Public-private liaison. How the girlfriend of Russia's Finance Minister gained access to billions in budget money

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Until recently, the name Olga Khromchenko did attract any notable attention. However, after July 2018, her face began to appear on tabloid websites publishing commercial “exposes.” The pieces described her as a “former escort” who had gained good connections and began “taking on important economic and organizational issues,” such as “winning tenders to build overpasses in the Moscow Region.”

What the authors of those rambling pieces wanted to say is not entirely clear. At the time, Khromchenko was not yet listed in any companies, and the escort business representatives The Insider spoke to did not know her name. Yet, as the documents show, as early as 2019, Khromchenko received stakes in companies with million-dollar projects and access to taxpayer money.

A liaison with a minister

Olga Khromchenko was born in the village of Shamoksha near Saint Petersburg and finished a vocational school. At least until last year, she was employed by Rosspirtprom, a fully state-owned enterprise and Russia's largest producer of ethyl alcohol from food raw materials.

Khromchenko drives a Range Rover, which, according to the databases available through Telegram, she often parks in the vicinity of Frunzenskaya Metro Station near the Andreevsky residential complex, where Anton Siluanov owns a penthouse.

In the contact lists of her acquaintances, Khromchenko is listed as Siluanova, and in two cases referred to as his spouse (officially Siluanov has been single since 2015). Other tags associated with her are “villa Gelendzhik,” “Miami,” “lobbyist,” and “Seychelles.”

And those aren't her only overlaps with the finance minister. Both Khromchenko and Siluanov received speeding tickets in the Kaluga Region (the minister enjoys a fast ride on his BMW K 1600 GTL motorcycle). Siluanov owns land plots in the village of Shuvalovo near Kaluga, according to extracts from the Russian State Register.

It was from Shuvalovo that Yuri Khromchenko, Olga's father, returned home to St. Petersburg during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to leaked digital passes used during the lockdown.

It is hard to pinpoint when Khromchenko moved in with Siluanov. They were most certainly in a relationship in 2020, but there is no exact data on 2019, so it would be a stretch to say that her career took off after meeting the minister. One of her projects — the toll roads — involves Moscow Region authorities, and the rest are connected to federal agencies and budgets.

Toll roads

In 2019, Olga Khromchenko received a 20% stake in OOO Rusdor-Finans, and in February 2021, it increased to 33%. Rusdor-Finans has several subsidiaries engaged in toll road construction in the Moscow Region.

One of the subsidiaries, Lytkarinskaya Tollway, is set to begin the construction of the road from Solntsevo to Zheleznodorozhny via Butovo, Vidnoye, Kashirskoye Highway, Molokovo, Lytkarino, Tomilino, and Kraskovo in the third quarter of 2021. The toll fee will be set at $0.10 per kilometer. Khromchenko's firm is acting as a concessionary: during the construction phase, Moscow Region authorities are to allocate funds from the $357 million received from the federal budget. When (and if) the road is built and put into operation, the regional authorities will pay another $206.5 million to the concessionary. The rest of the private company’s revenue will be in the form of tolls.

The concession agreement was concluded last February between Lytkarinskaya Tollway and the Moscow Region government without a tender — based on the company's proposal and the absence of alternative bids. According to the agreement, the regional authorities undertook to transfer Capital Grant funds to Khromchenko's firm at the expense of the federal budget. The first tranche of $17.5 million is due in 2021.

Vedomosti noted the extremely favorable terms for the private partner, which can count on compensation in the event of insufficient traffic on the highway and can terminate the agreement even during the construction phase. The 2021 Moscow Region budget does not specify the transfer from the federal budget. If the agreement is terminated, the concessionary may claim compensation for design costs and lost revenue. Alexei Stroganov, the main owner of Rusdor-Finans, rejects the validity of any speculation on this scenario: “We're working on the project every day. In fact, I’m at the Moscow Region Expert Review Center right now,” Stroganov told The Insider over the phone. Stroganov declined to comment further on the matter.

Another Rusdor-Finans subsidiary, Odintsovskaya Tollway, is building an overpass near the village of Savvinskaya Sloboda. The project sparked protests from locals, who would be effectively deprived of a free alternative, and has been suspended.

Also affiliated with the girlfriend of the Finance Minister are companies Stupinskaya Tollway, Shaturskaya Tollway, Akulovskaya Tollway, Sergievo-Posadskaya Tollway, and Toll Detour of Shchelkovo. As Anton Siluanov stated, Russia does not have enough toll roads. He lobbied for the creation of a special government fund to finance such projects. Whether the finance minister or his department may have had anything to do with projects involving Khromchenko is unclear.

A port on Sakhalin

Construction of a multi-purpose cargo port with oil, gas, and coal terminals on the east coast of Sakhalin is scheduled to begin in 2022. The project will be implemented by Mnogofunktsionalny Gruzovoy Rayon (“Multi-Purpose Freight District”), a company in which Olga Khromchenko also has a stake through Rusdor-Finans.

The concession agreement was developed by the Federal Agency for Sea and Inland Water Transport, which reports to the Ministry of Transportation. The port construction project also received approval from the federal Ministry of Finance. The agreement provides for the allocation of roughly $41 million from the federal budget for the creation of infrastructure.

Hemp

Rusdor-Finans, with Khromchenko as a co-owner, holds 50% of shares in K Farma, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, together with Konoplex shareholder Roman Belousov (more on him later). Konoplex is Russia's largest producer of industrial hemp. In cosmetology, hemp is used in skin and hair care products, and in pharmaceuticals, it is used to make cannabidiol-based preparations.

