Yury Chaika, the Prosecutor General of Russia
On December 1, 2015, Anti-Corruption Foundation, led by the most active member of Russian opposition Alexey Navalny, published a large investigation on the current Prosecutor General of Russia Yuri Chaika, and his family. The Report came with a 40 minute film. Today Russian media calls the film “The most popular film in Russia” as in two days after release it was watched on line by 1,400,000 people. By December 7, the amount of those who’ve seen the film on You tube reached three million.
In May 2014, a hotel Pomegranate opened on the Greek peninsula of Halkidiki after a nine-month renovation. The investors invested €25 to €29 million just into the renovation of the hotel. The hotel is gorgeous, even by the standards of a five star hotels – it is considered to be the best on the peninsula.
The opening of the hotel was accompanied by unprecedented celebration.
Rumor has it that the party was organized by the same company that organized the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The event, lavishly decorated with hundreds of white roses and purple hydrangeas, cost €1 million (euros) and made quite an impression on the guests.
130 artists were presented at the party: music and dance performers, magicians, acrobats; there were also a laser show, fireworks, a four-course gourmet dinner and a concert of the Russian and Greek top stars.
The party was attended by some of the wealthiest Russian and international businessmen, celebrities and politicians including the Russian Culture Minister, Vladimir Medinsky.
The owners of the hotel, Artiom Chaika and Olga Lopatin were also presented. Who are these people?
Artiom Chaika and Olga Lopatin
Artiom Chaika, is the son of Yury Chaika, the current Prosecutor General of Russia.
Artiom Chaika is known by his involvement in several scandals.
Several years ago a chain of illegal casinos was discovered in Moscow suburbs. Artiom Chaika was involved in the casinos’ protection racket. Then the car of the Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika was found loaded with weapons and narcotics. The car was officially borrowed by criminals from the Prosecutor’s son Artiom. In both cases the father managed to get his son out of the mess.
Olga Lopatin is the ex-wife of Gennady Lopatin, Deputy Prosecutor General. Gennady Lopatin is famous for having retained his post in the prosecutor’s office, even though, along with Artiom Chaika, he was involved in the protection racket of Moscow suburban casinos.
Olga is a close friend of the Chaika family. Artiom calls her his second mom.
The Lopatins were divorced in 2011. A lot of documents are presented in the Navalny’s film, which support the idea that the divorce was fictitious, made in order to hide family’s illegal profits.
Anti-corruption Foundation had discovered that former wife of the Deputy Prosecutor General, officially not working housewife, had had and still has considerable earnings of her own.
Olga Lopatin is one of four co-owners of the company Kubanskiy Sugar. Two other co–owners are wives of the most famous bandits in Russia, Sergei Tsapock and Vyacheslav Tsepovyaz. They are sentenced to life and twenty years, respectively, for a particularly brutal murder of twelve people, including four children.
The fourth co-founder of Kubanskiy Sugar is Nadezhda Staroverova, the wife of Alexei Staroverov, another top executive of the Prosecutor’s Office.
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Until November 2014, Staroverov was the General Manager of the Prosecutor’s office, when he was “suspended”. In his suburban home were found a warehouse of weapons and ammunition and along with criminals, who had robbed and killed 14 people at suburban highways, so called Gang GTA. The leaders of the gang were working there as security officers.
The wives of two top functionaries of the Prosecutor General office were partners with wives of two bloodiest gangsters in Russian history. That is a real sensation! And the sensation that is backed with lots of documents! It explains the unheard of success of the Navalniy’s film.
Comparing this fact to all the other reports shown in the film: stories of the obviously criminal businesses that made Artiom Chaika a billionaire, or stories of his younger brother Igor, who made his capital by getting state commissions from corruption schemes, all these stories look just trifles.
Igor Chaika
Coincidentally, at the same time with this sensational Alexei Navalny’s publication, some new information came to Russia from Spain.
In 2007, President Vladimir Putin established the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office, de facto independent from the Prosecutor General’s Office. Alexander Bastrykin, former First Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia, had been appointed the chairman of the Committee. Alexander Bastrykin graduated from the Law Department of Leningrad State University in 1975, and was a university classmate of Vladimir Putin.
In July 2012 Alexey Navalny published documents indicating that Bastrykin had a residence permit and owned real estate in the Czech Republic. Mr. Navalny wrote that the real estate holding and residence permit in a country – a member of NATO, a military alliance opposed to Russia, should raise questions about Mr. Bastrykin’s security clearance for work in law enforcement, where he has access to state secrets. Bastrykin is still the Chairman of the Investigative Committee.
Now, as it was reported by the Russian magazine New Times, the nine years long Spanish investigation of the so called “case of Russian mafia in Spain” finally has been completed. Down further in this article will be seen that this investigation gives new and unexpected information about the appointment of the Chairman of the Investigative Committee.
The Spanish prosecutors demand 8 years for the accused Gennady Petrov, 6.5 years for his wife Elena Petrova and 5.5 years in prison and € 100 million fine for all defendants. The main defendant, Gennady Petrov is a man well known in St. Petersburg. He was repeatedly imprisoned, and in 1987 he was released. In 1994, he was arrested again on suspicion of organizing a criminal group, racketeering, extortion, but was released from custody before the trial without charge.
Arrest of Gennady Petrov by Spanish police
Petrov and other members of the group settled in Spain back in the mid-1990s. They created a network of hundreds of companies, for the purpose of money laundering, that were acquiring real estate and then repeatedly resold it for higher prices through front companies controlled by the same members of the group.
There are 27 people in the list of the accused members of the “organization of Gennady Petrov”: Spanish citizens, employees, shell companies, and the Russians, including the State Duma deputy Vladislav Reznik and his wife.
The investigation found that the main suspect, Gennady Petrov maintained direct relations with Anatoly Serdyukov, who, at the time of wiretaps made by the Spaniards (2006 – 2008), served as the head of the Federal Tax Service, and then was Minister of Defense.
Also cited was Viktor Zubkov, Prime Minister of the Russian Federation in 2007-2008, who prior to that was the head of Federal Financial Monitoring Service, the financial intelligence unit of the country, and who prior to that was Deputy Minister of Finance, earlier Deputy Minister for Taxes and Duties, and before that he was the deputy of Vladimir Putin, back then the head of Foreign Relations Committee of St. Petersburg Mayor’s Office.
Zubkov “lobbied group’s interests in Russia”, being on the post of Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, taking “a number of political decision-making” with the Chairman of the Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin.
The Spanish prosecutors maintain in their indictment, that “the Petrov’s group was integrated into the police institutions of Russia”. According to the indictment, the main success of the group was promotion of “Sasha“. Sasha is the head of the Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin.
The investigating prosecutors came to this conclusion on the basis of several tapped conversations. In June 28, 2007, Igor Sobolewski, then a lawyer who worked in St. Petersburg, called Gennady Petrov. According to decipher, he said that Bastrykin is to celebrate his appointment to the position of the Chairman of the Investigative Committee, to which he was appointed thanks in every way to Petrov.
The Chairman of the Russian Investigative Committee was really appointed by gangsters! It’s hard to top such information.
In the opinion of many, Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB and KGB agent, who fled Russia to London, was killed with polonium-210 by FSB in order to stop his providing information about this “case of Russian mafia in Spain” to Spanish police.
