“Gazprom is more than just a stock company. The country’s entire economy is largely based on the gas industry,” said President Vladimir Putin a year after he was first elected, in May 2001, when he announced to the team of the gas monopoly that his confidant Alexei Miller had been appointed head of the company. This phrase was true in every sense, even the ones that Putin probably would have preferred to hide. From the first day of his presidency, Gazprom became more than a state company; it became a source of personal wealth for Putin himself and his entourage, including people from the security services.

Unnational treasure

It all began with words about the state benefit. The president announced to Miller that his goal was to regain state control over the gas monopoly . By 2000 the state owned only 40% of the company, of which 35% was controlled by Rem Vyakhirev × . The new president and new CEO of Gazprom began by first establishing personal control over the company. Gazprom’s former management was purged within a year. “The new czar started asking me some pretty interesting questions. So I said: if I don’t keep my place, I’m leaving right now. When Putin heard that I was leaving, he was so happy that he made a phone call right in front of me […] instructing to issue an order,” Rem Vyakhirev, the previous head of Gazprom, recalled in his last interview.

Even earlier than Vyakhirev, former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, who was head of the Gazprom board of directors, was also expelled from the company. In 2000, Putin replaced him with Dmitri Medvedev, who was then just an obscure St. Petersburg lawyer. Within a year after Miller’s appointment, nine out of eleven other Yeltsin-era directors were removed from Gazprom’s management, one of whom even had to be kept in a detention center for a while. The person in question was Vyacheslav Sheremet, Vyakhirev’s first deputy and his closest man at Gazprom. He was detained in January 2002 along with the head of Sibur, Yakov Goldovsky. Sheremet would then be released on recognizance and ultimately remain free × . Putin and Miller’s acquaintances from St. Petersburg and the security services were brought in to fill the vacancies and put in charge of the gas giant’s most important subsidiaries.

By 2005, control over Gazprom had formally been returned to the state, only to have the gas monopoly’s most lucrative assets soon fall into the hands of people closely tied to Putin.

All of these mega-deals could not have happened without the approval of the head of Gazprom. Did Miller act only out of loyalty to his boss and his friends or did the head of Gazprom have his own material interest? To answer this question, we will tell you three stories.

How Alexey Miller created a mega-company dedicated to servicing himself

Grigoriev is one of Putin’s closest friends from his time in the KGB. This officer was known for working against dissidents, in particular, under the guise of the priest “Father Alexander,” keeping an eye on dissent in the church, including supervising the future Patriarch Alexy II, who was listed in reports under the codename “Drozdov.” “If you want to live with the big people, you gotta share,” said our interlocutor who knows Manasir.

Manasir did share: two remarkable persons became co-owners of his growing business: Olga Grigorieva, the daughter of this same Putin’s friend, and Major General of the Federal Security Service Anatoly Tkachuk, who owned no less than 35% of the company. Tkachuk, like Grigorieva, had nothing to do with the gas or construction industries but he did have something to do with intelligence. As an officer of the military counterintelligence of the KGB, Tkachuk worked abroad and in 1986 was sent to the site of the Chernobyl disaster. There he was checking the version of a terrorist attack by foreign special services as Tkachuk himself admitted later in an interview with RIA-Novosti × . In addition to Manasir’s business, Tkachuk was listed as a co-owner or manager of many commodity companies AO Rustitan, AO Rusminresursy, AO Rusecologiya ×  — such a career looks logical for a “seconded state security officer”. After leaving the equity of SGK, Tkachuk became president of the seemingly inconspicuous RFI-Bank. However, it was this financial institution that was involved in the grand scandal with the Wirecard payment system and its head, Jan Marsalek many global media outlets wrote about it in detail × . Marsalek allegedly cooperated with the Russian secret services and fled to Russia or Belarus after the investigation against him began in Germany.

