You often hear the following tale in old accounts of Vladimir Putin. In 1999, when the family of the alcoholic, sickly, and essentially incapacitated President Yeltsin, along with a bunch of oligarchs, chose Putin as his successor, he initially refused. After a lifetime as a low-ranking official, he was finally one step away from becoming the country’s top politician. What could there be to be unhappy about? What more could he want? The answer to this question can be found in the words of Putin’s closest associate of that time, the founder of the United Russia party, and the man who persuaded Putin to become president, Boris Berezovsky.

This takes me back to the winter of 1999, when talk began of him considering becoming president. I was at his summer house at that time, and he stopped and said, “Listen, you know what I want more than anything else in the world? I want to be Berezovsky.” Then he paused and said, “Give me Gazprom.”

Boris Berezovsky

From his 2007 interview with Dmitry Gordon

Back then, in 1999, this phrase simply did not make any sense. What do you mean—“give me Gazprom”? What Gazprom? You’re the director of the FSB. Gazprom is a state company, it’s practically equal to state service, so how can one “give” it to you? Why, where and how do the interests of a KGB officer and the state gas monopoly intersect?

But this is not 1999, but 2022. And we know so much about Putin that this story by Berezovsky requires no context or additional explanation at all. Even then, in 1999, before his first presidential term, Putin’s priorities were already fully formed. He knew exactly what he wanted: to steal. You see, there has never been Putin the patriot, there has never been Putin the geopolitician, there has never been Putin the savior of Russia, Putin has always been the thief. He was always ready at a second’s notice, without hesitation, to exchange his highest state office for the opportunity to “become Berezovsky”.

But there was no need to trade anything. Gazprom has become Putin’s personal property, his favorite plaything. He seized it and divided it among himself, his friends and relatives. He has turned it into a bottomless purse from which he can take money. Be it for palaces and entertainment, or for war. Gazprom is not just a gas monopoly, but a personal, purpose-built corrupt monster on which Putin’s power rests. 

And for twenty years now, this monster has been headed by his most trusted and loyal person, who has been given the dirty job of reaching into the pockets of every Russian citizen, taking the money out of there and putting it on his master’s table.

Alexei Miller. Head of Gazprom since 2001. Billionaire. Hero of Labor (awarded by Putin). One of the most inconspicuous and non-public Russian officials. Keeper of one of the country’s biggest secrets, about how the state-owned company, which is called our national treasure on TV, got stolen from us.

Oddly enough, hardly anything is known about Miller. How much does he make? Where does he live? What does he own? Where is his family, his children, who are they? All this information is classified. The facts of his official biography have been twisted. But today we’re going to rectify all that. We’ll tell you the fullest, most comprehensive story of how Putin’s junior aide from the St. Petersburg mayor’s office turned into one of the richest men in the world. We’ll show you what he owns, where he rests and lives. We will give you a tour of his secret palace both from the outside and the inside. We will tell who his real wife is, in whose accounts we discovered billions of rubles, and, most importantly, how Miller personally has been stealing billions on Gazprom contracts for a dozen years already, with the help of an intricate network of foreign offshore companies.

21 years ago, on May 31, 2001, at a meeting with businessmen in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin announced the appointment of Alexei Miller as the new head of Gazprom. Miller was standing to attention. Not only the viewers of this news story, but most likely even the people present at this meeting were seeing him for the first time. Where did he even come from?

We have to thank Anatoly Chubais, this gentleman who now lives in either Turkey or Cyprus or Israel, for Alexei Miller. He was working in the Leningrad mayor’s office in the last years of Soviet power, and hired the then 28-year-old Alexei Miller as a junior researcher. He had been working at the LenNIIProekt for a couple of years by then. This was a Soviet design bureau that dealt with urban construction—panel houses, residential neighborhoods, and public spaces.

In 1991, when Leningrad became St. Petersburg, Chubais left for Moscow, and Miller stayed to work with the new city mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. One can read in old records that Miller was simply not taken to Moscow, to Chubais’ team, for being weak and unqualified. At the mayor’s office, Miller got into the Foreign Economic Relations Committee and there the most important event of his life happened: he met Putin.

You must have heard about the Marina Salye Commission. This is a very famous and scandalous investigation by members of the St. Petersburg City Council, which established that in the early 90s, Putin and his associates from the Committee on Foreign Relations were stealing money on food supplies, city procurements, and government programs. Putin personally ran these schemes, but it was mostly his deputy, Alexander Anikin, who signed all the documents. Their names stand together in all the accusations. The official recommendation of the investigation was appropriate: “Remove Putin and Anikin from their positions.” Mayor Sobchak covered up his protégé Putin, but deputy Anikin was sacrificed and fired. And instead of him, Miller was appointed to the vacated position.

For the next five years of his work in the mayor’s office, Miller, despite his low position, was Putin’s key man. He was in charge of the bribes. In 2014, St. Petersburg businessman Maxim Freidson filed a lawsuit against Miller in New York, and then gave out some rather sensational interviews. He recounted how in 1993 he tried to set up a police weapons company in Russia. He needed a visa from the mayor’s office, and Putin negotiated with him. Putin would ask for bribes for help and administrative support. In this particular case, it was $10,000, Putin would write the amount on a piece of paper and then say out loud: “Alexei Miller will handle the paperwork.” And so it was with any issue where the mayor’s office had to be involved. You need the paperwork? Just kick in 10 grand and give it to Miller.

— During the conversation, a gentleman who strikingly resembled Russian President Putin wrote a figure and concluded by saying: “Alexei Miller will handle the paperwork.” That was the end of the conversation. I must say that they did everything very competently, quickly and without any problems.

— Were you there one-to-one, or was Miller there too?

— No, we were one-on-one.

— And what was the amount he wrote?

— Ten thousand dollars.

Maxim Freidson

From his interview with Radio Liberty

In 1996, when Sobchak lost the election, Putin stayed in Moscow as head of the presidential administration. But he did not bring Miller with him (unlike Sechin, for example). Miller stayed in St. Petersburg and went to “work” at the Sea Port. Judging by the materials of the case in a New York court, Miller’s tasks at the time included assistance to criminal authority Ilya Traber, who controlled part of the port. As director of development and investment, Miller reported to this “economist of the Tambov gang”. Miller was probably sent to work at the port as a watchdog, and as a link between Putin and the gang, with whom it was not very desirable for the director of the FSB to deal directly. In addition, Miller received an unofficial allowance there, a precious bonus, in the amount of 2000 dollars a month in an envelope. The money was not that huge, but Miller wasn’t really in charge of anything in that port, either.

Those who knew Miller personally in the 1990s generally described him as a very mediocre man. Not very gifted, gray, unremarkable. “Devoid of initiative”. “Doesn’t make any decisions”. “He was completely unnoticeable”. “His main virtue was his ability to bow”.

And it worked! In 1999 Putin was appointed prime minister and recommended Miller for the position of general director of the Baltic Pipeline System, they were building a pipeline to export oil to northern Europe.

Just a year later, maybe less, Putin became president, and Miller got promoted too. He was appointed Deputy Minister of Energy and finally invited to Moscow. But Miller stayed in the post of deputy minister for less than a year as well. Ten months later, to everyone’s surprise, Putin appointed Miller head of Gazprom to replace Rem Vyakhirev, who seemed irreplaceable.

In conclusion, I would like to introduce Alexei Miller, who was appointed by the Board of Directors as the head of Gazprom yesterday. It is no accident that Rem Ivanovich [Vyakhirev] is here—he stays in the team, he will continue to work. I hope there will be a good tandem between this fairly young, modern person and the experienced Mr. Vyakhirev.

Vladimir Putin

At a meeting with representatives of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, May 31, 2001

It’s unclear what sort of tandem he was talking about: Vyakhirev and his whole team were literally purged from Gazprom. Almost overnight. 

Alexei Miller was appointed head of Gazprom the day before the official announcement. Not many people knew about this. Miller was brought into Gazprom’s office, given a photo shoot to show just how great he was, and presented to the board of directors, where they voted for him unanimously. Nothing was known about Miller, except that he is a close friend of Putin’s.

Here’s a snippet from the most important satirical program of the time, Puppets. They joke about Miller too, specifically about how no one knows who he is or even his first name.

It is rather difficult to convey now how unexpected these permutations were. Well, imagine Miller himself getting replaced now. Or Sechin. And in their place comes some very young guy who doesn’t even have any background.

The old Gazprom was built on two pillars. Chernomyrdin, who used to head Gazprom (which was a ministry at the time) since ’85, and Rem Vyakhirev, Chernomyrdin’s associate, who took over Gazprom when Chernomyrdin left to join the government. Vyakhirev had worked in Gazprom all his life, reportedly knew every inch of the company, and his entire life revolved around Gazprom. It’s very easy to believe it if you look at his tombstone.

