Mikhail Leontiev is a Russian journalist and publicist, the permanent host of the Odnako television program. Today he hosts the author's program "The Main Theme" on the radio "Komsomolskaya Pravda", holds the position of press secretary and vice president of the Rosneft corporation. Known for his harsh remarks towards colleagues, as well as politicians, including other states.
Childhood and youth
Mikhail Vladimirovich Leontiev was born into an intelligent family on October 12, 1958. Mira Moiseevna, the mother of the future journalist, worked as a teacher at the Moscow Institute. Plekhanov, father Vladimir Yakovlevich was an aircraft designer. By nationality, the newborn turned out to be half Jewish, half Russian.
From childhood, Mikhail Leontiev had a passion for literature - the boy read "drunkenly", he especially liked historical stories and novels. At the age of 5, the parents wanted to enroll the child in figure skating, but he refused. As a teenager, the boy passionately argued with his grandmother, proving to her, an inveterate communist, the shortcomings of the USSR's policy. In high school, Mikhail secretly read magazines banned in those years from his parents.
Journalist Mikhail Leontiev at the presentation of the book "Time to betray" / Dmitry Rozhkov, Wikipedia
After school, the guy entered the economic department of the Plekhanov Institute and successfully defended his diploma in 1979. In his youth, the future journalist had to earn extra money as a loader.
After high school, Mikhail Leontiev got a job at a research institute, tried to realize himself in the economy. Patience lasted for several years. In 1985, Mikhail retired from the research institute, from that moment life became brighter. The young scientist mastered carpentry, was an ordinary worker at the Literary Institute and a watchman at the dacha. Leontiev also earned a living by tutoring.
Journalism
The biography of Mikhail Vladimirovich is closely connected with journalism. In 1987, Leontiev became seriously interested in sociology - Mikhail's first analytical articles were devoted to this topic. After another 2 years, the man devoted himself entirely to journalism. At first he worked as a political correspondent in the Kommersant publication, then he headed the department in Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
Rosneft spokesman Mikhail Leontiev declined to comment on the Dozhd TV channel for information that appeared on social networks that the head of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, still uses a car with a flashing light, although he is not entitled to it by law.
"Please go to the ass. Please accept assurances of our unchanging respect," Rosneft spokesman Mikhail Leontyev answered Rain's question about why Sechin received a flashing light. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not answer the question whether Vladimir Putin provided a special signal to the head of the state-owned company.Until 2012, Sechin traveled by car with a special signal as a deputy prime minister. Dozhd failed to find any presidential decree that would give the head of Rosneft the right to use a flasher. All departments whose employees can use the flasher are listed in the presidential decree "On streamlining the use of special signals", which he signed in May 2012. According to the text of the document, for example, the government is entitled to 32 flashing lights, the presidential administration - 22, the FSB - 207. Rosneft and other state-owned companies are not included in the decree.
Sechin can travel in a car provided not by his company, but by a third-party agency that has the right to a flashing light, the Federal Protective Service, two federal officials told Dozhd. Such decisions are not formalized by public decrees, one of the interlocutors clarified. "We have nothing to do with this," the press service of the FSO told Dozhd and addressed Rosneft on all issues.
"Rain"
The fact that Sechin is moving in a car with a special signal was noticed in December last year by Life journalist Anastasia Kashevarova. According to her, "Sechin left the Kremlin himself at the wheel."
Traditionally, numbers with the ECX series are installed on FSO cars, the federal official notes. The alleged car of the head of Rosneft has just such a series. The Mercedes number published by Kashevarova is Е939КХ77.The Kremlin correspondent of "Life" Alexander Yunashev told "Rain" that he also repeatedly saw Sechin get into a car with this number. Moreover, according to him, an escort car also follows the head of Rosneft. “Once he got behind the wheel himself, and as soon as he drove off a little, an escort car drove up behind him, if I’m not mistaken, a dark blue Volkswagen. But usually Sechin sits in the back seat of his car, and unlike all officials, he sits not on the right, but on the left, that is, behind the driver. This is the safest place. I once asked him why he does this. He replied that it was a habit from a previous job, "says the journalist.
