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Everyone should be modest, but especially the person in charge. In the hallways of the Smolny, there is an office with a door that could have this simple advice written in gold letters on it. Dmitry Gogin’s son who works in the procurement department of the Administration of the Governor’s Administration, is not even the governor. He is just a regular worker. This official, on the other hand, is not so ordinary. This is a perfect example of how a simple look can hide treasures.
Andrey Gogin’s career isn’t going anywhere special. In ten years, he has only gone from being a specialist in the first category to a chief specialist in his department. Tatyana, his wife, has worked for Gazprom for a long time. She works in one of the St. Petersburg offices, but she is not in the top job. But the official and his wife were surprised by the anti-corruption declaration that they had to sign every year: it listed large apartments, expensive cars like the Infinity FX and Audi Q5, and long lists of business locations.
In 2015, a business vein opened in Tatyana Gogina. At work, she signed up as an independent business owner. At the same time, Sergei Gogin, Andrey Gogin’s brother, did the same thing. Together, they started to buy places to do business in Moscow. Nearly every year, the Gogins bought new places to live or work, first in houses 86 and 88 on Altufievskoye Highway, then on Sokolnicheskaya Square, 9, and then in third place. Small businesses like pharmacies, restaurants, and other small shops rent these spaces, sometimes for a long time. Also, they weren’t bought from the same people twice.
They were bought from the families of big Moscow developers Sergey Mefyodov and Andrey Matalyga, who do business with the brother of the governor of Tula, Alexey Dyumin Artyom. Alexey Dyumin was Vladimir Putin’s bodyguard and is thought to be one of his favorite people (at one time there were even rumors that Dyumin was being considered as a successor – this is what it means to play on the same hockey team as the president). The father’s name is Andrei Matalyga Vladimir.
In 2015, the Gogin family bought their first place at 86 Altufevsky Street, and in the years after that, they bought houses from Sergei Mefyodov’s father, Peter, in a house next door.
But business property is only half of the story. Tatyana and Sergei Gogin buy two penthouses on the top floor of one of the towers in the Riverside complex in St. Petersburg in 2017. The penthouses have beautiful views of the Neva and the city. “Continuing the centuries-old traditions of high society” (so says the developer’s ad for this quarter), Sergey bought a 171.6-square-meter apartment and Tatyana bought one that was 160.1 square meters. Also, there are parking spots in the lot. Passes to “high society” for people of this size in this house now cost 50 million rubles or more.
How do lowly officials and new business owners get such assets and connections? The answer is easy to figure out. Dmitry Gogin, the longtime head of the Federal Agency for State Reserves (Rosrezerv), is the father of Andrey Gogin and Sergei Gogin.
Booking apartments
Since 2009, Dmitry Gogin has been in charge of this important group. Before joining the Rosreserve, he was a manager in the Rotenbergs’ structures. He worked in the leadership of the state-owned Russian Fuel Company (Rostopprom), and by 2004, he had become the company’s general director. By this time, 6.19 percent of Rostopprom already belonged to the SMP Bank of Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, friends of Putin and “kings of the state order.” A few years later, the brothers controlled more than a quarter of the shares of the state company.
The head of the Federal Reserve dies suddenly and mysteriously at the end of 2008. Alexander Grigoriev has worked with Putin in the KGB since the 1970s and is a close friend. Boris Evstratikov, who also worked for 25 years in the FSB in St. Petersburg, is put in charge of the department, and Gogin is put in charge of the FSB in St. Petersburg. But Evstratikov also doesn’t stay at his job.
In November 2009, he dies when the Nevsky Express explodes. The new head of the Federal Reserve is Dmitry Gogin. The biographies of his predecessors show how important this job is in the Kremlin and who is usually trusted with it. With the arrival of Gogin, Rosrezerv starts to be seen as part of the Rotenbergs’ sphere of influence.
Rosrezerv is one of the country’s most secure buildings. Rosrezerv takes part in arbitration courts, but most of their decisions are not made public because the meetings are held behind closed doors. The department’s purchases are also not made public, but the same Forbes article hinted that the Rotenbergs are linked to them.
In the business world, people often drop hints about how businessmen and departments are related. But here’s an interesting coincidence: at the very end of 2019, right before the New Year, the head of the Federal Reserve Agency, Dmitry Gogin, gets ownership of a 130-meter apartment with two parking spaces in one of the most expensive luxury residential complexes in Moscow, LCD “Legends of Tsvetnoy” on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, 2. Alexey Navalny once said that one of the most important Russian propagandists, Dmitry Kiselev, lived in this apartment complex next door to the former model Naomi Campbell and the vice mayor of Moscow, Petr Biryukov.