In 1992 the Gas Industry Ministry was transformed into a state corporation, but unlike oil companies, Gazprom didn’t follow the famous privatization scheme of the 1990s. It was not broken up into pieces and given to some oligarch at a mortgage auction. Truth be told, it was hard to call it state property then. Gazprom was de facto controlled by Vyakhirev and his team. This was a huge problem for the authorities at the time. Gazprom not only disposed of huge sums of money in its own right, but also spent them on politics, on television and, of course, on itself. Gazprom under Vyakhirev was very corrupt. There’s a famous story about Boris Nemtsov, who in 1997 (he was the minister for fuel and energy) discovered that Rem Vyakhirev, a government employee, had a secret option in Gazprom of unexplainable origin. This option, “for his work and merits,” gave Vyakhirev the right to receive a 30% stake in Gazprom for almost nothing, at a price 750 times lower than the market. This did not happen though, thanks to Nemtsov this contract was terminated.

Gazprom was very corrupt under Vyakhirev. Even though it was a different era, these stories will seem so familiar to you as if they happened yesterday. Vyakhirev arranged for his son to join Gazprom’s top management. Yuri Removich Vyakhirev managed Gazexport, the company’s most profitable subsidiary. Vyakhirev’s second child, his daughter, was a major shareholder in Stroytransgaz, Gazprom’s main contractor. Other shareholders in this contractor were two of Chernomyrdin’s sons and the children of other old Gazprom managers.

And then along came Putin. Putin 1.0, so to say, the Putin who put things in order. He replaced Chernomyrdin, who in 2000 was chairman of Gazprom’s board of directors, with Dmitry Medvedev, his closest friend and trusted confidant. A year later, the unsinkable Vyakhirev is removed and replaced by another of Putin’s friends, Miller. And then Miller cleaned up the rest. He appointed to key positions people whose only qualification was that they had once worked with him in St. Petersburg.

The 27-year-old Kirill Seleznyov, with whom Miller worked at the St. Petersburg Sea Port, became his assistant, then a few months later a board member and director of marketing. Accountant Elena Vasilyeva, who also worked with Miller at the port, became the chief accountant of Russia’s largest and most important corporation. Andrei Kruglov, an employee of the St. Petersburg Mayor’s Office’s External Affairs Committee, immediately became a member of the Management Committee and head of Gazprom’s Corporate Finance Department. He was 33 years old at the time. Mikhail Sereda, who worked with Miller at the Baltic Pipeline System, became head of the board administration in 2001 at the age of 31. He still keeps this job. Alexander Dyukov, head of Gazpromneft, was Miller’s formal boss at the port. Valery Golubev, Putin’s KGB colleague and an employee of the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, was appointed to oversee construction at Gazprom. This list can go on for quite a long time.

At first, this reshuffle was even welcomed. They threw out the old crooks headed by Vyakhirev and appointed young and effective people. What’s wrong with that? It all became clear in just a couple of years.

By seizing all the positions, control mechanisms, and financial flows from the old Gazprom people, Miller came one step closer to his real mission at Gazprom. The old thieves were kicked out so that Putin’s new ones could come in. And steal even more.

The scheme couldn’t be simpler. Gazprom decided to get rid of non-core assets and give them directly to Putin’s friends and relatives without any special ceremonies. 

In 2008 Gazprom decided it no longer needed its five construction contractors, as they were distracting it from its main business. These assets were bought up by the judoka Rotenberg at a starting price of 8 billion rubles. He used them to form Stroygazmontazh, which was practically Gazprom’s main contractor. He made a lot of money. And in 2019 Rotenberg sold the firm back to Gazprom, but for 75 billion.

Timchenko did the same thing. In 2007, his structures bought out Stroytransgaz, Gazprom’s oldest and no less large-scale contractor. They received huge contracts without any competition and managed to make a huge amount of money. And two years ago, Timchenko sold the firm to Gazprom for 50 billion rubles.

Putin even enriched his great-nephews at the expense of Gazprom. He arranged for one of them, Mikhail Putin, to be Miller’s deputy, and another, Mikhail Shelomov, got 8 billion rubles’ worth of Gazprom stock.

Here’s another example. Gazprom’s insurance firm Sogaz, after being sold, went to Bank Rossiya, that is, under direct control of Putin, his closest cronies, relatives, and mistresses.Without an auction, they just gave it away for the ridiculous price of 1.7 billion.

In 2006 Sogaz also bought out 75% of the shares of Leader, the company that managed the country’s largest non-state pension fund, Gazfond. The president of the fund to this day is Yuri Shamalov, the brother of Putin’s former son-in-law.

The oligarchs have not been spared either. Alisher Usmanov, who worked at Gazprom for more than 15 years, was involved in non-core metallurgical assets there. He headed Gazprominvestholding, which first bought up metallurgical assets with Gazprom’s money, and then a couple of years later it changed its mind and sold them to Alisher Usmanov himself.

Roman Abramovich probably pulled off the most blatant corruption deal in the company’s history. In 1995 he bought Sibneft at mortgage auctions for $100 million, and in 2005 he sold it back to Gazprom for $13 billion. This deal alone enabled him to become one of the richest men in the world, buying soccer clubs, castles and yachts.

The beneficiaries of these deals did not leave this favour unanswered. Almost all of the people listed above were directly involved in the construction of Putin’s famous palace in Praskoveevka. They paid bribes: with villas in France, like Timchenko, or yachts, like Abramovich. Alisher Usmanov personally gave Medvedev, once the chairman of the Gazprom board of directors, a mansion on Rublyovka.

And this was the very purpose of Gazprom’s existence. All other indicators did not matter. In 2008, Miller had promised that Gazprom would be worth a trillion dollars by 2015-16. And it would become the most expensive company in the world. Gazprom was then valued at 360 billion. Now, in 2022, it is worth 100 billion, 10 times less. But even this 100 billion is an overestimate. Since the start of the war, Gazprom shares have not been traded on international exchanges at all. In 2007, Medvedev, as deputy prime minister and head of Gazprom’s board of directors, said that full gasification of the country could be completed in 10 years. Fifteen years have passed, and Putin promises that by 2030, after another eight years, it might be possible to gasify 83% of households. For ordinary consumers, gas prices are only growing.

Here is a great example from the Kursk Oblast: a man found his old utility bills, compared them to the new ones, and published them on the Internet. In 2011, gas for a private residence cost 3.6 rubles per cubic meter. Ten years later, it cost 6.2 rubles. The increase in the gas price was 72% in 10 years. In the Moscow Oblast, the price doubled. It costs between 400 and 700 thousand rubles to connect gas to a dacha in our gas empire!

But don’t feel bad, why do you need this money anyway? There are more important things than that, aren’t you glad that Gazprom sponsors the German football club Schalke? It’s only 650 million a year, and it brings so much joy. Look at your gas bill and remember that Gazprom has spent 14 million euros on the reconstruction of the mosaics in the St. Sava Cathedral in Serbia. And they built themselves the biggest skyscraper in Europe, Lakhta Center. You have to pay more for gas because Gazprom needs to hire Schroeder and Putin’s friend from the Stasi Warnig, it’s all very expensive.

A very interesting and telling story happened in 2018. Sberbank analysts prepared a report on Gazprom for investors, but the quite ordinary report turned out to be so scandalous that Gref personally had to apologize and fire them. The real reason for the scandal was that the report explained the essence of Gazprom in a very simple and clear way.

Gazprom is not about business and efficiency. Gazprom is not and has never been aimed at being profitable and making money. Gazprom exists to give money away, to pay its contractors, Putin’s friends. They build pipelines, lay pipes, and launch megaprojects with the sole purpose of enriching the constructors (Timchenko, Rotenberg, and the rest) as if there were no tomorrow. They don’t care whether there is profit or not. The Nord and South Stream, as it turned out, may not get launched at all. The job is already done. The budgets have been “sawed”.

On September 7, 2018, a motorcade of armored black Mercedes-Maybach cars passed near Shcherbinka, in the Moscow region. It was heading toward the center of Moscow from the nearby Ostafyevo airport. It is a small airfield, built in the 30s for the NKVD, and now owned by the Ministry of Defense and used for business aviation, mostly by Gazprom. Near the village of Novokuryanovo, an Audi swerved into the oncoming lane; the driver of the first armored Mercedes-Maybach had no time to dodge it. The accident was not serious, no one was hurt.

