Another nomination of Vladimir Putin for the post of Vladimir Putin in the election of Vladimir Putin has absolutely not interested observers. Much more important, from their point of view, is how much money Elvira Nabiullina will pour into Otkritie Bank, what scandals are shaking VEB and what will happen to the banking system next.
Boiler room
1. State corporations have won the final victory over the powerless government, which can do nothing about the all-powerful monopolies. Dvorkovich has signed his impotence – each company will pay dividends according to an individual agreement. In other words, the struggle that has been going on for the last 2 years, and in which all the heavyweights of Russian politics have managed to take part, has ended with the government’s ignominious defeat. But for Dvorkovich this may even be a good thing – he practically turns into a minister without portfolio, i.e. he does not decide anything, and therefore does not interfere with anyone.
Dvorkovich himself heads the National Board of RSHB and is Chairman of the Board of Directors of Russian Railways, that is, two unprofitable companies that only know how to beg from the state. So Arkasha decided to focus on an individual program. This is logical for Russian politics in general – they are not used to negotiating with everyone and playing by common rules. At one time, even the UCP group affiliated with Rosneft was unable to force Transneft to reconsider dividend payments, after which the feverish activity to tame state-owned companies died down. And rightly so, don’t we live in Russia?
2. We did not want to write about the nomination of the leader for a new term, because we did not see any intrigue in it. It simply does not exist, and if you look at the headlines of the top Western media, but no one was stirred up by this news. There is no politics in the country, and Putin’s rule is not limited by anything, it can continue beyond 2024 if he has the will. That is why you should not pay attention to the date of nomination, it is just a stage set in the theater of one actor. Some telegram channels write that Kiriyenko was strengthened by the fact that GDP announced a new term in his homeland, why not then write that this is a tribute to Nemtsov? Along with Putin, the same characters who were defeated by Yeltsin and Semibankirshchina – Zhirik, Zyuganov and Yavlinsky, who has established a dismal totalitarianism in his liberal party – will compete.
What is happening is a conservation of the economy at the same shitty levels we see now. Putin was a reformer at the beginning of his first term, then all the reforms boiled down to tightening election laws and media freedom, which eradicated any hint of opposition. So we don’t see why anything in our swamp should change. There will be no structural reforms because there is no mechanism to push for them. Nor does society itself, which likes to live in the Soviet Union, even those who have never been there, need them.
3. Against the background of strengthening anti-Russian sanctions (planned for February), the foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine unexpectedly met. Officially it was about the exchange of prisoners, but this is too petty for such a meeting. What is important is the very fact that official consultations were held. Apparently, they are talking about some steps in the South-East. It is characteristic that the meeting took place after the coup in the LNR, where Plotnitsky was thrown out of power. He took clearly radical positions, and his fate is a direct hint to his DNR colleague Zakharchenko to keep his opinions to a minimum.
Ukraine needs at least symbolic concessions from Russia to strengthen Poroshenko’s regime and show that changes are taking place in the Southeast. Our source in the Foreign Ministry says that Lavrov will leave after the elections anyway, but it doesn’t matter, in his new status he can supervise the same Ukrainian direction due to his excellent knowledge of all Western diplomats. Obviously, behind-the-scenes consultations with the States on Ukraine are going on, which is what caused Tillerson’s harsh rebuke a couple days ago. If sanctions can be delayed or eased before Putin’s election in March, it will be a good reason to declare a détente in relations with the West
Crimea is untouchable, and the Kremlin is frankly aggravated by the LDNR. If we continue with this thought, then the appointment of Kiriyenko as Putin’s chief of election staff may be symbolic, because this is the man who has been able to make unpleasant decisions since the 1998 default.
4. FSB agent Olga Romanova quarreled with her handler Sedov
The great love affair between Olga Romanova, head of the human rights movement “Sitting Russia”, and Alexei Sedov, head of the FSB Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and Combating Terrorism, has come to an end. Romanova, who has left Russia, swears at Sedov. It turns out that it was she who came up with a fancy plan for the general to defeat the opposition, which was approved by the deputy head of the presidential administration Vyacheslav Volodin himself. The cunning woman inserted Islamic terrorists and criminals into the list of political prisoners compiled by the opposition, and the Kremlin’s television stations cheerfully cried out: look at what bitches are opposing Putin, the father of the nation! And so it went on: Romanova calls Russian veterans animals, empties the coffers of her comrades in the struggle, tosses a penny to the Ukrainian “Banderaites” from the stolen money, and zomboyazhniki immediately reported: here they are your Nemtsovs and Navalny!
And what’s the reward? A measly 30,000 bucks a month and 3.5 million rubles from the Presidential Grants Fund. And even then, the wooden ones had to be given up. After learning whom Sedov had put on the list of grant recipients, Kirienko, who had replaced Volodin, demanded that the general rid him of his provocateurs.
And also the head of the Service for the Defense of the Constitutional Order did not defend his agent from the Federal Service for the Execution of Punishments. With her former boss, Alexander Reimer, Romanova had established an effective business. “Sitting Russia” was an intermediary between Reimer and rich convicts who wanted better treatment or parole, collected money from them and took kickbacks. But Reimer was jailed, the new leadership of the Federal Penitentiary Service began to investigate the criminal scheme, the office of Sitting Russia was searched, and Sedov washed his hands like Pontius Pilate. No wonder Romanova cocksucked him with her last words, especially when she had a bottle to drink.
