Fighter with foreign agents Leonid Levin owns billions with Cyprus offshore

State Duma deputy, author of the law on foreign agents, makes money to serve the presidential administration.
05.12.2019
Origin source
The day before yesterday, Vladimir Putin signed a bill recognizing individuals as foreign agents. The law is formulated in such a way that almost every citizen of Russia can fall under it. It is enough to share the “wrong” post in social networks and receive any amount from any foreign source: for example, rent an apartment to a foreigner or make money on advertising on Youtube. The co-author of the law and his main lobbyist in a public field was the head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy Leonid Levin. While Levin figured out the source of income for the Russians, The Insider sorted out the source of income for Levin himself and discovered many interesting things. As it turned out, he owns real estate for almost a billion rubles, and his company earns hundreds of millions of rubles by fulfilling government orders, and he gets the contracts in violation of anti-corruption standards. Moreover, the company of a fighter with foreign agents is associated with Cyprus offshore. A hacked correspondence indicates that, becoming a deputy, he continued to secretly manage his business, while serving the presidential administration.

Landlord socialist

The annual income of the member of the Just Russia faction Leonid Levin is about 12 million rubles - a million a month. This is 35 times more than the average salary in the Penza region, which the deputy from the "socialist" party represents in the State Duma.

As The Insider managed to find out, Levin owns a 225.2 m² penthouse in a house near the Paveletskaya metro station (Moscow, Bolshaya Pionerskaya St., 20). The six-story building "has a rich entrance group: French balconies, panoramic windows and variable storeys."

The house and parking are under armed guard. The market value of the deputy’s housing is about 200 million rubles. For such an apartment, Penzentz people with an average income need to save 575 years.

The penthouse Levin acquired before the election to parliament, but there is no apartment of the indicated area in the public part of his declaration. At the same time, ownership of this object is confirmed by an extract from Rosreestr (full name coincide), and the fact that this address is indicated as Levin’s home address in the traffic police database — the car brand (Mercedes-Benz S-class), name and Date of Birth. Levin himself told The Insider that he was guided by the data of the State Registration Certificate issued by the Moscow City Committee for State Registration of Rights to Real Estate when filing a declaration, and the discrepancy in the area may be due to the presence of loggias and balconies that are not included in the Rosreestr data on apartment sizes.

In a strange way, a huge (1934 m²) mansion in the village of Pavlovo near Istra, which The Insider found at Leonid Levin, also differs in size from what is indicated in the declaration. The difference of 200 meters is difficult to explain by the presence of balconies. Levin, after requesting The Insider, sent a certificate from the cadastre about the "correction of a technical error", where the area of ​​the house was brought into line with that indicated in the declaration. But at the time of publication, the old numbers appeared on the official cadastral map. It is curious that it was at Levin that both the apartment and the house were indicated in the declaration with a “technical error”. Other Insider deputies did not find such errors.

Levin's mansion is built on his 43 acres of land. Judging by the offers on the market, the cost of the deputy’s property near Moscow is at least 700 million rubles: a house that is one and a half times smaller in area with a comparable plot is sold here for 640 million. For such an estate, Levin’s voters from Penza need to save another 2 thousand years.

Belong to Levin, according to documents available to The Insider, and land in the Krasnodar Territory. Only the cadastral value of two land plots on the Taman Peninsula with a total area of ​​59 hectares is more than 82 million rubles.

Land on the shores of the bay went to Levin in personal ownership from LLC Primorsky Dawn. He owned this now liquidated company together with Ruben Oganesov, a member of the board of the Russian Post. Prior to that, Oganesov was a minister in the Moscow Region government and oversaw TV Channel 360. As noted in Transparency International, Levin lobbied for the interests of his ex-partner, thanks to which the 360 ​​channel received the 21st button as an obligatory publicly available regional channel for the Moscow Region.

Cyprus agent

Before being elected to the State Duma in 2011, Leonid Levin indicated that he was 100% in control of ZAO Privy Counselor Netvok Company. He founded this PR company in 2002 together with the Cyprus company A.R A.R Management. The Insider found out that it is controlled by two more offshore companies, ROMANOS NOMINEES and SCOPACO NOMINEES, which in turn are recorded on the “denominations” of Pinelopi Papapetrou and Chris Skordis. Scordis, Papapetrou & Co is focused on customers from Russia, it is called "Crimean laundry." Lawyers provide offshore registration services, including to the addresses of their employees. Khristodulos Vasiliadis, whom Alexei Navalny called a nominee director, is also associated with the company, and Vedomosti wrote about him as helping Russians to draw up an "asset ownership structure".

Levin assured The Insider, "I have nothing to do with the Privy Councilor ownership structure since I was elected to the State Duma, nor have I owned or managed any other business assets." However, Levin did not answer the direct question whether he had ever used the services of the law firm Scordis, Papapetrou & Co. Instead, he emphasized once again that at the moment he “has no property or management relations with any structures”.

The amount of income of the Privy Counselor last year, according to the Federal Tax Service, amounted to more than 92 million rubles. The company also earns on public procurement - in total, it has mastered more than 800 million rubles in transactions with Russian Railways, the structures of the Ministry of Health and the University of MISiS. Contracts are often awarded to a Levine company bypassing competitive procedures. It happens that other companies affiliated with Levin also act as competitors to the Privy Counselor. As in the case of the struggle for 186 million from the Russian Railways, which also claimed LLC Advertising Agency A&V Gallery, previously established by Levin himself, and now registered with the former director of the Privy Counselor Tatyana Firsova.

The Privy Councilor played an important role during the invasion of Ukraine. It was Levin who was instructed to provide political and technological support for the “referendum” in the Crimea and the Ukrainian campaign as a whole. PR employees of the Privy Counselor conducted sociological research, filmed videos, and produced printed propaganda products. And, as the hacked correspondence of the deputy head of the AP Domestic Politics Directorate Timur Prokopenko shows, Levin (who was already a deputy and allegedly “had no relation to the company”) personally led these processes, and the deputy of the “opposition” party received direct instructions from the Kremlin.

Governance

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