Russian President Vladimir Putin fortune

Vladimir Putin is undoubtedly the most powerful man in Russia. He has been running the country for more than 20 years and has in all likelihood also amassed a considerable fortune during that time. But reliable information about the Russian president’s property is scarce. Nevertheless, rumors keep coming up. Some even say that Putin is the richest man in the world. Also read: This is Vladimir Putin’s family

Vladimir Putin: This is Russia’s head of state

Putin has been the head of state in Russia since 2012. Recently, Putin fanned the East Ukraine conflict violently. A portrait.

BERLIN.   Officially, Russian President Vladimir Putin lives a frugal life. But his fortune could be in the billions.

• According to official statements, Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a rich man
• In the background, however, he could have accumulated a fortune in the billions
• This is known about the wealth of the ruler

Vladimir Putin is undoubtedly the most powerful man in Russia. He has been running the country for more than 20 years and has in all likelihood also amassed a considerable fortune during that time. But reliable information about the Russian president’s property is scarce. Nevertheless, rumors keep coming up. Some even say that Putin is the richest man in the world. Also read: This is Vladimir Putin’s family

Vladimir Putin: A raise for my birthday

The official information does not initially sound as if Putin is a multi-millionaire or even a billionaire . According to public Kremlin documents , Putin earned around 11,000 euros per month in 2019. However, it is also public that on October 7, 2019, the President issued a decree ordering a salary increase of 4.3 percent for himself and other civil servants, thereby increasing his monthly salary to around 11,550 euros. By the way, October 7th is Putin’s birthday. For comparison: Joe Biden’s official salary is a good three times as much per month.

The Kremlin not only states Putin’s salary , but also his property, and it sounds anything but ostentatious. Officially, Putin only owns a 77-square-meter apartment and an 18-square-meter parking lot. As president, he can also use a 153 square meter apartment and a garage . It is not specified where these are located.

Two vintage cars are officially part of Vladimir Putin’s fortune

By the way, if Putin wants to get behind the wheel himself, he can do so behind one of his two vintage cars from the Soviet automaker GAZ from 1956. In it he drove US President George W. Bush around in 2005 . In addition, since 2009, according to official information, Putin has owned a Lada SUV and the tent trailer that went with it.

Putin’s fortune looks more than modest, even compared to other top Russian officials. Anton Eduardowitsch Waino ‘s wife alone owns three properties. Waino is chairman of the presidential administration and thus something like Putin’s head of the chancellery.

How is Putin supposed to be able to afford a palace complex?

So it doesn’t seem right at first that the supposedly modest Putin can afford a palace complex worth 1.12 billion euros on the Black Sea. That is exactly what Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny accuses Putin of in his latest investigative film.

This Black Sea palace is said to belong to Vladimir Putin.

Photo: Uncredited / dpa

In the hugely successful video, Navalny and his team speak of the “biggest bribe in history” in connection with the financing of the 17,700 square meter luxury property. The money is said to come from companies connected to Putin confidants. In addition to the billionaire businessman Gennady Timchenko and the main shareholder of Rossiya Bank, Yuri Kovalchuk , the name of Igor Sechin is also mentioned.

The former KGB officer and chairman of the Russian oil company Rosneft is a longtime companion of Putin and is considered one of his closest confidants. However, Putin’s name does not appear once in the palace complex’s financing documents, as Navalny openly admits. Also interesting: Alexej Navalny: This is the family of the Kremlin critic

Accordingly, it should have been easy for Putin to reject the allegations against him. “Nothing listed here as belonging to me belongs to me or my close relatives,” Putin said of the video. The Kremlin has officially announced that the property belongs to an entrepreneur. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not name any names. In the meantime, however, the Russian construction magnate Arkadi Rotenberg has reported as the owner. Rotenberg is a childhood friend of Putin and became a billionaire at his side. More on the topic: This oligarch allegedly owns “Putin’s Palace”

The beginnings of Putin’s alleged billion dollar fortune

It is not the first time that Putin has been accused of corruption and close ties to Russian oligarchs . As early as the 1990s, he is said to have received bribes as chairman of the St. Petersburg Foreign Trade Committee. The accusation comes from the Petersburg ex-city councilor Marina Salje .

