Magnificent palaces, yachts, bribes… For almost 20 years, Alexei Navalny denounced scandals related to the corruption of Russia's political and economic elites.
Published on February 18, 2024 1:46 p.m
Reading time: 6 minutes
Russian opponent Alexei Navalny in the business center where the office of his anti-corruption foundation is located, in Moscow, December 26, 2019. (DIMITAR DILKOFF / AFP)
He had made the fight against corruption his main battle. Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin's number one opponent, died on Friday, February 16, at the age of 47 in an Arctic penal colony. There he served a 19-year prison sentence for “extremism.”
The trained lawyer was known for exposing the extent of corruption plaguing the country and Russian elites through well-documented investigations published on social networks. The person who saw Vladimir Putin's United Russia party as the “party of crooks and thieves” began denouncing the government's excesses in 2007. In particular, in 2010 he founded the participatory platform Rospil (a term meaning “plundering of Russia”) to denounce cases of misappropriation of public property and corruption, and then in 2011 the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), whose activities have been suspended for ten years later. Franceinfo looks back at five corruption cases reported by Alexei Navalny.
Transneft, the affair that made Alexei Navalny famous
In 2010, the Russian activist was at the beginning of his crusade against corruption. He began “buying shares of the country’s large parastatals and holding them accountable,” economist Sergei Gouriev told RFI in 2021. In supporting documents, Alexei Navalny accuses Transneft, a giant of the Russian oil industry headed by a former KGB colleague of Vladimir Putin, of enriching itself by more than 3 billion euros while building a gigantic oil pipeline connecting Siberia with Russia in the Pacific Ocean.
This affair was revealed on his personal blog, which he created four years earlier. “His website served as a springboard for him to establish himself in the opposition landscape,” explained Carole Grimaud Potter, professor of Russian geopolitics at the University of Montpellier, in 2021. The Transneft affair allows her to become known in Russia and abroad.
Dmitry Medvedev's real estate empire
In March 2017, the activist went on the offensive against Vladimir Putin's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. The temporality is not linked to chance: Alexei Navalny wants to run for the 2018 presidential election. In the documentary published on YouTube, he is not called Dimon (a reference to the diminutive of the first name Dmitri), but the prime minister's real estate assets are disclosed. The video from the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) now has 46 million views.
Dmitry Medvedev is accused of heading a system of charitable foundations financed by oligarchs and banks under state control, but whose ultimate goal would be his personal enrichment. Massive demonstrations followed. Activists sometimes brandish ducks, a reference to a miniature house ducks had in one of Medvedev's opulent residences. The prime minister “rejected the allegations but had to keep quiet after these revelations,” Cécile Vaissié, a professor at the University of Rennes, recalled to franceinfo in May.
“Putin’s Palace”
Does the Russian president own a magnificent villa on the shores of the Black Sea, on land 39 times the size of Monaco? This is what Alexei Navalny says in the documentary “A Palace for Putin: The Story of the Biggest Bribery,” which was released on YouTube on January 19, 2021, two days after the Moscow airport opponent was arrested. The video, which breaks all viewership records (nearly 130 million to date), contains never-before-seen photos and 3D visualizations of the palace and uses contracts, bank documents and witness statements to prove that Vladimir Putin is the owner.
The villa, with an estimated value of just over one billion euros, is to be equipped with a casino, a theater and an ice hockey arena. All built on FSB land, by the Russian secret service. One of the striking details of the film is the alleged cost of toilet brushes: 700 euros, according to Alexei Navalny. During the demonstrations on January 23, many of the tens of thousands of participants swung the object, AFP reported.
Vladimir Putin himself has to intervene to defend himself. “I haven't seen this film due to lack of time (…) Nothing shown in it as my property belongs to me or my loved ones,” he said on January 25.
In 2014, Portal revealed in an investigation that this palace had been partially funded with taxpayer money, from funds raised as part of a program to improve Russian health facilities.
According to Alexei Navalny, the building was paid for by people close to Vladimir Putin, such as the head of oil giant Rosneft Igor Sechin and businessman Gennady Timchenko. “It is a state within Russia. And in this state there is only one irremovable tsar: Putin,” said the Russian opponent, according to AFP. He accuses the Russian president of an “obsession with wealth and luxury.”
Gazprom, a “monster of corruption”
In June 2022, Navalny's foundation and investigative journalists from Proekt Media broadcast a documentary about Alexei Miller, the wealthy manager of gas giant Gazprom and a long-time friend of the Russian president. “Gazprom is not just a gas monopoly. It is also a specially cultivated corruption monster on which Putin’s power rests,” argue Maria Pevchikh and Georgy Alburov, FBK’s two main investigators, quoted by Libération.
The Russian president “has turned it into a bottomless purse from which to withdraw money, be it for palaces and entertainment, or even for war,” the journalists say. Alexei Miller is accused of embezzling billions of dollars from the company to enrich “Putin’s friends and family.”
Vladimir Putin and his yachts
According to the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), Vladimir Putin is a big fan of yachts. The organization's investigation focuses on the Graceful, an 82-meter-long boat worth 100 million euros. While construction in Hamburg (Germany) is not yet completed, its immediate repatriation to Russia will be ordered in January 2022. This return comes a month before the outbreak of war in Ukraine, as a result of which several Russian assets were frozen or confiscated by Western countries. According to Forbes, the boat has since been renamed and refitted.
Another luxury yacht, the Scheherazade, was seized in Italy in May 2022 as part of European sanctions against Russian oligarchs. Its price is estimated at 700 million euros. Its official owner is Eduard Khudaynatov, former head of the oil giant Rosneft and close to the Kremlin. But according to FBK, the real owner is none other than Vladimir Putin. The Dossier Center website's yacht trackers, linked to opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, even assure that it is a Christmas present offered to the Russian president in 2014 by a handful of grateful oligarchs.