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The Fund to Fight Corruption (FBK) created by Navalny published an investigation on Tuesday about Russian President Vladimir Putin, who would benefit from a real “palace” on the shores of the Black Sea.
The Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, today accused the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, of receiving from his friends the “most expensive palace in the world” on the shores of the Black Sea. The Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK) created by Navalny, published on Tuesday an investigation into “the largest corruption plot in Russia” for an amount of more than 100 billion rubles (about 1.4 billion dollars).
See more: Who is Alexei Navalny, the activist who has Putin in check?
The total area of the palace is 17,692 square meters, which makes it the largest private home in Russia, and the land on which it is located occupies an area of 68 hectares. The property is surrounded by a 7,000 hectare piece of land owned by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB, former KGB), a kind of “containment perimeter” to prevent unwanted visits.
There is an indoor swimming pool, a gym, a helipad, an underground ice rink, a church, a greenhouse, a tunnel to the sea, and huge vineyards. The FBK also assures in its investigation that it knows who the front men of these properties are; makes reference to Mikhail Shélomov, Putin’s distant relative, billionaire businessman Alexandr Ponomarenko, and oligarch Guennadi Timchenko, among others.
The video of the investigation, lasting 1 hour and 52 minutes and which was planned when the anti-corruption activist was still in intensive care in Germany, only on the YouTube platform recorded more than 450,000 views in a couple of hours. Navalny, aware that he could be arrested upon his return to Russia, agreed with his partners to publish the material once he was back in Moscow, because, as the opponent himself explained, “we do not want the protagonist (…) to think that we fear him ”. Here the video published by the opposition leader:
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, quickly rejected these accusations, telling the Ria Novosti news agency that “it is not true”, although he assured that he still does not know the details of this investigation.
Legal proceedings
Navalny has long been in the crosshairs of the Russian authorities. He became known for his published online investigations into the corruption of Putin’s elites and environment. In any case, its celebrity is mostly confined to the major urban centers and the most connected generations.
See more: Russian police detain opponent Alexei Navalny at Moscow airport
On the political level, before his poisoning, he was preparing an active campaign with a view to the legislative elections of September 2021, amid the erosion of the popularity of the ruling party, United Russia.
Three European laboratories concluded that the opponent was poisoned with a Novichok-type military nerve agent, developed in Soviet times. Moscow rejected those conclusions and denounced a plot.
Since his return to Russia, Navalny has been under threat from court cases that could end in prison terms of several years. The opponent will be tried on Wednesday for defamation of a former World War II combatant, a crime punishable by a fine or imprisonment, his lawyers announced Tuesday.
But above all he has another key judicial appointment on February 2, when a court will examine the revocation of a suspended sentence to which he was sentenced, which could open the possibility that he will have to carry out a part of the sentence of three years and half of prison that was imposed on him in 2014.
Since late December, he has also been the subject of a fraud investigation on suspicion of having spent donations for personal use, a crime with a penalty that can go up to 10 years in prison. Navalny claims that these cases are politically motivated.
With information from Efe and Afp *
