Putin Palace
Two years later, Bank Rossiya gained management of Gazprom’s retirement savings, 168 billion rubles at the time, through Sogaz. The pension fund, Gazfond, is run by Yuri Shamalov, son of Nikolai Shamalov, who owns 10.4 percent of the bank and has a house in the same lakeside complex as Putin.
In an open letter to then-President Dmitry Medvedev in 2010 complaining about corruption, St. Petersburg businessman Sergei Kolesnikov said he had been compelled by former partner Nikolai Shamalov to help secretly finance and build a $1 billion palace for Putin on the Black Sea. Putin denied the claim through aides and Shamalov declined to comment.
Before the overthrow of Ukraine’s Kremlin-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych, during deadly riots in February, Sogaz sold the company that managed Gazprom’s pensions. Bank Rossiya then cut its stake in Sogaz to 48.5 percent from a controlling 51 percent one week before the blacklist was announced, effectively curbing the scope of the sanctions.
Public Approval
Now, with Russia locked in its worst conflict with the U.S. since the Cold War, Putin appears to be relying on his old Bank Rossiya ally, Kovalchuk, and other media outlets to help rally the country behind his policies in Ukraine.
Thanks in part to glowing coverage of Putin’s annexation of Crimea from media outlets owned outright or in part by Kovalchuk, Putin’s approval rating has surged to 80 percent, the highest since since 2008, from 65 percent in January, according to Levada Center, an independent polling company.
“Kovalchuk has replaced the Yeltsin-era media oligarchs Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky,” said Stanislav Belkovsky, a former Kremlin adviser who’s now a political analyst in Moscow. “This is a comfortable situation for Putin because he gets an owner that is formally independent from the state while still under the Kremlin’s control.”
Kovalchuk started acquiring media properties after OAO Surgutneftegas, the oil producer run by longtime Putin ally Vladimir Bogdanov, acquired 6.8 percent of Bank Rossiya in 2007.
TV, Newspaper