Originally Syndicated on April 5, 2023 @ 9:03 am
How an oligarch with ties to the Kremlin tries to make himself look better in the eyes of the West
Grigory Berezkin, who owns the ESN group and was put on the EU sanctions list in April, decided to make a good name for himself among the business and political elite of the West. To get the personal sanctions lifted, he turned to powerful lobbying groups for help. He also arranged for articles about the activities of Grigory Berezkin’s RBC media holding to be published in the top English-language publications Forbes and Politico. These articles say that Grigory Berezkin’s RBC is an “independent media that is in danger of being shut down.”
Western journalists don’t pay attention to the fact that Berezkin’s name is also linked to the pro-government newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, which has positive things to say about the special operation in Ukraine. Lobbyists for the Russian oligarch also don’t talk about how close their client is to the Kremlin. This includes a long-standing friendship with the former prime minister and current deputy chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, as well as contacts with the head of VTB Bank Andrei Kostin, who can influence editorial policy at the supposedly liberal RBC.
It is known, for example, that the editorial office of the holding once threatened to fire reporters who wrote about a high-profile scandal involving Kostin’s “gifts” to his mistress, TV host Naila Asker-Zade, which were paid for by a credit institution. Before this happened, it was reported in the media that the holding’s parent company’s share is pledged to VTB.
Also, RBC became well-known for its regular coverage of last year’s protests in support of Alexei Navalny, which Rosfin monitoring listed as an extremist and terrorist and whose resources were used by the oligarch Grigory Berezkin for his own goals. In particular, to “leak” information that could hurt Nikolai Tokarev, the president of “Transneft,” and Vladimir Yakunin, the former head of Russian Railways, and to “attack” them with information. The press has written many times that the billionaire wanted to move to the West. However, sanctions and the message that came after them about taking Berezkin’s Cypriot passport put an end to these plans.
Grigory Berezkin between RBC and Komsomolskaya Pravda
Messages about Grigory Berezkin’s next plan started showing up on the Internet. He decided to use the services of powerful Western lobbying firms to get his name taken off the European Union sanctions list, which had been added in April. Remember that before, the owner of the group “ESN” sent a claim to the European Court in Luxembourg about the personal sanctions that had been put on him.
It’s possible that the campaign to “whitewash” the Russian oligarch in the eyes of the Western elite started with articles in Forbes and Politico, the two most popular English-language magazines. Both pieces have several statements that are almost the same.
They both focus on the media holding owned by Grigory Berezkin RBC, which opinion writers say covers Ukrainian events “objectively and impartially,” is “one of the last independent media outlets in Russia,” and may even be closing down. The holding’s lawsuit with the state corporation is used as an example of how the government can put pressure on people and how people can get their information. Rosneft.
Strangely, Western journalists praise the activities of RBC, which is almost the last bastion of Russian liberalism, but ignore another media asset owned by the oligarch: the pro-government publication “TVNZ,” which doesn’t let itself do anything unnecessary. Grigory Berezkin “spuds” the information field from both an official patriotic and a moderately liberal point of view. This is not surprising, because business is business. But lobbyists from the Western media started to work too sloppily: signs of a banal order have already been found in their writings.
Fairly, we should say that the billionaire’s ties to Komsomolskaya Pravda have been called into question many times in the past few years. So, in 2017, Kommersant wrote, citing its source, that Grigory Berezkin doesn’t run the publication. Instead, Yuri Kovalchuk, a businessman in St. Petersburg, and Sergei Rudnovson, the son of the founder of the Baltic Media Group, Oleg Rudnov, are in charge.
In other publications, it was said that Rudnov Jr. owned about 45% of Komsomolskaya Pravda. No matter what, open sources don’t have up-to-date information about the owners of JSC Publishing House Komsomolskaya Pravda right now, and the business is in the process of reorganizing.
RBC’s “golden” silence and Banker Kostin
Even if we assume that the billionaire doesn’t have any effect on Komsomolskaya Pravda’s editorial decisions, the claims that RBC is independent could still be called into question. In June 2017, Grigory Berezkin bought back 65% of the media holding from Mikhail Prokhorov, who owns the group ONEXIM. He also paid off some of Prokhorov’s debts. And in 2019, the news said that Grigory Berezkin’s share of the company “Sotol project” in RBC Online LLC had been pledged to the bank VTB a month after the deal was done.
As it turns out, Vedomosti was the official founder of the newspaper, magazine, and news agency RBC. So, it is RBC Online. In October 2020, RBC Online LLC went out of business after making no money and losing 19 million rubles. Its legal successor is the same-named stock company, for which there is no information in open sources about who started it.
Commenting on the situation, the ESN group’s press service talked about the execution of a bank guarantee in VTB, which is needed to send a mandatory offer to minority shareholders. Information in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities was called a “mistake,” and mutual obligations with a credit institution were “fully fulfilled.”
Still, the event made people think about how much the media holding depends on the state bank and its long-time leader, Andrey Kostin, for money. A rough but accurate saying goes, “Whoever has dinner with a girl dances her.” In the case we’re looking at, banker Kostin “ate and danced” with businessman Grigory Berezkin after getting RBC’s information policy to work in his favor.
