that’s become more acute since the conflict in Ukraine rekindled Cold War distrust.
After a briefing by Grinda, one of the prosecutors, in Madrid in 2010, U.S. officials concluded that Putin runs a “virtual mafia” state where the activities of criminal networks are indistinguishable from those of the government, according to a classified cable from the U.S. embassy in the Spanish capital that was published by WikiLeaks.
Russian security services control criminal groups and use them to do things the government “cannot acceptably do,” Grinda was cited as telling U.S. officials at the time. One mafia leader in Spain was actually a Russian intelligence officer tasked with “selling weapons to the Kurds to destabilize Turkey,” the embassy said in the cable.
Litvinenko Murder
A lawyer for the widow of dissident Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died of radioactive poisoning in London in 2006, in January accused senior officials in Moscow of ordering Litvinenko’s death in part to prevent him from helping Spain root out Russian criminal networks.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied having anything to do with Litvinenko’s murder. In March, Putin awarded a medal to the chief suspect in the ongoing U.K. probe, fellow KGB veteran Andrei Lugovoi, who’s now a member of parliament, for “services to the fatherland.”
Petrov used Spain as a base to carry out criminal activities mainly in Russia, including murder, arms trafficking, drug smuggling, extortion and fraud, the prosecutors say, repeating some of the accusations that led to his 2008 arrest. Political and judicial contacts in Russia offered him help, including advice on his personal safety; inside information about business dealings; the threat posed by other criminal groups; planned actions against organized crime; and the amount of influence he needed to exert, they say.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied having anything to do with Litvinenko’s murder
Photographer: Natasja Weitsz/Getty Images
Gazprom, Defense
His network in Moscow, according to the document, includes Viktor Zubkov, the chairman of gas exporter Gazprom who was prime minister and first deputy premier from 2007 to 2012, and Zubkov’s son-in-law, former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.
Serdyukov “does business with Petrov” and Zubkov, who worked for Putin in the St. Petersburg government in the early 1990s, “favored Petrov’s organization with some political decisions,” the prosecutors say, without elaborating. Serdyukov’s lawyer, Genrikh Padva, declined to comment and Zubkov didn’t respond to a request for comment sent through Gazprom’s press service. Neither man is facing indictment.
Other officials mentioned as being “directly related” to Petrov’s group include Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak and Alexander Bastrykin, who runs the powerful Investigative Committee that oversees major criminal inquiries. Bastrykin and Putin both earned their law degrees from Leningrad State University in 1975. Kozak graduated from the same law school a decade later and worked in City Hall at the same time as Putin.
Post-Soviet Chaos
Kozak -- about whom no detail is provided in the complaint -- said he only knows of Petrov through media reports, according to his spokesman, Ilya Djous. Bastrykin’s committee said in a statement that it didn’t have any information corroborating the reported information of Spanish prosecutors.
Another senior Russian official at the time, Leonid Reiman, who was communications minister and a Kremlin adviser from 1999 to 2010, was a business partner of Petrov’s, the prosecutors say. Reiman has “no ties” to Petrov, OAO Angstrem, a technology company in Moscow that Reiman is chairman of, said by e-mail.
Petrov, 67, was an influential figure in St. Petersburg during the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and knew many of the city’s political elite, including Zubkov, Bastrykin and Kozak, two people who knew him at the time said on condition of anonymity.
78 Calls
Petrov proved to be influential in Moscow under President Putin, too, the Spanish prosecutors say. When Putin created the Investigative Committee as a counterweight to the Prosecutor General’s Office in 2007, Petrov helped secure Bastrykin’s appointment as its first chairman, they say, citing wire taps of calls between Petrov and one of Bastrykin’s future deputies.
Other officials mentioned as being “directly related” to Petrov’s group include Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak
Anastasia Tsayder/Bloomberg Markets
Another law-enforcement official, Nikolai Aulov, is “one of the most important persons for Petrov” in Russia, according to the document. Aulov is a deputy of Viktor Ivanov, who runs the Federal Narcotics Service and is a former KGB colleague of Putin’s in Leningrad and later St. Petersburg.
Investigators logged 78 phone calls between Aulov and Petrov. In March 2008, according to the complaint, Petrov asked an associate to get Aulov to pressure Russia’s new customs chief to facilitate port shipments for his group.
The drug agency’s press service referred requests for comment from Aulov and Ivanov to an interview Ivanov gave to the Kommersant newspaper this month. In it, Ivanov said he doesn’t know what “dirty political games” the Spanish are playing because Aulov helped bust a criminal gang led by Petrov in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s.
“This Petrov probe could change the narrative of Putin in the West -- from being a Stalinist tyrant defending the interests of his country to being a product of gangster Petersburg who united authorities with organized crime,” said Stanislav Belkovsky, a Kremlin adviser during Putin’s first term who consults at Moscow’s Institute for National Strategy.
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Nitli / PixabayA local expert told Tszunzhen during the trip that he had helped construct the tunnel.
A secret passage used to smuggle intelligence out of Communist China and into the Soviet Union has been discovered in the northern Heilongjiang province, a news report said Monday.
The tunnel, located in the Dongning district, was found by researchers who have spent years trying to locate its whereabouts, Interfax quoted China's Xinhua news agency as saying.