On the same day, scandalous headlines poured in. The motorcade was carrying Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller and Chairman of the Board of Directors Viktor Zubkov. The driver of the Audi says that immediately after the crash, some security guards jumped out of the cars, grabbed their briefcases and weapons, and began promptly twisting the plates off the car involved in the accident, while the other motorcade vehicles hurriedly drove away. 

It is completely baffling, to be honest, why there would be such a security show for a minor accident. All the more interesting, though. We found the car the motorcade collided with. Here it is in the picture, next to the Maybach in the ditch. And here is an ad for its sale shortly after the accident. You can tell by the crosses that this is definitely it. The history of this car features the September 7, 2018 crash we need, the Mercedes-Maybach we need, an its plate number.

So here it is, the coolest moment of any investigation. We are one click away from the main secret of Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller. The key to all his secret assets and how he has been plundering our national wealth for twenty years. I have to hand it to him, Miller has hidden his billions very well. But not well enough.

Mercedes-Maybach, license plate C864РА777, which was used to transport our state official on matters of state importance, is registered... No, not to Gazprom, but to an obscure and completely anonymous company, with an intricate network of nominal owners going all the way to the Seychelles. It’s called OOO Vladenie-V.

Why does Miller drive such a strange and essentially someone else’s car? Who can provide a state official with personal transportation? So far, nothing is clear. We make a mental note that Miller himself uses the cars of this company, and that’s enough for starters.

To understand how Gazprom operates and how exactly an organized criminal group took it over, we will once again turn to Vladimir Putin’s spiritual and business mentor, Berezovsky. He quite clearly derived the formula by which Putin operates to this day: to profit from a company, you don’t need to be its shareholder or owner, you just need to control its financial flows. 

Leaving Gazprom as a formally state-owned company means you can simply direct the money not where Gazprom needs it to go, but where you want it to go. To your friends and associates whom we’ve already discussed. In return, you’ll receive a multibillion-dollar ’thank you’ for the contract awarded without competition.

Until 2013, Jordanian businessman Ziyad Manassir was Gazprom’s main contractor. He owned the firm Stroygazconsulting, which had been receiving contracts from Gazprom since the mid-1990s. Manasir made a huge fortune on Gazprom. Stroygazconsulting’s revenue in its best years was mind-boggling: somewhere around 700 billion rubles. And Manasir was always generous in his gratitude.

In the early 2000s, he built Putin a huge swimming pool at the Novo-Ogarevo residence, which the President was very fond of and where he would gladly pose for journalists. Around the same time, Manassir constructed a new building for Putin’s “Riviera” residence in Sochi. And even the construction of that very palace in Praskoveevka, according to the architect Lanfranco Cirillo, was not done without Manasir. It was through him that the wishes and specifications were received from the real customer.

But all this is nothing compared to his main project. We do not know if it was voluntary, out of the call of his heart or as part of corrupt obligations, but Ziyad Manasir got involved in the project of the century: the construction of a dacha for Alexei Miller.

Let’s open the map of the state cadastral registration office together with you. This is not some Yandex map or the alien Google Maps. This is the most official map that exists in the country. And on this cadastral map, near the village of Berezhki, we see a strange object. Look, right on the map it says “Millerhof”, as if it were the name of a settlement of some kind.

The mere existence of this palace with an area of almost 3,000 m² and its own 15-hectare park only became known in 2009.

At that time there were no aerial drones, and some amateur pilot, who often flew around the Istra reservoir, took a camera with him. He took some photos of the mysterious Versailles near Moscow from the air and published them on an auto forum with the comment that all this belongs to “Comrade Miller”. The images instantly spread all over the Internet, and the mysterious palace became known as “Millerhof”, after the famous Peterhof.

All the local residents unanimously asserted that it was Miller’s palace that was being built near them, and the guard who escorted the journalists from the site said that the construction was of “national importance”. Gazprom’s press service also had to talk to journalists; their press secretary Sergey Kupriyanov flatly refused to comment on whether Miller owned the mansion, even though he was seen at the construction site.

From here on this story acquires a little comic and absurd tone. Because of the fuss that arose around the palace, Miller decided that he could not live there after this. But he didn’t want to give it back either. The finished palace was mothballed for the next 10 years, and then it was taken over by companies affiliated with Vladenie-V.

The palace, which had turned into a white elephant, has recently been given a new lease on life. Look at this footage. This is the dapper rapper Timati, meeting girls who dream of marrying him. This is the show “The Bachelor” on TNT.

In the hall with a huge staircase, Timati chooses which of the contestants he likes, and the girls wait for the verdict and get acquainted in the pompous living room. It all takes place in the Millerhof.

The palace is now rented out for weddings, shoots and other events, and you can find many photos on the Internet of what Miller had built for himself, what the bribe from the contractor looked like, which Miller accepted but opted not to use.

Browse through the gallery below to view the interiors of the palace.

All this is very funny madness, and a wonderful insight into the world of what corrupt officials value, but in fact this story is eerily symbolic. It’s exactly like Putin’s palace in Gelendzhik, all of Putin’s Russia is about that, with billions of bribes being pumped into building dachas for officials that are so huge that they can be seen from space, and these dachas then being abandoned, just because they didn’t fit, and Timati picking a bride there instead.

So, it turns out that Manasir, Gazprom’s contractor, didn’t fulfill his obligation. He didn’t thank Miller properly. The gift didn’t suit him. So what did Manasir do in this difficult situation? He built another dacha for Miller.

We’re going to the village of Greenfield west of Moscow, 37 kilometers from Millerhof. Even the satellite map shows that the village is for respectable gentlemen. Even the cheapest house in this village costs at least 150 million rubles.

But there is a house here that stands out even among others. Here it is. This is the dacha of Ziyad Manasir himself. He began constructing it in 2008 and it has even been called the most expensive house in Russia. It seems to be true. We found a very fresh ad for its sale, it is already postwar, from April 8. What makes it interesting is not only the pictures of the impressive interiors, but also the fact that the market value is given. Ziyad Manassir sells his house for 10 billion rubles.

The house is very luxurious indeed. There is an entrance with columns in palatial style and an own park. But is Manassir’s palace the most expensive house, the ultimate in luxury and opulence?

No! Because the most expensive house is across the fence from it.

One can see straight away that this house stands out even by the standards of the famous Rublevka. It is one of the largest and most expensive private houses in Russia. An alley surrounded by trees runs through the whole plot of land, leading to the main house. In front of the main house are statues of lions and a luxurious fountain. And an Orthodox chapel is hidden to the right. 

This is the largest palace we’ve ever filmed in the Moscow region: its area is 8,500 m².

This is indeed a real palace, and it’s not just about the area, but also the appearance: a grand driveway where a car can drive up to the very entrance, columns, balconies, a giant dome. On top of the building there is a private terrace with sun loungers and chimneys, which hint at the presence of numerous fireplaces in this house.

We’ll leave the main house for now and come back to it a little later. Looking at the building from the other side, we see 2 security buildings and a protruding annex to the palace, where the technical rooms and the parking lot are located. There’s some kind of playground between the trees. The house is protected from the outside world by a fence and three lines of trees.

There is also a guest house. Nearby, there are two more guard booths and a rather plain structure by the standards of this palace: the servants’ quarters. We have a plan of it.

House plan of the servant’s quarters

On the first floor of the building there is a garage for 6 cars, two security offices, a kitchen/dining room and a recreation room. On the second floor there are five bedrooms with sitting rooms and bathrooms. Not far from the servants’ quarters there is a 200 m² glass greenhouse.

It was clear from the very beginning of the construction that Manasir was not building the house for himself. First of all, why would Manasir build two almost identical houses across the fence from each other at the same time? In 2011, long before the construction was completed, Manasir, despite being a Jordanian, built an Orthodox chapel on the site.

There is also an own 2,000 m² stable with a huge manege there, and next to it is a full-size statue of a horse.

Horses are a great passion of Alexei Miller. He used to be the chairman of the board of directors of Russian Hippodromes, and a spokesman for Gazprom once said that Miller was “very fond of this subject”. Miller has been gifted steeds, his horses compete with those of Kadyrov, and now he owns five stallions: Bombay, Sevinch-khon, Vesely, Trans, and Frigate. That stable was built for them.

The history of this house is very similar to that of Millerhof. First it was being built by Gazprom’s contractor, Ziyad Manasir’s Stroygazconsulting: he paid all the bills and bought the land, and then in 2014, the nearly completed house ended up in the ownership of Vladenie-V, which is already familiar to us.

This was the case until the end of 2020, and then the trickery with the Rosreestr, which our viewers already know very well, began. The names of the real owners began to disappear from the official registry records. Officially, this was done to protect various security officials like Shoigu and the heads of the FSB from enemy intelligence, but the palace was classified just to protect the psyche of poor Russians who could accidentally find out how the head of our national treasure, Gazprom, lives.