Not only did Manasir give shares in his company to the right people, he had for years been registering luxury properties designed for Gazprom’s top executives, primarily for Miller, in his name. According to The Project’s calculations, the Jordanian and companies associated with him owned at least a dozen properties associated with Gazprom’s management, including the Millerhof palace complex near Moscow, a country house in Sochi near the Laura ski resort, and many others. It also built and managed real estate objects that were secretly intended for the top state officials. It was SGK that ordered Putin’s palace in Gelendzhik, and in Sochi, Manasir’s company Svod International managed the ski resort where Putin and Dmitry Medvedev like to ski . It is now formally owned by Gazprom subsidiaries OOO Gazprom Upravlenie Aktivami KSN and OOO Gazprom Pitanie × . Everything looked like Manasir could feel secure about his well-being. So much so that he was one of the few guests at the secret wedding of Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova and businessman Kirill Shamalov in 2013.

However, in 2013 the warm relationship between Manasir and Gazprom came to an end that year Stroygazconsulting received only 32.1 billion rubles in contracts from Gazprom, whereas, for example, Stroygazmontazh won contracts for at least 207.7 billion rubles from the concern × . “It was an ideological split,” describes our source in the gas industry. “He was told to do something, and he didn’t want to do it. And he gave up everything according to the list of assets: this went there, that went there and that was it.” If we investigate to whom Manasir’s assets went, it becomes clear who they really belonged to all this time.

Like Miller, Yentaltseva began her career at the St. Petersburg city hall, was Putin’s secretary there, and when the latter was appointed president, she moved to the Kremlin, where she headed the president’s protocol for many years.

Even more surprising is that after Manasir’s disgrace, Tregub received not only his luxury real estate, but also a substantial part of his business. Formally, Stroygazconsulting, Manasir’s main company, became part of Gazprom’s so-called “mega-contractor,” Gazstroyprom, after a series of perturbations in 2018. Gazstroyprom subsequently incorporated two of Gazprom’s other major contractors, Rotenberg’s Stroytransgaz and Timchenko’s Stroytransneftegaz. This merger of Gazprom’s own once-sold-out assets was presented as an attempt to save on the gas monopoly’s expenses.

In reality, it looks like one big swindle. Back in 2015, when Manasir’s “legacy” was being divided, almost 75 percent of SGK went to companies associated with Tregub and his patrons. These are OOO Ancord, Intek Group, and Legato, which through a chain of legal entities were controlled by offshore companies, the beneficiary of which is now another person with the surname Tregub, Sergei’s nephew Vadim Tregub.

In 2018, some of SGK’s assets began to be transferred out under the umbrella of the Sphera company. It was this part of Manasir’s former business that would become part of the “mega-contractor” by 2019, but SGK itself continued to exist SGK formally announced liquidation on June 8, 2022, a few days after The Project sent its questions to Sergei Tregub × . These are 23 production companies with a total book value of about $746 million. This still considerable business is owned through a chain of legal entities by offshore companies WOODIKO, ARIFY and INTOPIA × , the ultimate beneficiary of which is the same Vadim Tregub. Some of the SGK companies are terminating their activities, but not all of them. For example, Gaztechleasing stands out, which is still earning money from state contracts by leasing construction equipment, oil tankers, and aircraft. For example, three months ago the Komi Republic authorities allocated 1.8 billion rubles from the budget to pay off the debt to Gaztechleasing.

In other words, the person in whose name the luxury real estate linked to Miller is registered still owns a business that was supposed to be part of Gazprom.

But what about the part of Manasir’s former assets that ended up being merged into Gazstroyprom? It turns out that people, including those acting in Miller’s interests, sold the business to the state company he heads. Some part of the money received in the deal — 34.4 billion rubles Gazstroyprom paid a total of 42.8 billion rubles for its stake in the SGK ×  — wound up in the Cyprus-based company Redensy Management (this company will be mentioned later in our investigation). Then, Redensy transferred a significant portion of these funds to the Russian companies Vladenie-V 14.9 billion rubles × and All-Russian Farmer Center 1.6 billion rubles × , which, as stated above, nominally own the real estate of Gazprom’s CEO: the palace in Greenfield village and Millerhof, respectively. It turns out that the money paid by the state-owned “mega-contractor” was used, among other things, to arrange for the luxurious life of Putin’s former secretary and his spouse.

