[Bryan See]

I've read about the documentary film (EDIT: See below the end of this post) about the shady business dealings of Russia's Prosecutor General Yury Chaika and his family, produced by anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny about a week ago. Entitled "Chaika", the sons of Chaika have, according to The Guardian, had a huge business empire, partly owing to their father’s position and their ability to keep regional prosecutors onside.

It also alleges that the sons’ business associates have ties to the Tsapok gang, which terrorised the town of Kushchevskaya in southern Russia until arrests were made following a massacre that shocked the country.

Navalny’s 45-minute video begins with a five-star hotel in Halkidiki, Greece. The hotel’s lavish opening featured a speech by Russia’s culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, and performances by leading Russian pop stars.

Navalny’s researchers discovered that the owners of the hotel were Artem Chaika and Olga Lopatina, the former wife of Gennady Lopatin, the deputy prosecutor general and Yuri Chaika’s number two.

Navalny has made a habit of uncovering the undeclared property, suspicious foreign assets and criminal links of Russian elites, usually to a stony wall of silence as an official reaction, but the Chaika video is the most damning yet, if the allegations are all true. Chaika’s other son, Igor, is also accused of using his family connections to build a huge business, and of benefiting from apparently rigged state auctions.

Navalny said his team first uncovered the Chaika story when they were doing their regular monitoring of property purchases in territories where Russian officials like to stash their money – Greece, Cyprus, Spain and London. They noticed the lavish Greek hotel opening and the Chaika connection.

“We put it to one side for a while, because really there’s nothing all that surprising in our officials having dubious property. But then, when the Tsapok links appeared, I couldn’t believe it initially.

“We checked it and checked it, and it just got worse and worse,” he told the Observer.

Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation found company records showing Lopatina was one of the joint owners of a sugar business with Anzhela Tsapok, the wife of Sergei Tsapok, who died in prison last year. He had been given a life sentence for one of the worst crimes in recent Russian history.

Even in Russia, in which the crime pages of newspapers are often filled with gruesome deeds, the Kushchevskaya massacre resonated for its sheer brutality. Twelve people were killed, including four children, mainly by stabbing or strangulation, and then the house was set on fire with the bodies inside. The ensuing investigation uncovered a chain of killings, kidnappings, rape and corruption. Tsapok, who had formerly been a local politician, was named the gang leader and sentenced to life in prison, while his mother was given three years in prison for fraud.

The prosecutors in the case at the time said Tsapok’s gang had its tentacles all over the town, with local police on the payroll. Tsapok himself was a member of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party and a member of the local parliament.

The gang controlled all local business, and were also accused of picking young women at random off the street, raping them and then keeping them silent with threats. They were accused of 19 deaths over a decade, including the 12 which brought Moscow police to the town and finally uncovered the chain of wrongdoings that local police had been unable or unwilling to prosecute.

Navalny’s film includes documents which appear to show that earlier cases against the Tsapok gang were dropped after interference from local prosecutors. Navalny’s video has received more than 3 million views on YouTube in the week since it was launched, but the official reaction has been muted.

Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the allegations “did not provoke our interest” because they were not related to the general prosecutor but to his sons, who have their own business activities.

Chaika himself, in his only comments on the video, told Interfax on 3 December that the video was “a hatchet job, not paid for by those who made it”, hinting that some outside power was attempting to smear him. “The information presented is deliberately falsified and has no basis in fact,” he said.

Prime minister Dmitry Medvedev was asked about the allegations during an annual interview with Russian journalists last week, and became angry, suggesting that tabling the accusations was risking a return to Stalin-era repression. “You said a certain person has been accused. If we’re going to operate in such a way, we’ll be going back a long way — back to the 1930s. Only law enforcement can lodge accusations,” he said.

The influential business daily Vedomosti wrote an editorial calling on the government to investigate the allegations seriously. “The materials that were published need to be confirmed, but they are not baseless – the investigation is well documented,” the paper wrote. “In a normal country, these kinds of public accusations should be publicly dealt with, and not just by the people involved but by their superiors.”

Navalny said the authorities were in a difficult position, as they did not want to be seen to be reacting to any of his investigations. He is also an opposition politician and a trenchant Kremlin critic. He has faced a number of court cases and his brother has been jailed, in what has been described as an attempt to put pressure on him.

“There will not be any investigation here, but the Latvian authorities have already started one on money laundering and we want the Swiss authorities to start one too. We want to make the cost of keeping Chaika very high for the Kremlin,” Navalny said.