In November 2020, Vladlenie-V sold this palace, but we won’t find out the names of the new owners from the registry extract: it says “Russian Federation” instead. There’s even two of them. Seriously, two Russian Federations own this estate 50/50.

One might rejoice: such palaces have not been owned by our state since the days of the Russian Empire. But we know for a fact that we are being deceived again. Behind the classified extract hides the head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, and his family.

Let’s prove this. The fact is that even though Miller is a non-public person, his movements still leave traces. Miller doesn’t travel around the world on Pobeda flights—he has his own airline, Gazprom Avia, made up of luxury business jets. We found one pattern in all of Miller’s flights. Wherever he flies, whatever plane he uses, he gets the same flight number: when he flies out of Moscow he gets 4G9611, and when he flies back, 4G9612. This is evident from the leaked flight databases.

Here’s Miller flying to and from Sochi. We see flights 9611 and 9612. Here he is in 2015 flying to Beijing with a stopover in Tomsk, flight 9611. Back from Beijing comes flight 9612.

Miller’s official schedule also matches up well with his plane’s flights. On September 3, 2021, flight 9611 flies to Vladivostok, and Miller opens a helium hub there on the same day. On September 14, the plane flies to Yerevan, where Miller discusses energy development programs in Armenia.

Each time Miller takes off from Ostafyevo Airport, it’s right on the way there that he got into an accident. It takes about 2 hours to drive from Ostafyevo to Miller’s house in Greenfield through traffic jams, but Miller values his time. That is why he flies in a helicopter. He has two Airbus helicopters, each worth $15 million. Here they are, in special Gazprom livery and with the Gazprom logo on the fuselage. These helicopters will help us figure out where Miller really lives.

Let’s look at the flight logs. On April 22 of this year at 19:24 Miller’s plane returns from St. Petersburg to Moscow. And 20 minutes later, we already see his helicopter in the sky, which takes us straight to his palace. Its track cuts off just a few hundred meters from the helipad because the helicopter descends too low and its signal disappears from the air traffic radar.

Here is a similar example from January 22. At 15:39, the plane landed in Moscow. At 16:01 the helicopter was airborne and at 16:18 it landed near the palace.

January 16. The plane landed at 19:07, the helicopter was airborne at 19:28 and the head of the “national treasure” was soon dropped off at his dacha.

The situation is absolutely the same the other way round. On November 26th the helicopter takes off from the dacha and lands at Ostafievo at 15:57, and at 16:18 the plane with Miller on board takes off and heads for St. Petersburg.

We found quite a few examples of Gazprom helicopters bringing Miller to the Gazprom plane from his dacha or taking him back—over fifty in total.

There is another important point here, for those who may still not believe that Vladlenie-V is Miller’s pocket firm to which he registers everything he wants to hide. Pay attention to the dates. Until November 2020, the palace in Greenfield was owned by Vladenie-V, a firm with unknown owners and a mysterious status. But Miller still lived in the palace, and his helicopter flew the route we know.

October 9, 2020. The palace officially belongs to Vladenie-B. Miller’s helicopter arrives there. March 16, 2020: same thing, the owner of the palace is unclear, but Miller still flies there. Even earlier, 2019: Miller’s helicopter flies to Greenfield. And here’s Miller flying to Greenfield in 2018. So for at least the last 4 years, the palace has actually been used by Miller.

Here’s the very helipad he arrives at. The path from it leads directly to the palace grounds. This pad is still, through another firm, owned by Vladlenie-V. By the way, this firm maintains the pad completely free of charge. Miller does not pay a penny for this site, although he regularly flies to it.

We have been watching Miller’s helicopter for so long that we were able to understand how his travel schedule works. When Miller’s plane flies out of St. Petersburg, we understand how long it takes for his helicopter to arrive at the Moscow estate, the margin of error of our calculations is a few minutes. Therefore we can not but support numerous screenshots from tracking sites with the queen of evidence, a video. We want to exclude any possibility for Alexei Miller to say that his helicopter flew to some other site and that he had never heard of this palace at all. We look at the palace the way Miller often looks at it—from a bird’s-eye view.

Look, what’s that over there on the helipad? That’s Gazprom’s helicopter, taking Miller to get ready for his flight. The color, the five blades and the tail leave no doubt that it is the very same helicopter.

And besides the helipad, Miller doesn’t pay for utilities in his own house either. Even after the sale of the palace to the “Russian Federations”, Vladenie-V continues to pay the bills for the new owner. In 2021, Vladenie-V paid for water, wastewater, and truck access to the settlement.

As we have said hundreds of times in our investigations, what really matters is not who owns the palace, but who uses it. Miller lived in Vladenie-V’s palace and didn’t pay them a penny for it. Now Miller has re-registered the house to himself, but he continues to drive around in Vladenie-V’s cars, the same company continues to pay his utility bills, and it continues to maintain his helipad—the pad for one and only passenger—free of charge.

We have already proven that this house—probably the most expensive house in Moscow and the Moscow region—belongs to Miller. But attentive viewers will surely say “I am not convinced, guys, show me Miller’s or his relatives’ name on it.”

No problem. But some context first—or a digression large enough it could become a separate investigation in and of itself.

Alexei Miller is legally married, Irina Grigorieva became his wife in 1990. In 1996 they had a son, Mikhail. You can Google “Miller’s wife” and you will find Irina Miller. But you will meet neither this woman nor their child at the palace near Moscow. Miller lives exactly like Lavrov, Shoigu, Putin, and other conservative Orthodox Christian leaders of ours, keen on “spiritual staples” and family values, but his case is much more interesting. It’s neither a gymnast nor a stewardess. Many of you know Marina Yentaltseva, Miller’s real wife, a Kremlin official, head of the presidential protocol for twenty years.

To understand who this woman is, we once again go back in time to a place we’ve already been more than once. St. Petersburg mayor’s office, early 90s. From the beginning of the decade till 1996, Marina Yentaltseva worked there as Vladimir Putin’s personal secretary. Here’s their famous Best Employees board, here’s Putin, here’s Miller, here’s Yentaltseva (you know the others pretty well too). But unlike Miller, Putin’s inconspicuous shadow, Marina Yentaltseva was Putin’s real loyal friend.

Let us turn to our favorite primary source, the only official biography of Putin published in 2000. A truly unique book.

Because it was published in pre-censorship times, when Putin really wanted voters to like him and vote for him, and it reveals amazing facts. For example, Putin tells the story of how he went with his friends to the sauna at his new dacha, and the dacha caught fire, but Putin heroically saved everyone, climbing naked along the bedsheets to get out of the blazing house, and so on.

Who were the friends that Putin went to the sauna with? Marina Yentaltseva and her family.

Or when Lyudmila Putina got in a serious car accident and fractured her spine in 1994. It was Yentaltseva who was in charge of the hospitalization on the day of the accident. She also picked up Putin’s two daughters and took them to Putin’s home for the night.

Judging by the number of mentions and quotations in this book—only Putin’s wife is mentioned more—Marina Yentaltseva was literally the closest friend of the family. Not just a secretary, but someone near and dear. 

And as soon as Putin became president 22 years ago, he immediately called his friend to work with him again, in virtually the same secretarial positions, in the Protocol Service. This service deals with the organization of official meetings, schedules, food orders, gifts, travel arrangements, guests and so on.

Judging by the number of photos of Yentaltseva and Miller together, they have been in a relationship for a long time. Miller and Yentaltseva regularly appear together at various events despite the fact that he is officially married to another woman. Marina Yentaltseva is registered in a Saint Petersburg apartment belonging to Alexei Miller. Here’s some exclusive content: in 2017, the 56-year-old Marina Yentaltseva and the 55-year-old Miller had a daughter, Anna. Here she is, in Yentaltseva’s 2017 tax return. Exactly one year later, in 2018, the new parents had a second daughter, Maria.

Marina Yentaltseva retired at the end of 2018. She went on to to work at Skolkovo, handle other projects and obviously take care of her young children. Here is her last public appearance, most likely involuntary—she is aboard a private plane, accompanied by Dvorkovich, former Minister of Agriculture Tkachev and Medvedev’s press secretary Timakova—singing “Oh, My Fate, My Fate” and toasting the agrarian lobby.

“Oh, my fate, my fate, please tell me why. I can’t find the answer no matter how I try.” There are many questions indeed. Including this: why our sweethearts Yentaltseva and Miller, with such a romantic history reaching back into the corridors of Smolny 30 years ago, have hidden their relationship for so many years and haven’t registered it despite even having children together?

