"FBK and Navalny's headquarters network exist exclusively on your donations," Leonid Volkov, head of Navalny's headquarters network **, told Twitter subscribers at the end of December 2020.

"The average donation has been around 500 rubles for many years." 

He reminded the audience that 30 thousand people regularly donate to FBK, and almost 200 thousand more supporters "do it from time to time." 

  • Leonid Volkov

  • © RIA Novosti / Konstantin Chalabov

However, documents appeared at the disposal of RT that refute these allegations.

It turned out that 78% of all donations to FBK in recent years came from three sources: from the main sponsor of Navalny - Boris Zimin, who lives in the United States, Evgeny Chichvarkin from the UK, and from the foundation employees themselves.

At the same time, the latter contributed tens of millions of cash.

Volkov himself made contributions more often than others. 

In one clip

The series of Volkov's tweets cited above is a response to the criminal case of fraud with donations to FBK initiated at the same time, December 29, 2020.

According to the Investigative Committee, the founder of the fund, Alexei Navalny, with unidentified accomplices stole 356 million rubles of donations "for personal purposes."

In total, according to the Investigative Committee, FBK raised 588 million rubles.

According to the release of the Investigative Committee, the Anti-Corruption Fund collected money not only on its own account, but also on the accounts of affiliated non-profit organizations.

These are the Fifth Season Foundation (Moscow), the Citizens Legal Support Foundation (Votkinsk), the Shtab Foundation for the Protection of Citizens 'Rights (Ufa), the Foundation for the Organization and Coordination of the Protection of Citizens' Rights (Votkinsk). 

The actual head of these organizations was Navalny, according to the report of the UK. 

In addition, as RT wrote, two more funds with identical names are associated with FBK Navalny - the Fund for the Protection of Citizens' Rights (FZPG) ** - in Novosibirsk and St. Petersburg.

The first was registered to the ex-head of Navalny's local headquarters, Sergei Boyko, the second - to the FBK project manager Olga Guseva, and he also de jure replaced FBK after Navalny announced its liquidation in July last year.  

Navalny explained the liquidation of FBK by debts in connection with fines for organizing unauthorized rallies and participation in them, blocking accounts of individuals and legal entities in the framework of criminal investigations, and the obligation to pay 29 million rubles for the lost claim of Moscow Schoolboy LLC.

But in fact, by the time of the announcement of the liquidation of FBK, its employees had been actively using various formally unrelated companies for three years.

They were led either directly by the FBK employees, or by the heads of the regional headquarters.

Each organization was responsible for its own direction: someone - for public work, someone - for the release of "merch" (branded clothing and accessories).

We talked in detail about how this structure worked in the investigation "The Second Budget of FBK". 

RT also studied financial data on all funds, the funds of which, according to the investigation, were stolen as a result of fraud.

From the documents it becomes clear that the main sources of financing for the FBK were not thousands of ordinary citizens, but several influential people.

    So, according to the documents studied by RT, in 2017-2020, 211.3 million rubles were donated to the accounts of these NGOs.

    This time period was not chosen by chance.

    Three funds from the list were liquidated in 2018-2020, and the information was received a year before they were excluded from the register of legal entities.

    For existing legal entities, we analyzed the data for 2020.

    According to these data, only 22% of donations (46.7 million rubles) came from ordinary citizens through payment systems on websites and in social networks.

    The remaining 78% (164.5 million rubles) FBK received from people and organizations associated with Alexei Navalny. 

    Also on russian.rt.com "I went against the general line of the party": a former FBK employee - on charges of stealing data from the site "Freedom to Navalny"

    Dynasty support

    In the fall of 2020, it became known that the sponsor Boris Zimin, the son of the founder of VimpelCom and the Dynasty Foundation, Dmitry Zimin, is giving money to Alexei Navalny and his family.

    Navalny told about this in an interview with Yuri Dudyu.

    • Dmitry and Boris Ziminy

    • © RIA Novosti / David Krikheli / Wikipedia

    “Zimin understands very well that I need to live on something ... - said the politician.

    - He makes a legal contract with me.

    <...> But this is not exactly a full-fledged relationship "client and customer".

    He does not need these services so much.

    First of all, he just wants to support us. " 

    Documents studied by RT indicate: Zimin helps not only Navalny, but also his foundation. 

    According to the information received, in 2019-2020 Boris Zimin personally donated 75.9 million rubles to two non-profit organizations from the FBK structure.

    He transferred 20.4 million rubles to the Foundation for the Protection of Citizens 'Rights "Shtab" in Ufa, and 55.6 million rubles to the Novosibirsk Foundation for the Protection of Citizens' Rights.  

    “We are financially independent,” Alexei Navalny said in the summer of 2020 about the upcoming liquidation of FBK due to a legal debt.

