The organization founded by Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in prison earlier this year, is in the throes of a full-blown scandal due to their financial ties to businessmen who are the boards of companies, sanctioned in the US, for providing services to Russia’s security services.
According to publicly available documents, Navalny’s organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), was registered in the United States in 2021. Co-signing the New York registration were two key figures: Leonid Volkov and Alexander Zheleznyak.
Volkov, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was embroiled in a scandal that forced him to promise to resign from ACF, a promise that he never fulfilled, after it became public that he had signed a petition requesting that a pair of Russian oligarchs known to be close to the Kremlin, the founders of Alfa Bank Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, not be sanctioned.
Until today, Volkov has declined to call on Navalny’s supporters to send financial assistance to Ukraine’s suffering civilian population, instead claiming that money should be directed to ACF, to produce YouTube videos, even though YouTube is blocked in Russia.
However, the current wave of outrage is more directly related Volkov’s co-signee in establishing ACF in the US, Alexander Zheleznyak, who fled Russia following what he claimed was political persecution for having planned to assist Navalny’s organization.
Despite claims of “political persecution,” a report by Financial Times indicates that Zheleznyak’s flight from Moscow is more likely tied to his management of ProBusinessBank, during which period hundreds of millions of dollars went missing, later found to have been transferred to Zheleznyak and associates’ bank accounts, a massive theft for which Zheleznyak was being criminally investigated at the time of his departure from Russia.
Zheleznyak’s murky ties do not end with bank robbery.
It has recently been revealed that Zheleznyak’s personal lawyer, who regularly serves as Zheleznyak’s representative on corporate filings, Dmitry Dubograev, is on the board of multiple companies that are under Western sanctions due to their ongoing work with the Russian and Belarussian security agencies.
ACF, which claims that its members are politically persecuted in Russia, conveniently fails to mention to its supporters that Dubograev is a registered agent on the board of a Belarusian company, "Sinesis,” which develops video surveillance systems to assist the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko to catch and imprison protesters.
Likewise, in Russia, Dubograev is the agent of “Oxygen Forensics,” which is used by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs to hack mobile phones, including for cases of real political persecution, as was seen in the case of the American journalist arrested in Russia Alsu Kurmasheva.
Navalny’s organization, which describes itself as being “the Russian opposition” committed “to fighting corruption,” has given no clear answers as to why they have no qualms receiving support from businessmen who rob banks and who actively assist the Putin and Lukashenko regimes to crackdown on freedom in their countries.
Details in Russian: https://sotaproject.com/investigation/advokat-fbk