We have a clear and unambiguous answer to why. You can find it on the government’s website—among tax asset disclosures. Had Yentaltseva been officially married to her de facto husband Miller, she, as an official, would have had to publish his income every year down to the last penny. If that were the case, everybody would have learned exactly how much the country’s top state executive actually earns—1.3 billion rubles, as Forbes estimates, or even more. Everything he owns—houses, apartments, planes, helicopters—would have had to be declared for our eyes to see. Hence the love of corruption and theft turned out to be stronger than ordinary love.

Let’s calculate how much money Marina Yentaltseva made in the last ten years of her public service. Fortunately we have all the information, her annual salary, there is nothing to hide. We add it up and get 40 million rubles. Crazy money—yet it’s just her salary at a very low-grade secretarial sinecure.

But hold your surprise and indignation, because the main surprise is still ahead. Let’s go back: the Greenfield palace near Moscow was registered with Vladenie-V until November 3, 2020 and then was sold to some classified persons, the “Russian Federations”. Well, less than two weeks before this transaction, Marina Yentaltseva personally transferred 7 billion rubles to Vladenie-V under a “sale and purchase agreement”. A month later, on November 26, 2020, she transferred another billion to it. In total she paid Vladenie-V nearly 8 billion rubles.

8 billion rubles. Less than two years after leaving government service, the woman whose job was to put bottled water for Putin and Medvedev at meetings, choose their tie, and do whatever else protocol requires—somehow got hold of 8 billion rubles.

We have no doubt that this money was paid for this particular house. No other properties other than the Greenfield palace were sold by Vladenie-V at that time. And the “Russian Federations« in the registry conceals its real owners, Miller and his family—who paid 8 billion rubles, half the market price, just to legalize their residency in this house. They didn’t even pay it, they just moved it from one pocket to another.

Now that at least that is sorted out, let’s see what Putin’s two secretaries from the Saint Petersburg mayor’s office have built for themselves. Not only from the outside, but also from the inside, since we have architectural plans for every room in this house. And even a few sketches and design projects of individual rooms—we do not know how accurately they were made, but the concepts also deserve attention.

Basement floor plan

First floor plan

Second floor plan

Third floor plan

The second floor here hosts a 76-square-meter gym. One floor below the gym is a huge spa. There is a small pool or a huge jacuzzi in the center of the large marble room. We have a sketch of this room. On each side you see three doors that lead to small rooms with different types of saunas, Russian, Turkish, Finnish. There is also a plunge tub, a recreation area, and a changing room.

The house has a 30-meter pool in a grandiose 450-square-meter room with ceilings reaching the very top of the building. No blueprints can convey the real atmosphere of the room. But the drawings of the place can. It’s very majestic—check out the Greek columns around the pool and the grand staircase that descends directly to the water. The balconies with wrought iron lattices allow you to watch the swimmers, and of course there is an arched ceiling. To swim under it thinking how right it was to accept the job of a bribe-taking assistant for Volodya Putin, the KGB officer from St. Petersburg, 30 years ago.

The wing at the opposite end houses a large-scale entertainment complex. We see only two floors and an attic, but the most interesting thing is hidden underground. Here on the basement floor is a full-size 20-meter bowling alley with two lanes. We would like to mention especially the interesting and bold architectural idea: classical columns and paintings in golden frames are so unusually combined here with five brick arches in the style of a provincial Russian restaurant.

In another part of this room is—no, not the bowling shoe storage area, but the 150-square-meter mini-golf room. Unfortunately, there are no specific details about this place. But in any case we note the originality, this is the first time we have seen a golf course in an official’s palace.

We continue our tour of the basement floor. Here is the central area. Room number 40 is the dining room, which leads to a huge 270-square-meter living room. You can see a tennis table on the right side of the floor plan. Number 004 is a skating rink. A small 10-by-10-meter underground rink, right in the middle of the room.

There are several more auxiliary rooms on the plan: professional kitchen (018), food storage room (013), walk-in closet, laundry room, storerooms of all kinds. But our most favorite room, which evokes a pleasant nostalgia, is number 16. It’s a “refrigerated storage room for fur coats”. Another fur coat storage! To be more precise, a 15-square-meter fur coat fridge in which Miller and his family keep their many furs.

Let’s go back up to the first floor and enter the living room with two fireplace areas totaling 260 m². This is what the room of two officials who have lived their entire lives at our expense looks like. One of hundreds of rooms in their dacha.

One of the doors leads to the 80-square-meter library decorated in walnut wood, with a huge fireplace in the center.

Now to the inner sanctum of every official’s palace, the master bedroom. Here we are a little embarrassed, because when we showed the plans of Putin’s palace in Praskoveevka, we were outraged by the fact that his bedroom complex occupies as much as 270 meters. Compared to Putin’s secretaries, the President’s bedroom looks like a shoe box. Miller and Yentaltseva’s bedroom is 320 m². The main room with the bed and, of course, a TV set on a huge pedestal, occupies 140 m². 

There are two different exits from this room leading to areas for the master and the lady of the house. Each of these has its own 40-m² bathroom with a jacuzzi tub and its own 50 m² walk-in closet.

Our most favorite room is located on the second floor of the right wing. It is a 300 m² showroom for presents, decorated with Venetian plaster and gilded wood. Alexei Miller must be letting the space to the Museum of Gifts of the Russian Wheel of Fortune game show. I have no other explanation why an official has so many gifts that he had to build a separate 300-meter-long room for them. Especially since he, as a public servant, is not allowed by law to accept gifts more expensive than 3,000 rubles. 

We have a sketch of the room. We see a beautiful, bright hall with a marble floor and columns and a statue of a woman in the center. On its sides there are shelves—for smaller gifts.

There is the 155 m² home cinema on the first floor of the other wing.

Behind the cinema there is a 145 m² winter garden with a spiral staircase. It can take you up to the second floor and into the room located directly above the cinema: the 155 m² billiards room.

The 170 m² room above the main entrance was originally conceived as a living room, but now, judging by the sketch, it houses another winter garden with a small fountain. Stones, vases, benches and foliage galore.

Finally, here is Alexei Miller’s 40 m² reception area that leads to his office. The 80 m² wood-finished office consists of a workstation with chairs for two petitioners, sofas and a fireplace. 

In Putin’s biography, in the chapter about the fire at Putin’s dacha, another person is mentioned. A girl whom Putin’s daughters call Svetulya.

Svetulya is Yentaltseva’s daughter. It is not very appropriate to call her by that name anymore; Svetulya is 34 years old, and her name is Svetlana Yurievna Kuznetsova now. 

14 years ago, Alexei Miller gave one of his rare detailed interviews, where he said that there were a lot of rumors about him employing his friends and relatives to Gazprom, but that it was all slander and defamation.

There is no one from my school or university. There are no relatives of mine here, not even distant ones, contrary to the ridiculous rumors that occasionally arise in the press.

Alexei Miller

2008 interview

That’s what he said in 2008. And in the same year, Gazpromneft employed Yentaltseva’s twenty-year-old daughter Svetlana. She was on the books until 2019, she was getting paid there for 11 years.

In 2010 Svetlya married Alexander Kuznetsov. He was an ordinary guy; he was her age, had just graduated from college, and was the son of a regular FSB officer. Two months after the wedding, the 22-year-old Alexander Kuznetsov also got a job at Gazprom, at Gazprombank, to be precise.

Do you remember the old commercials? Children, little gymnasts, judoists, singers dreaming of becoming somebody in life. They were dreaming, and at the end of the commercial, their dreams were becoming reality, and for some reason this was accompanied by the voiceover “Gazprom: Dreams come true”. It is finally clear what Gazprom had to do with it.

Our little boy Alexander Kuznetsov, who is in fact Miller’s son-in-law and the husband of his stepdaughter, has grown up and his dreams have come true. He is only 34 years old, but he already owns two G-Wagens and a legendary racing supercar Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, which accelerates to 100 km/h in less than 4 seconds. It’s current price is 60 million rubles. He also has a racing Nissan GT-R and a collectible 1961 Chevrolet Corvette. We also found an actual presidential limousine Mercedes Pullman in Kuznetsov’s car fleet. Somehow the limousine used to transport the top officials and foreign delegations became a personal property of Miller’s son-in-law. And of course, no fan of fast driving can live without a Lamborghini. Kuznetsov owns this yellow Lamborghini Murcielago worth 12,5 million; there are only three such cars in Russia.

You know, owning a Lamborghini is certainly impressive, but not impressive enough for the son-in-law of the head of Gazprom. He dreams even bigger. That’s why his wife Svetlana bought two more Lamborghini. Let’s add them to the collection: a red crossover Lamborghini Urus for 30 million rubles and a blue Lamborghini Aventador for 40 million. The total price of just these three Lamborghini owned by the Miller’s family, which somehow managed to get such similar license plates, is more than 80 million rubles.