    "We do not need oligarchs, or the state, or abroad." 

    At the same time, as it turned out now, 36% of the total mass of donations to his funds were made by Boris Zimin, the son of Dmitry Zimin, who lives in the United States.

    The fortune of the latter in 2005 was estimated by Forbes at $ 520 million. 

    Your own sponsor

    In second place in terms of the amount of funds donated to the fund (32% of the total) was Leonid Volkov himself. In 2020, he transferred 24.3 million rubles to the Novosibirsk Fund of the FZPG. But the Votkinsk Foundation for the Legal Support of Citizens (FPOG) received another 42.9 million rubles from it in 2018. Volkov made donations in large amounts, an average of 460 thousand rubles at a time. In particular, in July 2020, he received five transactions in the amount of 400 to 500 thousand rubles each. 

    Ruslan Shaveddinov, FBK project manager, took the third place. In 2018, he donated 14 million rubles to the Votka FPOG. At that time he was 21 years old, he was employed in the same fund to which he donated. Earlier, RT wrote that Shaveddinov in the same period donated another 15.5 million rubles to the Fifth Season of the Year fund. At the same time, officially over his entire career, Shaveddinov earned 1.3 million rubles, according to sources in government agencies working with statistics of the working-age population. 

    The founder of Euroset, Evgeny Chichvarkin, who now lives in London, is one of the few well-known philanthropists who have publicly declared their support to Navalny.

    At the same time, the millionaire Chichvarkin seems to have donated seven times less than Shaveddinov.

    As follows from the documents, his assistant Yekaterina Tereshkina contributed 2.2 million rubles to the accounts of the Ufa Foundation for the Protection of Citizens' Rights "Shtab" in 2019. 

    • Evgeny Chichvarkin

    • globallookpress.com

    • © Gustavo Valiente / ZUMA Press

    Finally, in March 2020, an individual entrepreneur Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny donated 950 thousand rubles to the Novosibirsk FZPG. 

    The remaining 4.2 million rubles were paid to the accounts of their "satellites" by legal entities from the FBK holder: FZPG "Shtab" and LLC "Country of Tides".

    The latter company, as RT wrote, makes money on the sale of branded clothing and accessories and is managed by FBK lawyer Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

    Real sources

    Experts interviewed by RT believe that multimillion-dollar contributions from FBK employees are a way to hide the real sources of funding. 

    “For example, some businessman could give his money to FBK through someone else's hands.

    In order to hide all these things, he does it through third parties or gives his acquaintance to a small company, '' Sergei Markov, director of the Institute for Political Research, told RT.

    “And that one - to another friend of his, and this acquaintance already withdraws the money, gives it to the FBK employee, and the FBK employee deposits this money into the organization’s accounts as supposedly personal funds”. 

    Also on russian.rt.com "For a penny - eight years in prison": experts on the consequences of recognizing Navalny's FBK as an extremist organization

    According to Markov, in this way FBK can hide foreign funding. 

    The real support of Navalny's structures from the population, according to Markov, is much less than that shown by the FBK itself in its reports. 

    “The FBK's base of political support has never exceeded 7-8 percent of the population,” says Markov.

    - But in order to donate money, you need to support it very strongly, and this is about a hundredth of this 7-8 percent.

    This is a very small group of people. "

    The opposition is unlikely to be able to legally contribute several million rubles a month, Sergei Karnaukhov, an associate professor at the Department of Legal Support of the Market Economy of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, doubts. 

    "Donors are used primarily to camouflage external financial infusions from organizations that traditionally support anti-constitutional movements in our country," RT Karnaukhov said.

    Recall that on June 9, the Moscow City Court recognized Navalny's FBK, the Foundation for the Protection of Citizens' Rights and Navalny's headquarters as extremist organizations.

    These organizations, according to the metropolitan prosecutor's office, "under the guise of liberal slogans are engaged in the formation of conditions for the destabilization of the social and socio-political situation." 

    All dubious donations will be checked as part of a criminal fraud case, a source in law enforcement agencies told RT. 

    “During the investigation, it will be established where this rather large amount of money came from the individuals themselves - the FBK employees.

    Whether they are earned officially or received from third parties, ”said the interlocutor of RT.

    * The Anti-Corruption Foundation is included in the register of NPOs performing the functions of a foreign agent, by decision of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation dated 09.10.2019. 

    The organization is recognized as extremist, its activities are prohibited on the territory of Russia by the decision of the Moscow City Court of 06/09/2021.

    ** The Foundation for the Protection of Citizens' Rights (FZPG) is included in the register of NPOs performing the functions of a foreign agent, by decision of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation dated December 25, 2020.

    The organization is recognized as extremist, its activities are prohibited on the territory of Russia by the decision of the Moscow City Court of 06/09/2021.