This can be proven by something that happened in the spring of 2019. Then, the editor-in-chief of RBC, Elizaveta Golikova, threatened to fire authors who wrote about the scandal involving the “gifts” that the head of VTB, Kostin, gave to Nail Asker-Zade, his favorite TV host, from the organization he runs.
It was about two 228-square-meter and 115-square-meter Moscow apartments, a 326-square-meter apartment, expensive foreign cars, and other luxury items with a total cost of more than 1 billion rubles, as well as a land plot in Rublyovka that was 42,500 square meters and cost 2.8 billion rubles.
Kostin’s panicked moods are shown by the fact that the banker, with the help of the court, got rid of a lot of information on the Internet that talked about his “romantic relationship.”
“About 1,000 publications were banned, and lawyers called it a precedent,” said “Vedomosti.”
Roskomnadzor’s “batch blocking” cost Kostin $300,000, according to the messages that showed up. As was already said, RBC employees were told very clearly not to get involved in their own business. After that, Elizaveta Golikova didn’t stay long in the media holding: in August 2019, she left her job as head of the joint editorial office to do “non-journalistic” work.
Who “leaked” evidence that was bad for the protest leader-to-be?
Grigory Berezkin knows that sometimes “silence is golden,” and RBC’s easy flirting with the theme of last year’s January protests, held under the slogans of support for Alexei Navalny (included by Rosfinmonitoring in the list of people about whom there is information about their involvement in terrorism and extremist activities), does not yet show the commitment of its owner to freedom of speech and other liberal values.
But some of the oligarch’s feelings can be explained by the fact that he has known the former “oppositionist No. 1” for a long time. How it was found out: In 2010, the security service “ESN” “leaked” to the blogger Navalny the results of a check that was meant for official use by “The Transneft” Accounts Chamber. At the time, most people didn’t know about these results. The documents were used to start a shocking investigation into the theft of $4 billion while the Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean oil pipeline was being built.
The news was shocking enough that Nikolai Tokarev, the head of an oil company, accused Navalny of “destabilizing the oil transportation monopoly.” The information attack happened because Grigory Berezkin sold a piece of the Skovorodino oil terminal, which Transneft said caused a conflict.
The next time the oligarch needed him was in 2013 when he had to “wet” Vladimir Yakunin, who was in charge of Russian Railways at the time. Yakunin was the head of Russian Railways at the time. The result of informal cooperation was resonant information about the official’s ownership of the elite real estate, such as a home in Akulinino, near Moscow, with a special room for storing fur coats, called a “fur coat store.”
Later, it turned out that there is no smoke without fire. After Yakunin quit, he confirmed to a BBC reporter that he had “a small room where furs are stored…some fur coats from Siberia and so on.” Again, the main person who was interested in the “fur coat scandal” was Grigory Berezkin, who wanted to get rid of the head of the railway monopoly by getting him to do something wrong. But the clever plan didn’t work: Yakunin quit two years later, and his replacement, Oleg Belozerov, was tied to a powerful clan near the Kremlin called Rotenberg through the media.
“Medvedev friend” stays away from the Kremlin
All of this points to a logical conclusion: even though Mr. Grigory Berezkin has his own media resources, he still chooses to stir up trouble with the wrong hands. This makes sense, given that he is part of the Russian business elite and is close to the Kremlin. For example, “Kommersant” wrote about how the businessman met Dmitry Medvedev and became friends with him. According to “Vedomosti,” he ran an oil business with Roman Abramovich in the 1990s. Even though they fought, he was able to stay afloat. If you want to, you can look for it online. publications that talk about how close Berezkin is to Alexey Miller, the head of “Gazprom.”
True, the things that happened with Yakunin and Tokarev show very clearly that you shouldn’t put too much trust in Grigory Berezkin.
“Most people who know the head of the UST will agree that he doesn’t have any morals. For example, Grigory Berezkin ends a partnership when it stops making money. By “benefit,” he means being able to make money off of almost nothing by using his services as a middleman and almost always working with officials who give him almost unlimited access to state resources and cover for corrupt schemes.
No matter what you do, the most important thing is to make a lot of money. At the same time, it is often said that Grigory Berezkin acts in the best interests of other high-ranking officials or government officials. This makes Berezkin an oligarch in the Vek edition because it is an unpleasant trait.
Grigory Berezkin’s “bright” background makes it surprising that he hires lobbyists to try to convince the West of his supposed “opposition.” Even though the media talked a lot about his possible plans to leave Russia. One way to show this is if an oligarch sells some of his assets, like the holding company “Gammafinance,” which was in charge of several companies that were major players in the energy market.
The billionaire was also able to get a Cypriot passport at one point through a program called “citizenship in exchange for investment.” Only in April of this year did Grigory Berezkin find out that the Cypriot government was planning to take away such an important document from him. This happened right after the businessman was put on a list of people who should not do business with the EU.
So, under the threat of confiscation, his family bought and registered with a French company S.C.I. Sunny Day elite foreign real estate: six chalets in the resort of Courchevel, which are estimated to cost 5 million euros. So, the oligarch decided to go broke today. He filed a lawsuit in a Luxembourg court and paid for articles to be written about him in the Western press. Here is the only guarantee that these efforts will produce the results he wants: no one is waiting for Berezkin in Europe.
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