A commission she chaired concluded in 1992 that Putin and his deputy, Alexander Anikin , had exported around $100 million in raw materials . Only the food promised in return for St. Petersburg , where there was an acute food shortage at the time, never arrived. Contrary to the demands of the city parliament, Putin was not dismissed, he himself denied the allegations and an investigation into the incident came to nothing. Eight years later, Putin became President of Russia for the first time.

Several connections date back to Putin’s time in St. Petersburg, to which allegations of Putin’s supposed billion-dollar fortune still refer again and again to this day. It is documented, for example, that in 1996 Putin and seven confidants built dachas north of St. Petersburg. Four members of the so-called dacha cooperative “Osero” , Yuri Kovalchuk, Viktor Myachin, Andrei Fursenko and Vladimir Yakunin, owned the Russian private bank Rossiya at the time .

It is the very same Kovalchuk whom Navalny also names as one of the financiers of the palace complex on the Black Sea. Kovalchuk’s billionaire bank Rossiya has long been considered the financier of Putin’s inner circle and has therefore been the target of Western sanctions . During the Crimean crisis in 2014, for example, the United States froze Rossiya’s foreign assets.

Putin is said to own billions of dollars in stocks

The US and the EU also sanctioned the second alleged financier of the palace complex, Gennady Timchenko . He and Putin know each other from Dresden , where the Russian president was stationed as a KGB agent in the 1980s. Timchenko founded the oil trading company Gunvor together with the Swede Torbjörn Tornqvist in the late 1990s.

When the Russian political scientist Stanislav Belkowski put Putin’s fortune at around 40 billion dollars to the “world” in 2007, he also named shares in Gunvor as Putin’s indirect possession. According to Belkovsky, Putin would have held 50 percent of Gunvor’s shares through Timchenko. Belkovsky also claimed that Putin owned 37 percent of the shares in the gas and oil production group Surgutneftyegas, valued at around 16.6 billion euros at the time. In addition, there would be a 4.5 percent stake in Gazprom.

Gunvor has repeatedly categorically denied any connection to Putin. Putin also dismissed Belkovsky’s claims as untrue. What is true, however, is that Timchenko held shares in Gunvor. Shortly before the USA sanctioned him in 2014 in the wake of the Crimean crisis, Timchenko sold his entire stake to co-founder Tornqvist . This was done “in order to continue to ensure business activities,” as Gunvor announced, according to the Financial Times.

The US Treasury Department has also previously claimed that Putin owns shares in Gunvor and may even have access to its financial resources . Again, Gunvor firmly denied.

Is Putin’s best friend hoarding fortune for him?

However, Putin’s fortune could possibly be much higher than the estimated 40 billion. In 2017, the US Judiciary Committee summoned investment banker Bill Browder as a witness during the investigation into Trump ‘s Russia affair . In his testimony, Browder estimated Putin’s fortune at $200 billion . That would have made Putin the richest man in the world at the time. Browder did not say exactly how this fortune was made up. He merely claimed that it came from illegally siphoned off funds.

As an example, Browder referred to the revelations in the Panama Papers , which became public due to a data leak in 2016. . Roldugin is said to have owned several offshore companies at the time of publication . They allegedly owned shares in the largest corporations in Russia. Loans in the millions have also been processed through Roldugin’s company. A total of two billion dollars flowed through the letterbox companies, writes the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”.

Roldugin is neither a manager nor a stockbroker by profession, nor has he studied economics. Roldugin is a cellist. However, he is best known as Putin’s close, if not best, friend. Pictures show him as the godfather of Putin’s eldest daughter Maria. Quite a few suspect him to be the Russian President ‘s secret asset manager.