It was built in the 1930s and was used during World War II to allow Chinese intelligence officials to exchange intelligence with Communist allies the Soviet Union, Interfax reported, citing Xinhua. Both countries were then at war with the Empire of Japan.
The Moscow Times was unable to verify the original Chinese report as Xinhua's English-language agency had not published the story by the time this article went to print.
Rumors of the existence of the secret passage surfaced several years ago when an employee of the Dongning fortress museum named Van Tszunzhen went on a visit to North Korea, Interfax reported, citing the Xinhua report.
A local expert told Tszunzhen during the trip that he had helped construct the tunnel. Further research confirmed the existence of the passage, after which the Chinese side started trying to find it, Interfax cited the Xinhua report as saying.
The passage is located 55 kilometers from the Russian city of Ussuriysk in the Primorye region, and 153 kilometers from the far eastern city of Vladivostok, Interfax reported.
Fifty years from now historians will no doubt wonder why President Vladimir Putin was preparing to use force against his own people at a time when he enjoyed a nearly 90 percent approval rating.
During a roundtable discussion at the Army 2015 forum, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that his ministry plans to commission research on the subject of "color revolutions and society."
"Some say the army should remain on the sidelines and not take part in the political process, while some say the opposite. We will order research into this question," he said.
"We do not have the right to repeat the collapses that occurred in 1991 and 1993," Shoigu explained. "We must understand how to prevent that and how to educate our youth so that they move in the right direction, one that will provide for the continued peaceful, progressive movement of the country."
In so saying, the defense minister left no doubt as to which conclusion the future authors of that study should draw.
The fact that the Defense Ministry decided to farm out that study indicates that it has a discipline problem.
After all, Russia's top generals announced at an international conference more than a year ago that "color revolutions" are actually a new form of warfare invented by those treacherous Americans as a way of inciting the people against dictators whom Washington finds undesirable — that is, against leaders who, "in full accordance with the law," have secured for themselves a perpetual hold on power.
And thus, despite the fact that the Constitution implies the eternal reign of the "fathers of the people," Washington has connived a way to overthrow them. It would seem that after senior leaders reached these conclusions, the General Staff would have long ago submitted a plan to the Defense Ministry for countering "color revolutions" — that is, a specific directive on how to use the country's armed forces against the Russian people.
However, I suspect that the officers of the General Staff decided not to personally commit the sin of looking for arguments to justify the domestic use of force. For that reason, they needed outside "researchers" to do their dirty work for them. And they immediately found some.
According to the Kommersant newspaper, the Military Academy of the General Staff has been working on its own initiative since late 2014 on methods for countering "color revolutions." It is entirely possible that the Defense Ministry will officially commission such research from the Military Academy in the near future.
One goal of such "scholarly" work is to "develop a unified approach to identifying, preventing and combating the means for 'color revolutions,' 'soft power' (non-contact means for acting against a potential adversary) asymmetrical actions and measures for strengthening Russia's political system and the political culture of politicians, civil servants, citizens and businesses."
Put simply, the scholars from the Military Academy of the General Staff are prepared to find justification — if circumstances necessitate — for classifying some of the Russian people as military opponents of the ruling regime.
This coincides with an initiative put forward last week to hold a referendum in Moscow on restoring the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky (the founder and head of the Cheka — the bloody secret services of the Communist regime) on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad.
Only recently, it seemed that such a referendum could only have come from the Communists, and Moscow officials clearly demonstrated their unwillingness to participate in such a venture. And on the eve of the planned deadline, the Central Elections Commission unequivocally announced that it would not permit the referendum.
But then a miracle happened. Just a few hours before the deadline, the highly principled and incorruptible members of the Central Elections Commission reversed their decision. Now the residents of the capital will have to vote on whether to restore the monument to the Cheka chief — and spend 450 million rubles ($8.1 million) of taxpayer money in the process.
It appears that the Kremlin has decided to bring historical events full circle. The toppling of that statue to Dzerzhinsky marked the beginning of change in the country. That occurred in 1991, when Muscovites took to the streets and thwarted the attempted military coup. It was to those events that Shoigu referred when he said the regime could not allow their recurrence.
Thus, the restoration of the monument would symbolize a return to Soviet repressive practices. Why mince words? The authorities are testing the waters to see if the Russian people would like a replay of the repressive past.
After all, the Soviet films that state-controlled television has been airing regularly for years have convinced ordinary viewers that Dzerzhinsky was austere, incorruptible, fair and totally ruthless — in short, the ideal executioner.
Now the authorities have decided to find out to what extent the residents of Russia's most advanced city are ready to embrace this executioner — that is, to give their hearts to this regime and allow it to use or abuse the people as it sees fit.
All of this points to an amazing paradox. On one hand, the vast majority of Russians respect Putin. On the other hand, the Kremlin is preparing both ideologically and physically to use force against the population. The Russian authorities' deep contempt for the people is the only way to explain this phenomenon.
The Kremlin is convinced that the Russian masses are easily manipulated into holding this or that view of their leaders: today Kremlin spin doctors convince them to love Putin, tomorrow the West brainwashes them into hating him. And that is why Russian intelligence agencies and the military are preparing for the violent suppression of civil protests.
Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.
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