By Gleb Stolyarov
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian businessman Arkady Rotenberg said on Saturday he owned a huge palace in southern Russia that put Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny in jail with President Vladimir Putin.
Navalny and its anti-corruption foundation have released a video claiming that the lavish mansion belonged to the Russian leader. The video has been viewed more than 103 million times.
Rotenberg, Putin’s former partner in judo, who sold his stake in gas pipeline construction firm Stroygazmontazh in 2019 for an amount that RBC businesses spend about 75 billion rubles ($ 990 million) a day, said he will leave the palace for two years bought ago.
“Now it will no longer be a secret, I am the beneficiary,” Rotenberg said in a video published by the Mash channel in Telegram. “There was a rather complicated facility, there were a lot of creditors, and I managed to become the beneficiary.”
He gives no further financial details of the purchase or how it was funded.
Putin has already denied ownership of the palace.
Navalny was arrested on January 18 for 30 days for violations of parole that he said were detected and that they could serve years in prison. He was arrested after flying from Germany back to Moscow, where he recovered from a nerve agent poisoning last August.
After the arrest of Navalny, thousands of people joined unchallenged protests across Russia last Saturday to demand that the Kremlin release Navalny from prison.
Navalny’s supporters plan to hold further protest rallies across Russia this Sunday. Authorities said they were illegal and promised to break them up.
Rotenberg was one of the Russian officials and business leaders blacklisted by the United States and other Western powers in the aftermath of the Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014.
Russian police have arrested Sergei Smirnov, editor-in-chief of independent media Mediazona, in Moscow on Saturday on suspicion of taking part in the Moscow protests over the weekend, Mediazona said on Saturday.
($ 1 = 75.7500 rubles)
(Reporting by Gleb Stolyarov; Additional reporting by Polina Nikolskaya; Writing by Maxim Rodionov; Editing by David Holmes)