However, this is not where the swindle ends either. If you look at the ownership structure of the “mega-contractor,” it turns out that 26 percent of it  through OOO MK-3 × is owned by a certain Sergei Furin, who is registered in an ordinary apartment building in Izmailovo BBC journalists were the first to draw attention to Furin being among the shareholders of the mega-contractor × . Is this also done to save money, for which purpose the “mega-contractor” seems to have been created? We doubt it. What is sufficient to know about Furin is that he is the personal driver of Sergei Tregub and members of his family . He worked at OOO Gross Group D and paid the parking fees for the cars of Sergei Tregub, his wife Irina Kuzikova and his son-in-law Andrei Khromov. In leaked information, which allows us to find out under what name people are saved in the contact lists other mobile phone subscribers, Furin is listed, for example, as “Tregub cell drv,” which probably means “driver Tregub’s cell phone” × .

In other words, the blocking shareholder of Russia’s largest state-owned infrastructure company, which claims 1.4 trillion rubles from the budget a year, is the driver of a man no one knows.

Perhaps Tregub is a big businessman with a long and successful history in the infrastructure business? That is also unlikely. Tregub has as little to do with this business as General Tkachuk. But like Tkachuk, Tregub is also deeply connected to intelligence.

Tregub had been on military service since the 1980s — he supposedly served at the Sary-Shagan firing range in Kazakhstan, where Soviet air defense equipment was tested. He worked for a long time in the Soviet-friendly Syrian Arab Republic in the nineties. He was a military attaché at the embassy in Damascus and dealt with air defense, “I think all the military attachés are affiliated with the GRU,” Tregub’s American colleague of those times, Rick Francona, recalled. In his small edition book, “The Orient is a Riddle. Jerusalem is Sacred,” orientalist Leonid Medvedko names Tregub among “honest servicemen and other intelligence officers devoted to their duty.” The book was published with support from the Eurasian Integration Foundation, where Gulnara Ustobabaeva, one of Sergei Tregub’s nominees, worked)

One of the rare photographs of Sergei Tregub. It shows him with Rick Francona, military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, mid 90s

One of The Project’s interlocutors refers to Tregub as “a former resident spy in a Middle Eastern country”. Our spy finished his service in 1997 in the rank of colonel or higher, and in 2006 he was delegated to important business assignments (see next chapter). Since then, he and a group of his former intelligence colleagues, presumably also “honest intelligence officers committed to their duty,” (see diagram) have created an extensive network of shell companies controlling nearly $2.5 billion worth of business assets and property. Tregub holds a significant portion of these assets on behalf of the Miller family.

And Ziyad Manasir is now done with our country his current company Manaseer Group, registered in Jordan and having offices in the US, Egypt and the UAE, does not list Russia among the countries where it is represented × . But Manasir did take a piece of Russia, where he was a successful businessman, with him: the Jordanian built the Vikiland mansion in his homeland, its photo appeared in 2014 on the Instagram page of Ziyad Manasir’s wife Victoria × which strikingly resembles Manasir’s palace in Greenfield village near Moscow. That same mansion, which overlooks the luxurious palace of Alexei Miller and is once again registered to one of the shell companies of the ubiquitous Sergei Tregub.

Story 2

How the Chekists took over Yukos

To understand how Tregub and his secret service cronies got into the Russian business world and how important their role is, one has to go back to the beginning of Putin’s rule.

Back in 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia at the time, told Putin in front of TV cameras about the large-scale corruption in the country. In response, Putin lashed out at Khodorkovsky and his oil company, Yukos. The “Yukos case” was the most notorious political trial of the 1990s — the company’s owners and managers were either jailed or forced to flee Russia, and Yukos property was taken over by state companies. However, it is now clear that some of the Yukos assets also went to a number of private individuals working for Putin’s entourage.

