Posts Tagged ‘Zubkov’
Police raid on Moscow love nest splits Putin’s inner circle
A dawn police raid at the luxury Moscow flat of the blonde director of a defence procurement agency at first seemed merely the latest in a long line of corruption scandals to hit the Russian government.
But when news broke that a bleary-eyed Anatoly Serdyukov, the defence minister, had opened the young woman’s front door when police came knocking, it became clear that this was altogether bigger news.
The titillating detail seemed to break the Russian media’s traditional refusal to delve into the private lives of politicians.
It appears that the scandal became public because Serdyukov, 50, is married to Yulia, the daughter of Viktor Zubkov, 71, a deputy prime minister, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin and one of the most powerful men in Russia.
Serdyukov, who is reported to owe his meteoric rise from furniture salesman to minister to the influence of his father-in-law, incurred Zubkov’s wrath by allegedly having an affair with Yevgenia Vasilyeva — the official whose flat was raided — and in the process humiliating his daughter.
The case is mushrooming into an embarrassing scandal that may lift the veil on corruption, nepotism, selective justice and bitter Kremlin infighting under Putin’s rule.
Prosecutors searched Vasilyeva’s flat for several hours as part of a £60m fraud investigation into Oboronservis, a state-owned company that manages supplies to the armed forces. Vasilyeva, 33, who was until recently the head of the defence ministry’s vast property portfolio, is one of the company’s directors.
Officers from the prosecutor’s investigative committee said they had seized documents at her flat and confiscated more than £60,000 in cash plus antiques, paintings and hundreds of items of jewellery, including many diamonds. They also searched Oboronservis’s offices and have charged five people who, they allege, skimmed off large personal profits by using the company to sell state assets at far below their market value.
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Russian paper details business interests of defence minister’s associates
Vedomosti
Article by Roman Shleynov, Dmitriy Kazmin, Filipp Sterkin, and Aleksey Nikolskiy: “He Is a Machine, Not a Person”
There have been surprising twists and turns in Minister of Defense Anatoliy Serdyukov’s life. He came from retailing to impose order in the tax service and from a civilian finance job to reform the army. Generals complain that he taunts them as little green men.
Zubkov’s son-in-law
When Serdyukov came to the Petersburg Tax Inspectorate in 2000 he was already an established furniture retailer. After graduating from the Accountancy and Economics Faculty at the Leningrad Institute of Soviet Trade in 1984 Serdyukov went into the army. He served as a conscript in the 85th Motorized Infantry Division Communications Battalion in Novosibirsk. At that time, conscripts with higher education were offered the chance to enroll on a reserve lieutenant training course after nine months. After serving for 18 months they would be discharged with an officer’s rank. This was also the path that Serdyukov chose, a former officer in the Defense Ministry central apparatus says, clarifying that in the event of a war Serdyukov would have been eligible to be drafted to serve as a regimental military commissary chief.
But Serdyukov became a strictly peacetime retailer — after leaving the army he went to work for the No. 3 Lenmebeltorg furniture store in Petersburg. It was within the Lenmebeltorg system that he rose from assistant accountant to become director and joint owner of the Petersburg industrial trading company Mebel-market formed on the basis of Lenmebeltorg.
A possible contributory factor to Serdyukov’s transition to state service was his marriage. In 2000 he married Yuliya Pokhlebenina — the daughter of Viktor Zubkov. Zubkov was a party official during Soviet times, he became Vladimir Putin’s deputy in the Petersburg Mayor’s Office in 1990, and he then moved to the tax service – by 1999 he had risen to become deputy minister for taxes and levies while retaining the post of head of the Tax Service’s Petersburg Office.
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