Russian President Vladimir Putin and his friends, including his extended family members, have somehow assembled a massive fortune totaling a whopping $24 billion — and no one knows how they got that much money, according to a startling new investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project together with Russia’s most influential independent newspaper , Novaya Gazeta .
Putin and his pals are not talking about where the money came from, or if they are, they can’t explain it, according to the report . But the OCCRP/ Novaya Gazeta investigation revealed that one of Putin’s childhood friends, a butcher, now boasts a net worth of $550 million. Another boyhood Putin buddy, whose only visible means of support is his ability to play the cello, apparently controls offshore corporations worth an incredible $2 billion.
A distant relative of Putin’s, Mikhail Shelomov, works in a shipyard and earns a meager annual salary equivalent to $8,500 per year. Yet at least on paper, Shelomov sports an impressive personal fortune of $573 million, the OCCRP/ Novaya Gazeta investigation revealed when it was made public earlier this week.
The $8,500 per year worker recently invested in a newly constructed racetrack outside of Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, Russia, and also has apparent connections to Gazprom, the Russian state-run energy titan. At the same time, the butcher who grew up with Putin in St. Petersburg, Pyotr Kolbin, has gone out of his way to tell the Russian media that he is “not a businessman” — despite a fortune that makes him significantly richer than supermodel Gisele Bundchen (whose worth is estimated at $360 million ) or self-help guru Tony Robbins ( $500 million ).
Read the entire, highly detailed OCCRP/ Novaya Gazeta report titled “Putin and the Proxies” by visiting this link .
Putin has long claimed to live a simple life devoted to serving his country, and in 2013, the last time he filed documents stating his net worth, he claimed assets of only about $101,000 — assets which included his personal automobile and a modest Moscow apartment. However, other reports have claimed that his personal collection of wristwatches alone is valued at more than $500,000, and that he has access to a fleet of nearly 60 private jets and four yachts.
According to an interview given in 2015 by Bill Browder, an American-born businessman who has become a crusading foe of Putin , the Russian leader in reality has a personal net worth of about $200 billion — making him by far the richest man in the world.
If Browder’s figure is accurate, that sum would make Putin more than twice as rich as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is generally listed as the world’s richest person with a net worth of just a notch below $90 billion .
“I believe that [Putin is worth] $200 billion,” Browder said in the CNN interview. “After 14 years in power of Russia, and the amount of money that the country has made, and the amount of money that hasn’t been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on, all that money is in property, bank, Swiss bank accounts, shares, hedge funds, managed for Putin and his cronies.”
Watch a summary of “Putin and the Proxies” created by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in the video below.
According to the report, Putin and his inner circle’s actual wealth may be far greater than the $24 billion discovered by OCCRP/ Novaya Gazeta . “OCCRP did not include politicians and top state company managers among Putin’s friends,” the report says. “He also has other friends and relatives whose wealth is unknown.”
As for the Putin “proxies” covered by the investigation, “They claim not to be businessmen, are not known to the public, and in some cases have little idea of the riches that are registered under their names,” the report says.
“They have one common attribute,” OCCRP/ Novaya Gazeta concludes. “They are all family or boyhood friends of Putin.”
[Featured Image by Friedemann Vogel/Getty Images]