With its stunning seaside views, private casino, helipad, giant four-poster beds and marble halls, the newest palace built in the Black Sea resort town of Praskoveevka looks like something straight out of a James Bond movie. But according to a Russian businessman, it is being built for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with dubious funds.
The man behind these accusations is Sergei Kolesnikov, a Russian businessman who has worked with Vladimir Putin. On December 21, Kolesnikov published an open letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on the Internet, exposing his version of the story behind the palace.
Kolesnikov says he was made familiar with the palace’s construction while he was overseeing several public works projects for healthcare infrastructure and construction company Petromed. According to Kolesnikov, Petromed was approached in 2000 by Nicolay Shamalov, a personal friend of Vladimir Putin's, who offered to supply the funding for several major public healthcare contracts in the Saint Petersburg area on behalf of the president. The tens of millions of dollars in funding, which Shamalov said were “donated by generous oligarchs”, reportedly came with one condition: that Petromed transfer 35% of the contract funds into foreign accounts.
Kolesnikov says Shamalov told company heads that the money in the foreign accounts would return to Russia “to be invested in the Russian economy under Putin’s direct supervision”. Instead, Kolesnikov claims, the money financed the construction of the prime minister’s opulent seaside palace.
Initially, Kolesnikov says, the palace was presented as a “wellness complex”, but over the years it appeared that Putin himself regularly visited the site to supervise its construction and furnishing. In 2009, Kolesnikov was informed that construction materials were illegally brought in and paid for in cash. Kolesnikov says that when he told Shamalov that he disagreed with these pratices, he was immediately sidelined from the project. You can find the businessman’s detailed account in his open letter.
Following these revelations, Russian Web users dug out an article by a Novaya Gazeta journalist who reported on the villas of Praskoveevka in 2009. He couldn’t approach the palace reportedly being built for Putin because it was surrounded by security guards, but he managed to swim up to the beach behind it and speak to one of the workers on the site, who confirmed that Vladimir Putin was regularly on the premises.
Putin’s press secretary, Dmitri Peskov, issued a statement saying that the prime minister "is not and has never been connected to this building in any way”.
According to the NGO Transparency International, Russia ranks 154th out of 178 countries on its list classifying countries by their levels of corruption. President Medvedev has announced his intention to crack down on corruption, but recently admitted that the efforts have yielded few results.
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