Sobchak and Putin, as head of foreign relations, had awarded Timchenko quotas to export oil back in 1993 on the condition that part of his profit be used to import food, according to city documents. Timchenko would go on to start Gunvor Group Ltd., which made him a billionaire.
“We contributed about $3 million to the bank’s authorized capital,” Katkov said by phone. “We needed to diversify our revenue by investing in manufacturing and banking.”
Operation Troika
In 1998, the year Yeltsin defaulted on domestic debt and devalued the ruble, tipping the economy back into recession, Bank Rossiya got another new shareholder, Gennady Petrov, a local businessman who owned 2.2 percent of the company until at least the end of 1999, when Yeltsin stepped down in favor of Putin, according to company documents.
A decade later, Petrov was arrested in Spain during an organized-crime sting codenamed Troika and charged with trafficking arms and drugs and smuggling tobacco and cobalt. Spanish authorities in 2009 sent a letter to law-enforcement bodies in Moscow, a copy of which was seen by Bloomberg, asking for help in the case against Petrov, who they accused of running an organized-crime ring.
A Spanish judge, “in a surprise decision,” granted Petrov bail in 2010, the U.S. Embassy in Madrid said in a secret cable published by Wikileaks. He hasn’t been tried.
“Petrov, the chief target of Spain’s Operation Troika, was engaged in a ‘dangerously close’ level of contact with senior Russian officials,” the embassy said, citing Spanish prosecutors. The embassy’s press service declined to comment.
A Spanish lawyer for Petrov, Luis Fernando Granados, said he didn’t know where his client is and declined to comment on the case.
Putin’s Rise
Even with the support of Timchenko, who now controls 7.9 percent of the bank, business didn’t really take off until after Putin became president, according to former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who oversaw the city’s budget under Sobchak. Kudrin said in an interview that he doesn’t remember a single large deal made by the bank in the 1990s.