I can always bet that Vera Mysina and her "For An Honest Country" movement, along with the Anonymous activist group and possibly the rest of the world, will be aware of this.

[Dragon]

Corruption has been a plague in Russia for a long time, since the fall of Soviet Union it became crippling. I'm not surprised about the criminal links, either. Many "New Russians" come from shady circles themselves. Russia is a great example of how irresponsible and dishonest upper class can damage the country.

[Bryan See]

"New Russians" you are referring to are called oligarchs. Yury Chaika and his sons as stated above, aluminium trader Oleg Deripaska, and the academicians and corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences (especially physicist Vladimir Fortov, astronomers Alexander Zakharov and Lev Zeleny of the Space Research Institute, Yury Pivovarov of the burnt Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences, and Erik Galimov of the Vernadsky Institute) are considered as such. It should be noted that Fortov's meeting with Chaika during the September 2013 meeting of determining whether the measures to fix violations uncovered by prosecutors were enough or not is a prelude of him becoming corrupt and allows himself and others in the Russian scientific community to be surrounded by closeknit group of criminals who are enemies of Navalny's allies, and by extension, young scientist Vera Mysina and Minister of Education and Science, Dmitry Livanov.

According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Chaika said the film was a "black PR action" that is part of a wider effort to discredit Moscow's credibility and "discredit the Prosecutor-General's Office." Mysina should know this better. Navalny said he is "very disappointed" that Russian officials have chosen Browder to be the "mastermind" blamed for "organizing everything Russian officials do not like," repeating a call for Chaika to resign and be prosecuted for corruption, along with hopefully, Fortov, Zeleny, Zakharov and Galimov.

[Dragon]

Yeah, New Russian ("Nowy Ruski") is pretty much what people in Poland (and Russia as well) call Russian oligarchs. It's basically an oligarch with a specific kind of noveau riche behavior. A common butt of jokes owing to their wealth, their power and their utter lack of style/intelligence. I really do hope that Russians will finally clear out some of those embezzlers. Especially from the Academy of Science and Roskosmos. Considering things they do with this pack of leeches sucking out their funding, imagine what they would achieve with actual access to their money.

[Bryan See]

I agree with you, Dragon, but, the problem is that the government has links with organized crime, which is now a major element of Russia statecraft, making the Kremlin itself an organized crime group itself. That is why Russian President Vladimir Putin, Navalny's opponent, is awarded the last year's Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project Person of the Year.

It is organized crime that protects oligarchs. Oligarchs pays protection money to closeknit crime gangs to protect themselves via krysha. And criminals surround them. So this is why there are many beatings, kidnapping, extortion, cybercime, murders and general terrorism. The same thing applies to the Russian Academy of Sciences, and every sphere in Russia.
 
Do you know that Russian society, a third of which lives below the poverty line, is still divided on the need for immortal, criminal oligarchs? Mikhail Rechkin, an expert on the paranormal, says Russia doesn't need eternally living oligarchs, academicians included, saying that there is a widening gulf between the rich and the poor in the country and that, because of mafia connections and the deaths of many people at their hands, the rich will not be allowed to live eternally. He also says that there will be a revolution, the only thing that Navalny, Mysina and Anonymous will want to do.

[Bryan See]

To supplant this, Navalny's video is just the beginning. Navalny has called the ruling party of Russia as the party of crooks and thieves.

[Bryan See]

Youtube has just briefly removed Navalny's video due to copyright infringement, but was later put it back on.

But the video at the YouTube link distributed by Navalny was removed on January 4, with the California-based Internet giant saying that it is “no longer available due to a copyright claim” by Daniel Lopez-Paullada, a photographer and filmmaker based in Geneva.

Lopez-Paullada confirmed to RFE/RL in a telephone interview that had made a copyright claim due to “video content that was used without my consent.”

He refused to explain exactly what the content in question was or when he made his claim, saying he is “not at liberty to discuss this at the moment, to be perfectly honest.”

YouTube, which did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment from RFE/RL, restored access to the video later in the day January 4.

Lopez-Paullada has produced a promotional video for the Pomegranate Wellness Spa Hotel on Greece's Chalkidiki Peninsula.

The hotel featured prominently in Navalny's film as a trophy that one of Chaika's sons, Artyom, allegedly purchased with illicit funds.

Leonid Volkov, an anticorruption activist and political ally of Navalny, said that the opposition leader’s Anti-corruption Fund, which released the video, said it was removed January 4. He said they planned to challenge the copyright claim.
 
“But we have to explore the situation a bit first,” Volkov told RFE/RL. “This is quite a surprise.”