When the fate of the Yukos legacy was being decided, Gazprom was for a long time considered the main contender, while Rosneft, which eventually received the majority of assets, was never a favorite, recalls former company shareholder Leonid Nevzlin. The plan changed when Yukos’s Western shareholders began a legal fight over their assets and Gazprom could face legal problems Nevzlin continues × . “They decided not to eat the golden goose that was Gazprom,” confirms Igor Volobuyev, former vice president of Gazprombank who left his position and Russia after the invasion of Ukraine began × . Shortly after the start of Yukos bankruptcy proceedings in 2006, a new manager was appointed to the company — the director of Yukos EP and Yukos-RM, Sergei Tregub, whom we already know. The former Yukos employees interviewed by The Project recall only one meeting with their new boss during which he fired them all. Kommersant wrote at the time that “Tregub acted as a ‘government watchdog, ‘ tasked with preventing the outflow of funds and assets during the ‘interregnum’”.

In the spring of 2007, the sale of some of the Yukos assets began. Rosneft or its affiliated companies won 9 out of 18 lots. But Rosneft lost the auction on lot #13 to an unknown entity called Prana established by a Belizean offshore company. This unknown Prana paid 100 billion rubles ($4 billion) of unknown origins for the lot. Journalists were keen to find out whose interests Prana represented, but no one confessed. A little later, it turned out that Prana too represented Tregub and his associates. In 2009, Prana was transferred from offshore companies to the company of Alexander Smirnov, a partner of Tregub, and the directors of Prana became Tregub’s employees. Some of the Yukos assets that Prana received are still in the hands of Tregub’s group × .

Just a month after the auction, Prana sold to Rosneft one of the main assets of the lot — a 22-storey building of the Yukos headquarters on Dubininskaya Street. A short time later, Rosneft sold to Gazprom a half of another former Yukos asset — Tomskneft. The sums of the deals are suspiciously similar — Prana bought the Yukos office for approximately the same price as the half of Tomskneft cost to Gazprom $3.4 billion. Lot #13 also included other inexpensive assets, apart from the Yukos office × . A source acquainted with the circumstances of this transaction tells the following version: Prana acted in the interests of “Gazprom” and then exchanged the purchased asset for half of the production business in Tomsk.

A person involved in the “Yukos case” on the side of the state recalls that in the mid-2000s, Tregub did not work for Miller, but represented someone “higher up”. The interlocutor categorically refused to discuss it further. A source acquainted with Miller put it this way: “The intelligence services and expropriation of Yukos are not at Miller’s level, decisions were made at a higher level.

In other words, intelligence colonel Tregub, a citizen of Russia and Ukraine, We have at our disposal the number of Tregub’s Ukrainian passport, issued in 2011 in Crimea, with residence registration in the town of Priluki, Chernihiv Oblast × and a branched network of nominees associated with him, not only hold assets in Miller’s interests, but have been carrying out sensitive assignments for the country’s leadership for over 15 years.

Story 3

How a Chekist linked to Miller got a stake in Russia’s largest insurance business

Among the people connected to Tregub (see the chart above), who managed the assets of the seized Yukos, was a man with an unremarkable name — Alexander Smirnov. He was a member of Vympel, a special division of the FSB, and participated in the Chechen wars. In the early noughties, Smirnov retired to the reserve and, together with his former colleagues, created a group of companies whose names invariably included the word “Vympel” Vympel-MIK, Vympel-Shield, Vympel-Atom × . As the businessmen write on their website, they specialize in “assistance in resolving corporate disputes and working with troubled assets.”

* * *

In early 2022, Alexei Miller, who had just celebrated his 60th birthday, became a Hero of Labor of Russia. “For special labor merits before the state and the people,” reads the award decree signed by Putin, perhaps the only Russian before whom Miller really has special merits.