Russian Media Shine Spotlight on Stepanov’s Mother

Barron’s Online

The government television channel NTV devoted a third of its Saturday investigative show Russian Sensation to the Barron’s story on Olga Stepanova, a Moscow tax official whose husband Vladlen Stepanov (who claims they’re divorced) acquired a suburban Moscow mansion, a villa in Dubai and a well-stocked secret bank account at Credit Suisse (ticker: CS) when Olga’s office handled several of Russia’s biggest tax scams.

The schemes also victimized the hedge fund firm Hermitage Capital and led to the death in police custody of Hermitage’s whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky (see Barron’s, “Crime and Punishment in Putin’s Russia,” April 16, 2011).

After our expose, Stepanov launched a campaign of counter-publicity in which he took out newspaper ads claiming he’d legitimately earned the Credit Suisse account’s Eur. 8 million, now frozen by Swiss prosecutors in a money laundering inquiry (see Weekday Trader Extra, “After Swiss Freeze Millions, Stepanov Swings Back,” May 31, 2011).

Saturday’s NTV investigation checked up on Stepanov’s claims and found something that – in the eyes of traditional Russians – is more damning than possible embezzlement. The television broadcast shows Stepanov’s elderly and infirm mother living in a squalid Soviet-style one-room apartment, neglected while the son and daughter-in-law luxuriate in their avant-garde mansion in an exclusive suburb. The mother’s companion relates how Olga and Vladlen asked his mother to put her name on the property records for the tax official’s estate, in exchange for the children’s promise to have her apartment cleaned (see the broadcast here).

Neglecting aged parents is unforgivable in Russia. Online comments to Stepanov’s interviews and the recent NTV show have been harsh. “What kind of unbelievable greed motivates people to steal millions of dollars…” wonders one YouTube commenter, “while pinching pennies on their parents?”
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