An interesting video about how corruption has rendered the Russian army into such a poor shape:
What he doesn't really get into is that the worst, most corrupt official of them all is Vladimir Putin himself. He is worth at least 70 billion, rumored to be worth north of 200 billion, and all of this on a 187 thousand dollar equivalent salary. I would guess that no one has done more to make the Russian military so combat ineffective than Putin himself with his own embezzlement of state funds.
There have been numerous reports over the years to the effect that Putin is worth billions, but it is apparently very difficult to document it. The LLCInvest companies appear to be a piece of the puzzle:
>>>Journalists have struggled for years to establish what Vladimir Putin owns.
The Russian president, who cultivates a public image of abstemious patriotism, has been linked to a number of luxurious properties, including a vast palace on the Black Sea, acres of surrounding vineyards, a ski resort, and a villa north of St. Petersburg.
But tying the ownership of these assets directly to Putin through a paper trail has always been impossible. Instead, his friends have often stepped forward to claim them as their own.
. . .
Many owners of LLCInvest companies come from a group of friends and associates that coalesced around Putin when he was a senior St. Petersburg official in the 1990s, he noted.
[LLCInvest] looks most of all like a cooperative, or an association, in which its members can exchange benefits and property,” he said.
In total, journalists were able to identify 86 companies and nonprofits that appear to be part of this loose network. Together, they hold assets worth at least $4.5 billion, including mansions, business jets, yachts, and bank accounts filled with cash. All of them are interconnected, sharing the same corporate directors, registration addresses, and service providers such as auditors and registrars.
. . .
Much is still unknown about the LLCInvest companies, including whether they represent a kind of informal holding structure or are simply sharing technical infrastructure. Even the full scope of the LLCInvest universe is unknown, with 86 companies and nonprofits representing a conservative estimate. But taken together, these findings offer an intriguing picture of how Bank Rossiya connects billions in assets, sourced from Putin’s inner circle, in a way that appears to benefit the president himself.<<<
An email domain not visible to the public — LLCInvest.ru — helped reporters uncover a group of interconnected companies that hold palaces, resorts, yachts, jets, and bank accounts full of cash.
www.occrp.org
This article provides some insight into Putin's relationships with the Oligarchs:
>>>Much of the money that has flowed to the oligarchs and to Putin — whom historian
Timothy Snyder calls "the head oligarch" — has been stashed in accounts and assets located outside of Russia. "There is as much financial wealth held by rich Russians abroad — in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Cyprus, and similar offshore centers — than held by the entire Russian population in Russia itself,"
a 2017 study by economists Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman found.
Although it's been hard to see exactly where all the money ends up — and how much of it is actually Putin's — it's easy to see that loyal oligarchs are making bank through extra fat government contracts. In 2014, as Putin grew excited about hosting the Winter Olympics in Sochi, his government spent lavishly preparing for the Games. The biggest winner of this spending? Arkady and Boris Rotenberg. A
2017 profile of Arkady in
The New Yorker found, "In all, companies controlled by Rotenberg received contracts worth
seven billion dollars — equivalent to the entire cost of the previous Winter Olympics, in Vancouver, in 2010."<<<
In 2000, Vladimir Putin began targeting oligarchs who did not bend to his authority. The loyalists who remained — and new ones who subsequently got rich — became like ATM machines for the president.
www.npr.org