But that’s not all. Svetlana Kuznetsova-Entaltseva also has a snow-white Rolls-Royce (she just had to have one, otherwise she would have been ridiculed), a Porsche Carrera, and another G-Wagen. Our price estimate of the entire car fleet of these two Gazprom workers is 230 million rubles.

How can a 32 year old person buy a quarter of a billion rubles worth of just cars at his age? Dreams do come true!

And not just those dreams! For example in St. Petersburg, on Krestovsky Island, right next to Gazprom Arena, there is this wonderful new apartment complex Imperial Yacht Club. This is a unique residential complex that overlooks three water basins at once: The Gulf of Finland, the Rowing Canal and the Middle Nevka. This residential complex operates as a five-star hotel; there is a twenty-four-hour concierge service, a 20-meter swimming pool, a SPA complex with CryoSaunas, a promenade, restaurants, and even special waiting rooms for drivers and residents’ personal bodyguards. And, of course, there is a yacht marina for 200 boats and a helipad right on the territory. 

At the age of 32, Kuznetsov bought an apartment here, a 558 m² penthouse, worth 760 million rubles. Here you can see what it looks like, an entire wing of the building with a wraparound balcony. But the coolest thing, of course, is the private roof of the exact same surface area, that is another 558 m². There is another enclosed structure built up there, a kind of a winter garden, and it is surrounded by a real garden, a huge terrace with trees, shrubs, and furniture. The apartment is located in such a way that you can go out on this terrace in your bathrobe in the morning and see the premises of Miller’s father-in-law, Gazprom Arena and the new headquarters of Gazprom, the Lakhta Center skyscraper.

On the first floor of the same building, there’s another one of their premises. Kuznetsov’s wife, Yentaltseva’s daughter, got a modest 128 m² non-residential space. 

By befriending Kuznetsov, Miller not only showered him with money, but also provided him with plum jobs. Having started at Gazprombank, at the age of 26 Kuznetsov moved to Gazprom Invest. At 27, Kuznetsov was appointed Deputy General Director of Stroygazconsulting, the same Gazprom contractor that had been owned by the palace constructor Manasir. Manasir, however, had already been expelled from his own firm by that time.

At the age of 31, Kuznetsov was appointed the head man of the whole holding, responsible for material and technical support. He simultaneously holds three positions: General Director of two Gazprom subsidiaries and Deputy General Director of Gazstroyprom, which is a new mega-contractor of Gazprom; we will come back to it later. Kuznetsov is responsible for the procurement of literally all materials and supplies at Gazprom: from gas pipes worth dozens of billions of rubles and gas compressor units to chocolate products used for Gazprom’s needs. Hundreds of billions of rubles annually pass through Gazprom Komplektatsiya, which is managed by Kuznetsov. You can find procurements for more than two trillion rubles on the government procurement website alone. All this money is managed by Miller’s young son-in-law.

The personal income of the 34 year old Kuznetsov, i.e. the salary that the state company, our “national treasure”, pays him, is 700 million rubles per year. That’s how much he’s gotten from Gazprom firms over the last two years. That’s almost 60 million a month. Two million rubles a day. Kuznetsov should be on all the lists of highest-paid top managers of Russia (and of the world), but until now, we didn’t even know he existed.

As for his wife, she does not need to work, her income is more modest. She’s more of a socialite, she has her own restaurant network, Wine & Crab, one of them on Nikolskaya Street, five minutes from the Red Square. The second one is in Barvikha. The third, by all appearances, will be located in St. Petersburg, at the Imperial Yacht Club, where they live.

Kuznetsova also owns a beauty salon “Bureau Beauty”—a joint venture with Deripaska’s ex-wife Polina Yumasheva, Surkov’s wife, and Svetlana Bondarchuk. The 300 m² premises are located in this beautiful building on the Mytninskaya Embankment and belong to Svetlana’s grandfather, i.e. Marina Yentaltseva’s father. Valentin Petrovich Yentaltsev, bought it three years ago, when he was 91. Good for him.

Perhaps he was helped by an influential upstairs neighbor? After all, in this very house on the sixth floor is located the royal apartment of Miller himself. We call it royal, because what else would you call 6 joint apartments forming one 1400 m² space? Miller owns another adjacent premise: the 400 m² attic of the neighboring house. Apparently, 1,400 square meters was not enough, they couldn’t fit in there anymore. The cost of this real estate is almost two billion rubles. Miller’s family seat in Moscow is a bit more modest, costing about 1.2 billion rubles; we are talking about a 775 m² apartment located right behind the White House.

Look at them, the whole family is out at the theater:

Alexei Miller—formerly a quiet and inconspicuous aide to Putin, now a dollar billionaire who has been taking pieces of the Gazprom pie for twenty-odd years and handing pieces of it to his friends.

Marina Yentaltseva—a friend of Putin’s youth and his chief of protocol; two years after leaving government service, she somehow found 8 billion for a house in her accounts.

Her daughter Svetlana Kuznetsova, Miller’s stepdaughter. For 10 years she was listed as an employee of Gazprom and was getting a salary, while she was running beauty salons and crab restaurants. Owner of two Lamborghini.

And her husband Alexander Kuznetsov—chief procurement officer of the entire Gasprom, with a salary of 2 million rubles a day, a collection of sports cars and a penthouse worth 760 million. 

A new nobility, for sure. 

Obviously, this is not the end. Far from it. But in order to make sense of what else Miller owns, we would need a chart.

The two main properties in question, namely Millerhof and the Greenfield Palace, despite their complex layered ownership structure, lead to the same place, the Seychelles. One of the most restricted jurisdictions, where it is impossible to find out the owners of the firms. Millerhoff is registered with People’s Farming Center LLC. This firm belongs to the Cypriot offshore Redensy, which, in turn, belongs to the Seychelles offshore Valenta Holdings. Further owners cannot be officially identified.

Until recently, the palace in Greenfield was registered with Vladenie-V. They also own the cars used by Miller and the helipad next to the palace. Through a Russian closed-end mutual fund and a Cypriot offshore company, Vladenie-V is owned by the same Seychelles-based Valenta.

To find even more Miller’s assets, we have to look into what else belongs to the Seychelles-based offshore company Valenta. Its another subsidiary in Russia is AO Akrona, which is unremarkable except for the fact that the firm with a registered capital of 35 thousand and one employee owns more than two billion rubles worth of real estate. We found this real estate, and we didn’t have to look far.

Let us return to the Imperial Yacht Club, where Miller’s son-in-law and stepdaughter have an apartment. In a neighboring building, literally window to window, the top two floors, the entire second floor and almost the entire first floor belong to Akrona. On the 4th and 5th, we assume the apartments are combined, there is a 1,100 m² apartment, and another 540 m² of rooftop terrace. Judging by the blueprints and the stories of the construction crew, this is the new apartment of Miller himself. There is a helipad just 200 meters away from the entrance, so if the Gazprom CEO decides to get to work by air, as he is used to, it will take him about two minutes. Or he can do it by water, in 15 minutes.

We see from bank transactions that Akrona paid 1.6 billion rubles for the top two floors. This cost does not include decorations and furniture. Plus another 820 million for four apartments on the second and first floors. By the way, there are no strangers in this building. You can go to the developer’s website yourself and see that the apartments in it are simply not for sale. Miller’s only neighbor lives on the 3rd floor and that is his closest associate and head of Gazprom Neft Alexander Dyukov.

The total value of Miller’s premises there is 2.5 billion rubles. And all of it is registered with the sister company of Vladenie-V. Another 700 m² in the neighboring building are registered personally with Miller’s stepdaughter and son-in-law, that’s about one billion rubles. The family spent a total of 3.5 billion just for apartments in this one housing estate. 

Vladenie-V also has property in Sochi. And not just any properties. Look at the map: on top of it we see Putin’s residence Bocharov Ruchei, and a little lower the Rus health resort of the Presidential Affairs Directorate.

The resort is state-owned, and one can book rooms in it, and even in one of the three luxurious villas. There is one problem tough—there are actually 6 villas, but half of them are not marked with numbers on the map. They can not be rented because they somehow ceased to be the property of the resort, having effectively been removed from state ownership. 

The largest of them, measuring 2,100 m², ended up in the ownership of the company of Mikhail Shelomov, Putin’s great-nephew. Shelomov worked as a photographer in a photo studio all his life and when his uncle became president, Shelomov became a Gazprom shareholder and dollar billionaire.