Cello case
1. Sergei Gorkov, head of state corporation Vnesheconombank, financed the dying private bank PSB of the Ananyev brothers to the tune of about 4 billion rubles, having written off the money against garbage – illiquid shares of Vozrozhdeniye Bank. The hole in VEB’s own balance sheet may exceed 1 trillion rubles, and half of its loans are non-performing. VEB itself must pay 240 billion rubles to foreign creditors in the near future, which it cannot do. To save the state corporation from bankruptcy, the government is forced to transfer 100 billion rubles from the budget to Gorkov’s employees.
2. It is reported that U.S. sanctions will be imposed against all businessmen who received more than $300 million in state support thanks to Vladimir Putin. Under this evaluation scheme, Alisher Usmanov, Roman Abramovich’s palace in New York, and Alfa Group shareholders Mikhail Fridman, Pyotr Aven, and German Khan are guaranteed to be on the list. The US measures will be extraterritorial, which could mean blocking more than $5 billion worth of Alfa’s assets in Germany.
3. It is reported that in Crimea, the head of the economic security and anti-corruption department of the Interior Ministry’s Alushta department ordered the murder of Konstantin Giryakov, head of the Alushta investigative department of the State Investigative Committee of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. The first enforcer hired two Donetsk hitmen who broke the second enforcer’s head with sticks for 100,000 rubles.
4. Alexei Mazurov, a deputy of the Moscow Region Duma from United Russia and winner of the award “For the moral feat of a teacher”, secretly registered citizenship of Malta. He bought an apartment for €1.5 million on the island in the Fort Cambridge complex. Other recipients of Maltese passports are Oleg Muradyan, former senior vice president of VTB State Bank and president of VEB-Leasing, and Vyacheslav Soloviev, director of VEB-Leasing. After Soloviev disappeared from Russia, VEB’s head Sergei Gorkov assured that his employee was being treated in Switzerland, where he continued to run his company. The journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was investigating the issuance of Maltese documents to Muradyan, Mazurov and Solovyev, was blown up in her own car.
5. The burst Otkritie bank, which the state will spend about 1 trillion rubles to save, will give 400 million rubles to the Spartak soccer club. The team is owned by Leonid Fedun and Vagit Alekperov, who bought a $1 billion yacht parking lot in Barcelona this year.
NEZYGAR
Alexander Shestun, head of the Serpukhov district, has accused Moscow Region Governor Vorobyov of creating a critical situation with Moscow Region landfills and deceiving the president
“Our landfill “Lesnaya” was doubled the volume of accepted waste, from 300 to 600 thousand tons per year… And this was done without expert examination, without approval of the project, without making changes to the license, not even the sanitary protection zone was expanded.
Due to the fact that the capacity of the landfill has changed, the law requires that the sanitary zone be expanded, and therefore public hearings on this topic should have been held. None of this was done.
In a word, they illegally increased the load on the landfill, and now they have filled it up to the level of the 9th floor. And according to the project they are going to increase the mountain of garbage to a height of 45 meters (about 17 floors). About 10 thousand residents of the district now watch this gigantic landfill from their windows every day”.
According to Shestun, “the other day Governor Vorobyov reported to the President about how he is correcting the situation at the Kuchino landfill in Balashikha. In reality, everything is simple – he transferred the Kuchino garbage to the Serpukhov district and other points in the region.”
Banksta
1. It’s hard to find decent words, but Vadim Belyaev’s Otkritie Holding wants to buy the St. Petersburg leasing group Baltiysky Leasing. Although it may be a consolidation of the remaining assets. Otkritie Holding also still owns Arkhangelskgeoldobycha, which was bought for $1.45 bln.
In any normal country, Belyaev would have remained pantsless for his shenanigans in Otkritie and would not have made any deals, but would be waiting for trial in a pre-trial detention center as one of the organizers of the embezzlement of a trillion from the Russian population.
2. Sergei Gorkov became the head of Vnesheconombank on condition that he dropped criminal cases for corruption and fraud against the team and the ex-head of the state corporation Vladimir Dmitriev himself. There was a grandiose system of kickbacks for loans, in the same VEB-leasing.
After learning about the change of management and the expected punishment, in March 2016, Vyacheslav Solovyev, general director of VEB-Leasing, disappeared and did not come to work. Did not pick up the phone and did not inform where he was. At first, the management of the state corporation said that they did not know where to look for the CEO, but later the head of Vnesheconombank, Sergei Gorkov, explained that Solovyev was allegedly undergoing medical treatment in Switzerland and was still the CEO, thus publicly calming down the nervous and thieving Solovyev. In fact, Solovyov literally fled from his workplace to Malta, where he obtained citizenship in April 2016.
VEB understandably did not tell anyone about the fugitive director. The decision was made to close the holes caused by grandiose corruption in Vnesheconombank at the expense of the Central Bank, and hence at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. Dmitriev was also left with all the assets (finances, raw materials) that he had withdrawn when he was in charge of the corporation.
But the bankster spits on laws and justice, as these words are not about him. He laughs and mocks taxpayers and poor pensioners, smoking another Cuban cigar on a hundred-dollar bill.