One of Rostec’s top managers, the head of the Russian Helicopters state corporation, turned out to be the owner of expensive villas in Spain and Dubai, as well as a palace in Crimea.
As the investigation by Alexei Navalny’s team showed, the representative of Putin’s elite, taking advantage of his official position, privatized a number of defense plants, registered them to front persons and used the proceeds from the enterprises to purchase personal real estate abroad and in Russia.
Navalny’s associates estimated the total value of Kolesov’s assets at 14 billion rubles. Five villas in Majorca were found among his property. The first of them, with an area of 1200 square meters and costing 5 million euros, is registered to Kolesov’s seven-year-old daughter Nicole. Initially the object belonged to the defense plant Elekon in Tatarstan, which Kolesov withdrew from state ownership, but in 2022, against the background of the war in Ukraine, the property was rewritten to his four-year-old daughter. Nearby is another villa with an area of 500 square meters and worth 3 million euros. It was registered to the Tambov Factory of Electrical Appliances, but then 70-year-old Kolesov’s sister Lyudmila Tanno became the owner. Three other villas in Mallorca of 750 square meters each and a total value of 10 million euros were bought in the name of Kolesov’s four-year-old son Alexei. Since he could not sign the documents on his own, his representative Ekaterina Blokhina, Tenno’s daughter and Kolesov’s niece, signed for him.
In addition, Navalny’s team discovered that the head of Russian Helicopters had two villas on the island of Palma Jumeirah in Dubai: one with an area of 1,800 sq. meters and worth $25 million, decorated in the name of Kolesov. meters and worth $25 million, registered to his subordinate Lyudmila Koshcheeva, and another one with an area of 1400 square meters and worth $10 million, officially owned by Kolesov’s former mother-in-law Nelly Mazayeva. Also in Dubai, Kolesov’s eldest daughter Anastasia and her husband own two apartments – one with an area of 822 square meters for $23 million and the second with an area of 532 square meters for $10 million in The Residence near the Burj Khalifa skyscraper.
In addition, Kolesov owns a gypsy baroque palace in occupied Yalta worth 1 billion rubles, a plot of land on Rublyovka with an area of 11,000 square meters for 1 billion rubles, as well as a private tourist resort near Kazan with bowling, sauna, shooting galleries and security. He also has a Bombardier Global Express business jet for $20 million, an Embraer Legacy 650 jet for $10 million, and an Agusta-Westland 109 helicopter for $5 million. The entire fleet is registered to an affiliated firm, Spetsdostavka.
According to investigators from Navalny’s team, Kolesov acquired all of this through the alienation of shares in large defense companies that are part of the Radioelectronic Technologies Concern (KRET). Kolesov headed this concern for 12 years before joining Russian Helicopters. The shares were sold as “non-core assets” at an undervalued price to companies related to Kolesov. Thus, the enterprises were actually transferred into his hands. In particular, the shares of Elekon, Electrodetal, Kazan Electrotechnical Plant, Cable Industry Design Bureau and Ramensky Instrument-Making Plant were alienated.
Five firms created by Kolesov were involved in the scheme: JSC Star, registered to Nikolai Shadrin, a Samara-based narcologist; JSC Vysokiye Tekhnologii, owned by Kolesov’s driver Denis Samonov; Ingroup LLC, registered to Dilara Krainova, Kolesov’s first mother-in-law; Canfinance LLC, registered to Natalia Rumyantseva, an employee of the Elekon plant; and Riverpark LLC, registered to Elena Matina, another Elekon employee.