A senior federal official claims intelligence agencies had information that Sechin's life was in danger following the Yukos affair. He needs protection and escort in order to protect himself from the revenge of the former shareholders of the oil company, follows from the words of Dozhd's interlocutor. Because of this, according to his version, the flasher<...>
The heads of all other state-owned companies and corporations do not use flashing lights, it follows from the answers of their press services to Dozhd's questions. A spokesman for the head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, said that he used the special signal until the presidential decree in 2012, but after that he lost the privilege. "When the decree came out, we obeyed," Dozhd's interlocutor explained. The press services of Transneft, Sberbank, Russian Railways and Rostec also assured Dozhd that their managers and employees do not drive cars with flashing lights.
"Rain"
January 18, 16:30 Leontiev told BBC journalists that Sechin has the right to a car with a flashing light as "a government official of a certain level."
"By the way, Sechin is the executive secretary of the presidential commission on the fuel and energy complex (fuel and energy complex - Sechin oversaw it when he was deputy prime minister in Putin's government). That is, at least he is a government official of a certain level, who has the right to a flashing light and a special car," - Leontiev answered the BBC's question whether the information of the Dozhd TV channel that Sechin uses a car with a special signal is true.To a direct question whether Sechin has a flasher, Leontyev refused to answer.
Leontiev reacted emotionally to the call from the BBC correspondent. "What are you asking? Why, why the hell? What does this have to do with the company's activities? [...] Can you imagine the amount of serious information and tasks that the company solves? What are you calling with? Well, let me write a letter to " BBC": guys, you really fucked up. Well, stop picking up shit. […] You know what, go away, I don't want to answer your question," Leontiev said and quit handset.
The press secretary of "" reacted rather specifically to the question of the journalists of the TV channel "Rain" about the reasons why the head of the company moves in a car with a special signal - the so-called flasher. "Please go to the ass. Accept assurances of our unchanging respect," Leontiev said.
According to the publication, the Rosneft company does not have the right to use cars with flashing lights. The list of services that have such privileges is spelled out in the presidential decree "On streamlining the use of special signals", which he signed in May 2012. According to the text of the document, for example, the government is entitled to 32 flashing lights, the presidential administration - 22, the FSB - 207. Rosneft and other state-owned companies are not included in the decree.
At the same time, the TV channel claims, Sechin still uses flashing lights. This was reported to the media by several sources, including one federal official. At the end of last year, a photograph of his car with a special signal appeared on the Internet: Life journalist Anastasia Kashevarova posted on her Instagram a frame with a Mercedes against the backdrop of the Kremlin wall. According to Kashevarova, Sechin himself got behind the wheel of this car, leaving the Kremlin.
At the same time, Igor Sechin may be able to move around without traffic jams - it will not be illegal if another department provides him with a car, for example, the Federal Security Service. Such decisions are not formalized by public decrees, one of the interlocutors clarified. However, the FSO told the channel that they had nothing to do with this story.
Leontiev is also a co-owner of two technology companies. One of them is a resident of Skolkovo, the alleged main owner of the second is a former official of the Federal Agency for Fishery, accused of fraud in the amount of several hundred million rubles; the business of both is closely connected with government orders. Meduza special correspondents Ivan Golunov and Ilya Zhegulev figured out what these companies are and what Leontiev is doing there.
Leontiev and wing aerodynamics
In the spring of 2013, publicist Mikhail Leontiev made a harsh statement. He defended Skolkovo from attacks by the Investigative Committee of Russia and the Accounts Chamber, which accused the innovation center of inefficiency. In the TV show "However" on Channel One and an article in the magazine of the same name, of which he is the editor-in-chief, Leontiev explained that Skolkovo is the only venture capital fund in the world that does not "take away the project from the developer."Leontiev is well acquainted with the principles of work of Skolkovo. He is a co-owner of one of the fund's residents, the company "Optimenga-777", which is engaged in the aerodynamic design of aircraft wings.
It was founded in 2012 by Sergei Peigin, a graduate of the Mechanics and Mathematics Department of Tomsk State University, and his Israeli partner Boris Epshtein. A year later, Mikhail Leontiev became the owner of 10% of the enterprise, and Optimenga-777 received about 80 million rubles from Skolkovo as part of a grant to create a software product that can greatly reduce the cost and time of designing an aircraft wing. The company claimed that the project was "revolutionary": their algorithm solved the wing optimization test problem in 27 hours, and Boeing's programs in 50 days.
| Sergei Peigin
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UAC Meduza confirmed that Optimenga performed a number of works on mathematical modeling of structures, but noted that such work is ordered from several companies at once.