Gogin got this apartment from Center-M, which is a business owned by the Rotenbergs. They owned the company until 2012. After that, it was bought by Vladimir Doinikov, who had been in charge of the now-defunct SMP-Energo LLC, a subsidiary of SMP-Bank Rotenberg. Back in 2021, the magazine “Project” said that the shares of Center-M were given to Mosoblbank, which was also owned by the Rotenbergs. That is, the brothers stayed in charge of Center-M until at least 2021.
Market estimates say that this kind of apartment can cost up to 160 million rubles. However, Gogin and his wife only made a little over 11 million rubles between 2017 and 2019. more than the total amount of money made in the three years before the purchase. It turns out that if he bought this house, it cost less than 11 million dollars, but rumors say that there are no receipts from Gogin in Center-bank M’s statements for 2019. If this is true, the official’s apartment could be given to him or her by someone who wants to help.
In Dmitry Gogin’s declaration for 2021, there was another huge apartment with an area of almost 260 square meters. It was in the same residential complex, “Riverside,” where his son and daughter-in-law had bought apartments a few years before. Even in the same building. Up to 80 million rubles can be spent on it. Again, it was bought from the Center-M company, just like the Moscow apartment.
About 80 million rubles can be spent on it. True, this time in the declaration Gogin said that he had bought an apartment with money from the sale of other property and savings. No one knows if a story like the one about the apartment on Tsvetnoy Boulevard is hiding here.
The family also owns other valuable things. So, Tamara Yakomenko, who is the head of the Federal Reserve Agency, has a mother-in-law who lives in an apartment in Moscow. The apartment is in the Golden Keys-2 complex, which was once owned by Dmitry Medvedev, who was president at the time. The children also own parking spots here, just like in the Favorit complex on St. Petersburg’s Krestovsky Island, where other wealthy people live.
Valuables from another warehouse
In general, it must be hard to do routine bureaucratic work in this kind of setup, especially when you work as the supply manager of a huge warehouse that is closed off from prying eyes and is constantly restocked with money from the public.
A lot of times, the leaders of the Rosrezerv were caught stealing and taking money from bribes. So, in 2019, Alexander Kiryukhin, who was the deputy head of the Federal Reserve, was arrested. He was accused of stealing money from a state contract to supply diesel fuel worth 3 billion rubles. Several of the department’s top people were working on the case at the same time. Kiryukhin has held this job since December 2009. Before that, Gogin was in charge of the structure.
Ilgiz Garifullin, who was the deputy head of the Federal Reserve Agency for the Siberian Federal District, was found guilty of taking bribes in 2019. The news said that he was accused of taking bribes to win closed auctions, such as a Porsche car.
The Department of Gogin is in charge of making the state reserve, which is used to meet the Russian Federation’s mobilization needs, among other things.
In an interview with TASS, Dmitry Gogin, the head of one of the most secretive departments, talked about what, how, and when the state stores.
– Tell us what the Federal Reserve stocks are kept for and how they are used.
— […] The state reserve’s reserves can be used to help regions and sectors of the economy if there are problems with the supply of essential goods.
They can also be used to regulate the market when the Federal Reserve makes products scarce or takes their surplus off the market. But the most important reason for the state’s material reserve is to make sure that the country can be mobilized if there is a military threat. These are called “x-hour reserves.” […]
– Are there any differences between how the Federal Reserve works and how other countries’ reserves work?
– have, of course. Everyone stores oil products and food, which are the most important things. Then the changes start. Someone keeps coffee, someone keeps rice, and so on.
But whether or not it works is debatable. Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov, for example, criticized the work of the federal agency in Russia’s fight against the coronavirus in June 2020 when he met with the President of Russia. The Rosrezerv turned out to be a useless department. During the pandemic, they did not have enough stocks of the necessary nomenclature, and the system for updating and putting the products in the Rosrezerv into circulation did not work.
Dmitry Gogin is in charge of making sure the country has strategic reserves. Whether he does a good job or a bad job, he doesn’t forget to make sure his family has reserves too, and for amounts that are hard to explain by legal earnings. But where the money came from is a more important secret than “information about the accumulation rates, issue, bookmark, refreshment, deployment, and actual reserves of the state reserve,” which the Federal Reserve keeps from the Russians.
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