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Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

Jun 20 • 9 tweets • 4 min read

NEW: For years, Vladimir Putin has denied any connection to the palace, villas, and other assets that reporters have tied to him.

But we found that these properties have something in common: The companies that own them are secretly interconnected. /1
occrp.org/en/asset-track…

They ostensibly operate in different areas — but many of them share directors and shareholders.

Tying them together is a mysterious email domain: LLCInvest.ru. It’s operated by an IT firm close to Bank Rossiya, a sanctioned lender widely known as “Putin’s bank.” /2

The LLCInvest.ru domain has been used to register dozens of email addresses used by these companies, their directors, their shareholders, and their employees.

Leaked emails show them discussing common business, as if they were part of a single system. /3

@navalny

The assets they hold are worth at least $4.5B

These include the Black Sea palace famously investigated by @navalny, the Villa Sellgren, the Igora Hotel, and other properties previously tied to Putin — but not known, until now, to be interconnected. /4 cdn.occrp.org/projects/putin…

These companies also hold shares in functioning businesses, yachts, an air transport company, piles of cash, and assets not previously known to be connected to Putin. Some assets tied to the network ultimately belong to Putin-friendly oligarchs like Gennady Timchenko. /5

The companies are owned by a variety of people, including wealthy bankers and oligarchs, the children of Putin’s friends, and even his alleged mistress. Putin’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on the documents. /6

“[The group] looks most of all like a cooperative, or an association, in which its members can exchange benefits and property,” an expert on corruption in Russia said after examining reporters’ findings. /7

We also found that Sibur, one of Russia’s largest companies, paid for the rental of the Sellgren Villa in northwest Russia, which two independent investigations have linked to Putin. “WE CANNOT USE IT,” the company’s chairman wrote to colleagues. /8 occrp.org/en/asset-track…

@meduza_en

This investigation was done in partnership with @meduza_en and is being republished today by a number of our int'l partners.

It’s part of our #RussianAssetTracker project, which is working to uncover illicit and corrupt Russian wealth around the world. occrp.org/en/asset-track…

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