“I have known these guys [from Optimeng] since childhood, they are very talented, I tried to help them, but unfortunately there is no business there,” Mikhail Leontiev told Meduza. Nobody likes innovators. It's all tears and groans, no word "business" is applicable to this story. Many people have tried to help in some way, but you cannot act against the system. The system can only produce a "Superjet".
Leontiev and the fishing fleet
Airplanes are not the only area of interest for Mikhail Leontiev. He also has businesses related to water transport. In April 2013, the journalist became a co-founder of the Agro-Marine-LNG company, which designs ships powered by liquefied natural gas. (The fact that Leontiev has shares in Optimenga and Agro-Marine-LNG was also reported by the Dozhd TV channel.)The main owner of Agro-Marina is the British company Valser Oil, which, according to the UK commercial register, belongs to two offshore companies registered in the Marshall Islands: Pintox Systems Limited and Syten Group Limited. Information about the directors and owners of these companies is not disclosed. There are 25 companies registered with the New Zealand Department of Justice alone, established by Pintox and Syten; some of them appeared in scandals related to money laundering through Moldovan banks.
In April 2017, Valser Oil published a notice to include Valery Suraev, an Austrian citizen born in Russia in 1960, on the list of persons influencing the company's activities. This is a man known in the shipbuilding market: in the 2000s, Suraev headed the fishing fleet, ports and ship repair department at the Federal Agency for Fishery. During the inspection of the department in 2010, the Accounts Chamber revealed fraud around a billion rubles, which were received in 2005 for the construction of research ships in the Far East. One of the contracts was won by the Scientific and Production Center for Industrial Fishing, Exploration and Monitoring of Marine Bioresources (NPC), registered in Yaroslavl.
“According to the documents, the scientific ship was built, Suraev signed the acceptance certificate, after which more than 283 million rubles were transferred to the accounts of the NPC,” sources in the Ministry of Internal Affairs told Izvestia. “Then this money disappeared into the accounts of one-day firms.” During the audit of the Accounts Chamber, it turned out that the skeleton of the ship remained standing on the slipway of the plant in Khabarovsk among garbage and scrap metal. Three more unfinished vessels within the framework of the same project never left the stocks of the plant in the Kirov region.
Law enforcement agencies suspected that the real owner of the NPC - Valery Suraev. After the start of the inspection of the Federal Agency for Fishery, he resigned from the civil service and headed this Yaroslavl company. In 2011, as Rosbalt reported, Suraev received a residence permit in Estonia; a year later, a criminal case was initiated against him on suspicion of fraud, and a written undertaking not to leave was taken from the former official. The Ministry of Internal Affairs did not respond to Meduza's request about the progress of the investigation.
In 2013, the NPC was declared bankrupt - this happened at the suit of the Marine-Invest company, owned by Valser Oil, which subsequently established Agro-Marine-LNG. Agro-Marine, on the other hand, bought out most of the property of the NPC for a million rubles; in addition, the company wholly owns the Khabarovsk shipbuilding plant.
Mikhail Leontiev knew Valery Suraev long before these events. In the early 2000s, he devoted an entire issue of his author's program on Channel One to the problems of the fishing fleet - and published several columns by Suraev about these problems in the Odnako magazine.
“He came to me [as a journalist] with [fishing] problems and impressed me. I had ten programs on this topic, - Leontiev recalls. “Suraev and I did a very serious thing together - if we now have some kind of fishing left in Russia and some prospects for creating Russian ships, then the country owes this to Valerka Suraev, whom I helped a little.”
Another old acquaintance of Leontiev is the general director of Agro-Marine-LNG - this is Vladimir Koloskov, the former first deputy general director of the Rodionov Publishing House, who published the Krestyanka and FHM magazines that were closed in 2015. Leontiev also worked in the same publishing house - in the late 2000s he headed the Profile magazine for two years.
For the first three years after the creation of Agro-Marine-LNG, it did not show itself in any way. At the end of 2016, the company won two tenders from the Krylov State Research Center for the development and modernization of fishing vessels powered by liquefied natural gas. Both contracts were concluded under the "Purchase from a single supplier" procedure - since their conclusion, according to the documentation, was necessary to prevent accidents and other "force majeure" emergencies.