Facing the villa of Putin’s nephew is another villa stolen from the state, but smaller—only 1,100 m². It used to belong to Gazenergoprom Development, a subsidiary of Gazprom. But then Miller, who sincerely believes that Gazprom’s property is his own, stole the villa and transferred it from the state company to his personal firm. On March 3, 2020, this 1,090 m² building was purchased by Vladenie-V for 27 million rubles—that is, for the price of a good three-bedroom apartment in central Moscow. The real price of the house is 25 times more—700 million rubles.

For the sake of order, let’s mention another Sochi property. There is a so-called Gazprom’s village 8.5 km away from this villa. We look at the map and search for the largest house there. Here is a good candidate. A huge plot, half a hectare of land, a huge house and a swimming pool. It really stands out from the rest. From 2007 to 2014, the house was registered with Ziyad Manassir’s Stroygazconsulting, and in 2014 it was transferred to Vladenie-V.

Moving on. Gazprom’s mountain tourist complex at Krasnaya Polyana has a small, closed villa complex for Gazprom’s top executives and Putin’s cronies. Among its residents are Kirill Seleznyov, a former member of Gazprom’s board of directors, and Yuri Gorokh, Miller’s right-hand man. And then there is Putin’s closest entourage: one villa is registered in the name of the son of Viktor Zolotov, Putin’s security guard and head of the Federal Guard Service, and the other is registered in the name of Lyubov Kabaeva, the mother of Alina Kabaeva. And of course, there’s the villa owned by Vladenie-V. Here it is on the map, it covers 340 m², and it was received from Ziyad Manasir, who is already familiar to us.

These houses are so classified that their images have even been erased from the website of Gazprom’s resort, lying across the fence. Here’s a picture of the hotel, behind which we should see the houses of Gazprom and Putin’s friends. But instead of the houses, there is just a photoshopped forest.

While we are in the Krasnodar Krai, let us make a brief stop in Gelendzhik. Here the subsidiary of Vladenie-V owns a small hotel right on the seafront. The hotel describes itself as luxurious, but also cozy. In the pictures we see a swimming pool, saunas, billiards and a grand piano in the lobby. There are only 6 rooms in the building.

Now let’s go back to Rublyovka. We uncovered a very touching story there. In the village of Znamenskoe (by the way, literally across the fence from Medvedev’s dacha) used to be a resort of the Presidential Affairs Directorate. In the early 2000s, six dachas were built there, ranging in size from 450 to 1800 square meters. One of them supposedly intended for Yeltsin, and three of them were rented by Gazprom. One of the dachas housed Miller, freshly appointed to Gazprom—surely he has a lot of fond memories of this place. In 2014, these houses with a total area of 5,500 m² were sold by the presidential administration for a ridiculous price of 700 million rubles to a company affiliated with Vladenie-V. And in 2018 they ended up in the ownership of Vladenie-V itself. Right next door, the land is owned by Mikhail Miller, the son of the head of Gazprom. He received it in 2021 from Irina—his mother and Alexei Miller’s official wife. It is the golden land of Rublyovka measuring 100 000 sq.m. The opportunity to come to your first dacha and dive into your memories is priceless.

There’s another dacha that we just can’t miss. You have surely noticed a certain gap in Miller’s real estate portfolio. In St. Petersburg he has only appartments, but where can he go for a barbecue? Let’s correct this misunderstanding. In the Leningrad Oblast, not far from the famous Komarovo village, there is a community of Gazprom’s top managers. The most luxurious house here belongs to Mikhail Miller, whom we already know. He bought a huge dacha on 4 hectares of land in 2008, at the age of 22. The dacha complex consists of a 700 m² main house, a 520 m² bathhouse, a 250 m² guest house and an almost 1,000 m² house, which is described as a storage unit, but the horse manege in front of it unmistakably gives out that Miller’s beloved horses live there.

The dacha is undoubtedly magnificent, but it was built 14 years ago. During this time Miller took enough bribes to find something with more class and prestige. Miller’s new St. Petersburg dacha is being constructed literally next door right now. You can compare it yourself: here is Miller’s old house, and here is his new house.

The new house is six times larger (4,100 m²) and sits on an 11.5 hectare land plot. It is registered, as always at the construction stage, with an unknown company, AO PromEnergo, whose list of shareholders is unknown. But we can see that this company is connected with all of Miller’s other companies. For example, PromEnergo and a subsidiary of Vladeniye-V owned another joint company together.

The director of this company, Ilya Girevoy, who has been in charge of the construction since November 2019, gives us another key to Miller’s empire. He is employed by a firm called Gross Group D, and this firm, as we discovered, manages all of Miller’s real estate. Palaces and giant apartments in different parts of the country sound great, but in reality you need separate staff to maintain it all—cleaners, carpenters, lawnmowers, plumbers, cooks, security guards, system administrators and so on ad infinitum. And management companies are created to get rid of this headache. Among Gross Group’s vacancies, we found job ads for almost all the facilities we have listed: for example, here they are looking for an electrician in Sochi on Blagodatnaya Street, which is exactly where Gazprom’s cottages are located. Here they are also looking for a landscaping specialist in Millerhof, promising to pay up to 70 thousand rubles. In Greenfield, they were looking for a heating technician, a network administrator, a pool maintenance technician and a fire alarm engineer.

In the reports of Gross Group, we can find an amazing insight into Miller’s world. For example, it is clear from the staff schedule that Miller has 16 maids and 6 floor scrubber operators working at his dacha. 

This same company takes us to Crimea. There, at the Black Sea, Gazprom owns a very luxurious hotel, called Crimean Breeze. They call themselves “The Little Italy of the Black Sea”. The hotel even has its own helipad—we can see it on this Booking.com page, which is no longer accessible in Russia. On this helipad we find the very same Miller’s helicopter that takes him from Greenfield to the airport and back.

The hotel website has a map where you can see the names of the neighboring villas: Janochka, Nadia, Verochka. But one villa is not on the map—we would have called it Aleshenka.

From the reports we see that it is operated by a very familiar management company Gross Group. And in summer Miller himself, or at least his plane, flies to Simferopol several times a month. The villa is top notch— the main house is almost 1500 m², with several smaller buildings around it. Of course there is a private pool—there it is surrounded by sun beds. Just the flowers and other vegetation in the garden there cost 20 million rubles. We estimate the cost of Miller’s summer residence at half a billion rubles.

Let’s move to Altai, to the shore of the Teletskoye Lake. The place is incredible, the lake itself is included to the UNESCO World Cultural and Natural Heritage List. There are mountains, forests, clear water, and wild nature. Where else but here can you build another mansion spanning a couple thousand square meters? 

Here, right on the lakeside, there is a beautiful wooden house. All the locals are absolutely sure the house belongs to Gazprom or even Miller personally. Three hectares of land under this house are under a long-term lease by a company called Recreational Systems.

Let’s check whether it is belongs to Miller or not. Until recently, the primary founder and director of Recreational Systems was a certain Gulnara Ustobabaeva—she works as a simple employee at a well-known Gross Group D. She earns about 80 thousand rubles a month, and at the same time she is building this luxurious dacha in Altai. This year, the owner has changed… to another employee of Miller, a former director of Vladeniye-V, Akhkubek Akhkubekov.

And another 20% of Recreational Systems belongs to a certain Vadim Tregub. He is 36 years old. He is a citizen of Ukraine and used to live in Zhitomir, in Lutsk, in the suburbs of Kiev, in the village of Kryukovshchina in 46 m² flat. He participated in the MMM pyramide scheme, where he recruited new depositors to the financial pyramid, so nothing really noteworthy. But he would turn out to be the most important person in Miller’s scheme. Let’s remember him and come back to him soon.

How is it all paid for? Where does the money for palaces, apartments, and villas come from? Does someone buy them for Miller? Or does Miller pay for them himself? If he does, then where does the money come from? Even his fabulous salary would not be enough to pay for even a small part of it. 

Undoubtedly, everyone intuitively understands this: of course Miller is stealing from Gazprom, nipping off a few piece here and there and putting them in his pocket. But no one has been able to prove this until now. And to tell exactly how it is being done. 

Well, we figured it out. We found the very scheme through which Gazprom’s money goes directly to the construction of the palaces, villas, and apartments where Miller lives.

It all started in 2015. We go back to the very beginning of the investigation and recall Ziyad Manassir, who owned Gazprom’s largest contractor, Stroygazconsulting. This firm built hundreds of facilities for Gazprom—main gas pipeline systems, highways, sports and recreation complexes, administrative buildings and wells. And at the same time (as we mentioned before) it built palaces for Miller. In 2013, Manasir had an argument with Gazprom; they could not agree on something, they had a quarrel (it is not important for us now), and the contracts stopped flowing. And by 2015, Manassir was forced to sell Stroygazconsulting, which he had created, in its entirety.