It took Agro-Marine-LNG just a week to develop projects for two ships - having concluded a state contract on November 25, the company handed over the finished project to the customer on December 2. Kommersant explained that such a rush was explained simply: the work was financed under the federal target program “Development of civil marine equipment for 2009-2016” and officials could not postpone the deadlines for accepting finished work to the next year. As it turned out a little later, the vessels under the Agro-Marina project will be built on the basis of the hulls of those ships that Valery Suraev's companies had not completed.
According to a source familiar with the company's activities, Agro-Marine-LNG planned to take part in the construction of ice-class gas tankers - they are needed to transport liquefied gas along the Northern Sea Route, which Novatek produces in Yamal at the expense of received from the National Welfare Fund.
Gas carriers need about a dozen. The first of them (he was named "Christophe de Margerie" in honor of the head of Total, who died in a plane crash in Vnukovo) arrived in Yamal at the end of March 2017 from South Korea - however, it is planned that further gas carriers will be built in Russia, at the Far Eastern shipyard Zvezda ". This shipyard is owned by Gazprombank and the Rosneft company, whose press secretary is Mikhail Leontiev. Leontiev himself told Meduza that “there was a project with gas carriers, but I’m not in the know.”
Leontiev claims that he "never received even one penny from these [companies] in his life." “If someone signed me up as a founder for some reason, God will be their judge. I roughly remember what it is about, but I don’t even remember the names of these companies,” he said. - Did I try to help someone? I've tried to help a friend make a movie. Every person in life has attempts to help someone if he is not a complete bastard.
[IA RBC, 05/10/2017, "Mikhail Leontiev turned out to be the owner of a stake in technology companies" : In an interview with RBC, a spokesman for Rosneft called Meduza's publication "about nothing." “There is nothing there, there was nothing and, unfortunately, nothing came of it. Zero rubles, zero kopecks, zero results. Zero everything. And this is very unfortunate. I wish there was something there,” he said.
According to Leontiev, "all stupid allusions" to his financial interests in the companies mentioned in the article are unfounded. “Yes, everything that I got from this, I would personally hand over to Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky. Because it is a lot of hemorrhoids,” he said.
He noted that the activity of the company "Optimenga-777" continues. “People are working, doing something. Serezha Peigin (owns 27.5% of the company - RBC) - he is an applied mathematician of a very high world level. He did it in different countries, he really wanted to do it here. They really do it very well,” he said.
“As for fish, you can see how much I wrote about keel quotas. Some time has been wasted. Now, by the way, we can say that there is a result, because there are keel quotas. What does this have to do with a particular business? None,” added Leontiev. - Inset K.ru] The original of this material
© SDG, 01/22/2017, Photo: East News, Illustrations: SDG
Mikhail Leontiev owes 233.5 million rubles to Investbank depositors
Sponsorship of 170 million rubles of Rosneft did not correct the situation with the debt of the magazine "However"
Anastasia GorshkovaAs it became known to the Center for Investigation Management (TsUR), the publishing group Press Code, which published the Odnako magazine by Mikhail Leontiev, owes 233.5 million rubles to the depositors of the bankrupt Investbank. There are no signs that this money has been returned: the bailiffs cannot find the publishing house even to collect the tax debt. Earlier, the SDG learned that in May 2015, Rosneft allocated 170 million rubles to support its vice president's troubled publication, after which the magazine closed.
Leontiev's media startup investor was Converse Group father and son Antonov. The expenses for the first year of the project, according to Leontiev, should have been up to $4 million. “We want to turn this project into a commercially successful publication, and we have the opportunity to ride out difficult times,” Leontiev said at a press conference dedicated to the launch of the weekly “ However” in the crisis year of 2009. He also stressed that the investor "insisted on financing the project", despite Leontiev's warnings about the difficulties with advertising and return on investment.
The money was allocated by credit lines of Investbank Antonov Jr. from October 2009 to November 2010. Since December, funding for the journal has ceased, and in early 2011 Vladimir Antonov sold his shares in the bank to its top managers. Apparently, the new shareholders were embarrassed by the media asset, but they managed to agree: the bank received 15% of the publishing house (the share of Channel One), and Snoras-Nedvizhimost LLC was responsible for the loans, 50% of which at that time belonged to Antonov’s business partner, deputy chairman of the board of Academkhimbank Viktor Yampolsky. By 2013, the magazine was published every two months.