We can open the news reports of the time and see that Gazprombank and the United Capital Partners investment fund have become the new owners of Stroygazconsulting. This sounds quite normal, but it is not quite true. At that very moment, Miller himself became one of the owners of Gazprom’s largest contractor. And his son-in-law, the 27-year-old Alexander Kuznetsov, who had never worked at Stroygazconsulting before, became Vice President of the company.

Instead of the news reports written based on Gazprom’s press releases, let’s examine the official documents and statements, as we trust them more. After Manasir was ousted, Stroygazconsulting was registered with four Russian firms. Then, like a nesting doll, these four firms were registered with four Cyprus firms, and the four Cyprus firms were registered with four offshore companies from the British Virgin Islands.

The owners of Stroygazconsulting should have been impossible to identify. And it probably would have stayed that way if in 2018 Gazprom had not decided to create its own mega-contractor, i.e. to buy back all the main contracting firms and combine them into a large holding company, Gazstroyprom. This included Stroygazconsulting. Thanks to the financial statements published during this transaction, we can reconstruct the events quite accurately.

In 2018, specially created firms of unknown ownership MK-2 and MK-3 buy out the four Russian LLCs that own Stroygazconsulting from offshore companies. The total sum of the deal is about 43 billion, paid by MK-2 and MK-3 almost equally. Almost immediately, these four firms are resold to the new mega-contractor Gazstroyprom. But not for money, in exchange for shares. MK-2 and MK-3 receive the same amount of shares, about 43 billion, which is more than 50% of the mega-contractor. And to pay off the offshore companies, MK-2 and MK-3 took a loan from Gazprombank, of course.

On January 31 and March 29, 2019, nearly 43 billion rubles in loans were transferred to the accounts of MK-2 and MK-3. On the same day, MK-2 and MK-3 transfer these sums to the four offshore companies already familiar to us, and on that very day, the offshore companies transfer most of them to the ultimate beneficiary, the Redensy offshore company, which was mentioned in the previous chapter.

In total, the four offshore companies have transferred 34 billion rubles there. And then we can just follow the money. We studied Redensy’s bank transfers and official accounting records and saw that immediately, on the same day, the offshore company transferred about 15 billion rubles to Miller’s main firm Vladenie-V (the one that owned the palace in Greenfield) and another 1.6 billion to the National Farmer Center, the firm in the name of which Millerhoff is registered.

Thus, we discover a streamlined money flow from Gazprom. A chain through which the money of the state-owned company goes straight into Miller’s pocket through several offshore companies. 

Thanks to the same reports we discover that the Ridency offshore company was the mysterious owner of the four British Virgin Islands offshore companies. These firms have been transferred to the parent company, the Seychelles-based Valente. And, as we found out, they did not sell everything to the mega-contractor Gazstroyprom. They still own some of the old assets of Stroygazconsulting, the leasing business. Gaztechleasing, which was once one of the largest leasing companies in the country, is still owned by our heroes. That’s how they continue to make money through Gazprom.

Thus, absolutely everything, including villas, cars, apartments, and even Gazprom’s stolen contractor, Stroygazconsulting, is tied to the Seychelles-based offshore company Valenta. And the formal owner of this company, and thus absolutely everything else, is the 36 year old Ukrainian Vadim Tregub, the same one from MMM, whom we accidentally found in the Altai dacha. We can see this from the bank transactions. The offshore pays annual dividends to its shareholder: 1.2 billion rubles in 2019, 970 million in 2020. And that shareholder is Vadim Tregub.

There’s probably no need to prove that this young man from the Zhitomir Oblast is not the real owner of one of the most expensive houses in Russia, and also Millerhof, thousands of square meters of other real estate and armored Maybachs. And it is unlikely that it was really him 7 years ago who so cleverly snatched the largest contractor of Gazprom—Stroygazconsulting—from Ziyad Manasir. 

Vadim Tregub changed his job at MMM to an even more fraudulent one—he became a classic nominee, a special man who readily registers anything in his name. And with his name he covers the real owners, who carry out fraudulent schemes. Such a nominee, to whom it is easy to register a multibillion-dollar empire, is hard to find, but we know very well where our Vadim came from.

The name of Vadim’s uncle is Sergei Tregub. He is a former intelligence officer, who left military service in the rank of a colonel and went on to work as a special solver of sensitive issues for Gazprom. In 2006, he took part in the plundering of Yukos assets. As part of the bankruptcy management of the company, which was seized from Khodorkovsky, Tregub became director of two subsidiary companies. According to Kommersant, “Mr. Tregub looked after Yukos’ assets during the bankruptcy period.” The company Prana, which Tregub represented, received the former Yukos office in an auction. Journalists then wrote that the firm was acting in the interests of Gazprom.

And it is still the same as it was then in the early 2000’s. The schemes are still in place now. Gazprom’s mega-contractor, Gazstroyprom, which now includes Stroygazconsulting and Stroygazmontazh, bought from Rotenberg, and Stroytransneftegaz, bought from Timchenko, is still registered in such a way that we don’t know who really owns it. We’re told that it belongs to Gazprom. But at the same time, a quarter of the mega-contractor is registered in the name of some unknown person, Sergei Furin.

This story was covered by the BBC in 2019. They found out that this Furin is a billionaire on paper, but in fact works as a driver. His stairwell neighbor in a Moscow suburb told reporters that he knew Furin and he was a simple worker.

Now, three years later, we have something to add to this wonderful investigation. Furin works as a driver for Sergei Tregub. His number is saved as “Tregub’s driver” in other people’s contact lists. He is also a full-time employee of Gross Group D—the company that manages Alexei Miller’s assets. His salary is about 120 thousand rubles. 

You can read or watch more about Sergei Tregub and other intelligence officers who have been serving the interests of Gazprom for many years, carrying out secret business assignments and helping plunder Russia, in the piece by The Project, which released its big investigation today simultaneously with us.

And so, in Putin’s 23rd year in power, we see that our national treasure, Gazprom, is being plundered for the second time by Putin’s friends. They are entering a new cycle; the Rotenbergs and Timchenko have already made a fortune on Gazprom contracts for 5 generations ahead and have now stepped aside and ceded their place at the feeding trough—now it is Miller’s turn. And in 5 years it will be their children’s turn, in 10 years it will be someone else’s turn.

The state-owned Gazprom should work for us all, be profitable, pay taxes, these taxes should be used to build schools and hospitals and support the regions, but none of this is happening and it will never happen. Dreams will come true for former employees of the St. Petersburg City Hall, but not for you.

If we forget the complex schemes and offshore machinations, and look at all this through the eyes of people who will read and study our time, Putin’s Russia, many years later, imagine how surprised they will be. A grimy Soviet-era corridor of the St. Petersburg mayor’s office. An office, the reception room of which doesn’t even fit a couple of chairs. The young secretary, Yentaltseva, is putting on lipstick (she tells it in the book) and admiring her boss. Next to her is second secretary Sechin, a philologist who carries Putin’s briefcase around. Somewhere in there is a 30-year-old Miller, collecting bribes from the city, a tribute for the services of officials that they are supposed to provide for free. And of course him, the faceless KGB officer who has spent his life moving pieces of paper around with the sole purpose of writing the amount of the bribe on them. 

These people are simply nobodies. Absolutely useless, untalented crooks. But they are the ones who own Russia now. The country was stolen from us and given away—one has all the state oil, the other has all the gas, the third just has billions in his account and palaces with Lamborghinis. We only counted Miller and Yentaltseva’s real estate today, without stocks, not counting the money in secret foreign accounts and cash in suitcases. We found 43 billion rubles worth of residential real estate alone. 

At first they were just stealing to buy themselves a Bentley and a gold watch, then they thought they were noblemen and built estates with horses and servants. Now they’ve started a war, destroying and taking over a neighboring country, killing peaceful people. And they’re sure they’ll get away with it. 

But they won’t. It will all come to an end. Thanks to you. The truth is our greatest weapon. With such investigations, telling the truth about what Putin and his entourage really are, we must break through the wall of censorship and propaganda. There is no one in Russia (well, except these crooks themselves) who will say that a $16 billion palace with 15 maids, a private bowling alley, and a fur coat rack is exactly what the head of a state-owned company deserves. There is no reasonable explanation for the fact that the children of Putin’s secretary Yentaltseva have only bought themselves more than two hundred million worth of just cars. In a country where it takes a doctor or a teacher at least 400 years to earn those two hundred million. So the most important thing you can do is send the link to this investigation right now to everyone you know—friends, relatives, neighbors. And support our work. 

Freedom for Alexei Navalny.