According to SPARK, the shareholders of Press Code Publishing Group LLC are Mikhail Leontiev (15%), Ekaterina Sedova (15%), Investbank (15%) and Dukelevel Holdings Limited (55%) registered in Cyprus. In 2009, Leontiev told Kommersant that the majority shareholder is the main investor in the project.
And then in history, as usual, the Central Bank appeared. On December 3, 2013, he revoked the license from Investbank due to the unsatisfactory quality of assets. At that time, the bank ranked 80th among the largest banks in Russia with an asset value of 75.6 billion rubles. It soon became clear that 44 billion rubles would not be enough for the bank to settle accounts with creditors. This record hole size at that time, comparable only to the bankrupt Mezhprombank of Sergei Pugachev. The investment bank was declared bankrupt on March 4, 2014. The Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) began searching for assets and collecting receivables. As of the summer of 2016, the DIA managed to return to depositors only 4.1 billion rubles out of 40, in total the bank's debt to creditors is 60.2 billion rubles.
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| The decision to declare Investment Bank bankrupt
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And here the most interesting begins. The decision came into force on December 30, 2015, but there are no signs that the money was returned to Investbank. An important detail - the representatives of the "Press Code" were not present at the court hearings. According to SPARK, the publishing house has not reported to the tax authorities for more than a year. And according to the database of bailiffs, the enforcement proceedings initiated in August and November 2016 to collect tax debts from Press Code were soon terminated: it is impossible to locate the debtor, his property or obtain information about the money in the accounts (Article 46, Part 4 of this Code). 1 clause 3 of the Federal Law "On Enforcement Proceedings").
The Investigation Management Center (IRC) of the public organization Open Russia discovered that the current press secretary of the state corporation Rosneft, Mikhail Leontiev, received from this company in May 2015 "a sponsorship contribution for the publication of the Odnako magazine in the amount of 170 million rubles in exchange for some “information and advertising services.” The SDG found this information on the public procurement website.
At the same time, the execution of the contract began four months before it was signed, and was supposed to end on January 31, 2016. However, the last issue of the mentioned magazine was published in June 2015, according to the SDG page on the VKontakte social network.
The founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Alexei Navalny, has already drawn attention to the investigation. The oppositionist wrote on his blog that he, as a shareholder of Rosneft, would write a request to the company's management demanding that they provide him with all documents related to financing the production and distribution of the Odnako magazine.
The issue of the weekly "However" Leontiev launched in 2009, being the host of the TV show of the same name on Channel One. By 2013, the magazine was already published every two months, and then the publication ceased.
The founder of the journal was the Press Code publishing group, but the aforementioned sponsorship agreement was signed by Rosneft with Odnako Publishing Group LLC. political research" (ISEPI), writes SDG.
ISEPI, we recall, was created in May 2011 immediately after the formation of the pro-Putin "All-Russian People's Front" (ONF) and developed the election program of "United Russia" for the elections to the State Duma in the same year. In May 2012, the head of ISEPI, Nikolai Fedorov, received the post of Minister of Agriculture, after which Dmitry Badovsky headed the institute. According to open sources, in 2013 ISEPI directly or indirectly owned the Odnako magazine, the Kontr TV channel, the Vzglyad and Dni.ru online publications.
Since September 2016, 100% of the Odnako group has been owned by its permanent CEO Larisa Leonova, the ex-CEO of Press Code, writes TsUR. Employees of the center called Leontiev, but his assistant answered instead. Having learned that the callers were interested in the fate of Rosneft's millions spent on the Odnako magazine, after a long pause, she suggested "call back, maybe tomorrow," the publication says.
"Only the press secretary of a state-owned company that squandered 170 million rubles on his magazine "for intellectuals" can send a journalist to the ass," the TsUR ironically comments, recalling the recent story with Leontyev's answer to Dozhd journalists to a question about the "flashing light" on the president's car " Rosneft" Igor Sechin.
Since January 2014, Leontiev has been Sechin's adviser in the rank of vice president for PR and is the press secretary of Rosneft. The organization "Open Russia" was created by the ex-head of the oil company "Yukos" Mikhail Khodorkovsky. There is a version in the Western press that it was Sechin who at one time organized the arrest of Khodorkovsky in order to remove him from the political arena and seize Yukos assets, which eventually passed to Rosneft.