Jointly with Konoplex, Khromchenko also founded OOO MIK, which signed an agreement to establish an enterprise for the production of pulp from bast crops in the Penza Region. The agreement was concluded without a tender by order of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, becoming Russia's first federal industrial concession and the only federal public-private partnership project in 2020.

On the government side, the project is supervised by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, and the Ministry of Finance is tasked with ensuring that expenditure commitments are included in federal budget draft laws. The volume of budget subsidies may exceed $31 million.

Microloans

Since 2019, Olga Khromchenko has owned a 5% stake in OOO Unicom, the legal entity behind the microloan aggregator Unicom24. The annual revenue of Unicom24, which is technically its subsidiary, amounts to roughly $1.4 million.

Khromchenko's lending platform partnered with one of the funds of VTB Capital Pension Reserve, which manages an equivalent of nearly $1 billion. Not only microloan organizations but also state banks such as VTB, Post Bank, and Gazprombank cooperate with Unicom24.

Minister Siluanov is also partial to microloans. He once said, commenting on the decline in the population’s real incomes, that living on credit is “normal.” Additionally, the Ministry of Finance adopted a plan at the end of 2020 to bring digital technology into the financial sector in order to make it easier to get loans. However, the Ministry of Finance had no direct relation to the Unicom project.

Where the money comes from

To buy stakes in all these companies, Olga Khromchenko needed money — much more than she could put aside from her official salary at Rosspirtprom. The source of these funds is difficult to establish, but her family history may offer a clue.

As The Insider discovered, Olga's father, Yuri Khromchenko, worked at St. Petersburg-based OOO Stik until at least 2017. Stik is linked to Vladimir Arteev, the organizer of a large-scale scheme to embezzle public funds. Olga may have had direct access to Arteev earlier — and if we are to believe certain “exposes”, he was ostensibly her civil partner and the father of her child.

Arteev is the founder of Edinye Resheniya (“Unified Solutions”) group of companies. In 2017, he was detained on suspicion of fraudulent embezzlement of public funds allocated for the construction of social facilities. The companies controlled by Arteev, including Stik, where Khromchenko's father was on the payroll, signed contracts in St. Petersburg, Omsk, and Tambov for the construction and renovation of 11 social facilities. Not a single one was commissioned. In total, as St. Petersburg-based publication Fontanka wrote, roughly $280 million “vanished” as a result of Arteyev's collusion with corrupt officials. In addition to embezzling public funds, firms with government contracts under their belt easily obtained loans from banks and never repaid them.

As The Insider found, in the 1990s Vladimir Arteev was listed in police databases as a member of an organized crime group. He also had a felony conviction for kidnapping. According to criminal case archives, in 1997 he and his accomplice seized and held a certain A.V. Novoseltsev, demanding a ransom of $2,000. But their hostage managed to escape a day later.

Khromchenko's partners and connection to the organized crime ring

One of Khromchenko's key partners is the aforementioned Roman Belousov. Together they are involved in the port construction project, the hemp business, and the toll roads. Belousov is named among the confidants of the notorious Skigin family, and Mikhail Skigin is the main owner of the Moscow Region Tollway and its subsidiaries, in which Belousov and Khromchenko also hold a stake. The beneficiary of Konoplex, which Khromchenko has involved in the production of pulp, is Evgeny Skigin, Mikhail’s brother and another son of the late Dmitry Skigin.

Dmitry Skigin was known for his ties to Ilya Traber (“antique dealer”), a criminal mastermind wanted by Spanish police as a member of the Tambovsko-Malyshevskaya gang. The Petersburg Oil Terminal was believed to be one of Traber and Skigin's main assets. According to investigators, Skigin helped the organized crime group launder money through the Bank of New York, Liechtenstein, and Monaco. After laundering, the funds were partially invested in the Association of Banks Investing in the Port (OBIP) and back into the Petersburg Oil Terminal. After Dmitry Skigin died in Nice, his son Mikhail took control of the terminal.

More about Traber’s and Skigin's business — and Vladimir Putin's share in it — can be found in The Insider's investigation “Putin's 4 percent: How criminal kingpins with Kremlin connections launder oil money in Monaco.”

Mikhail Skigin told The Insider that Khromchenko's Rusdor-Finans is involved in joint projects “both financially and by lending its extensive expertise,” emphasizing that “the management of Rusdor-Finans has the required professional expertise in PPP. This company, as well as other project participants, is responsible for the fulfillment of obligations imposed on the concessionary by Russian legislation.”

Mikhail Skigin also insists that his father was never “Traber's man,” and that after 2000 Dmitry Skigin split the business with Traber and ceased to be his associate (Skigin retained the port, and Traber got Sovex). After that, according to Skigin the younger, neither Traber nor his representatives were involved in his father's business. He also notes that the Monaco prosecutor's office has no claims against him or his father, which is confirmed by a special letter to that effect.

Rotenberg strikes again

In February 2020, Olga Khromchenko bought a 162-meter apartment (an extract from the Russian State Register is available to The Insider) in the Barkli Gallery housing estate. The market value of one square meter in this clubhouse exceeds $10,300 — against the market average of approximately $3,100. (Curiously, Siluanov, recently offering advice on family budgeting, spoke about the need to coordinate large expenditures with one's partner). The previous owner of this apartment was businessman and Putin ally Arkady Rotenberg. The oligarch bought it in August 2019, only to sell it to former Gazprom executive Andrei Goncharenko, after which the apartment changed owners three times in four months before ending up in Khromchenko's hands.

Interestingly, Rosspirtprom, where Khromchenko is listed as an employee, is in Rotenberg's sphere of interest, Vedomosti reports. Eleven years ago, his associates were employed in almost all of the state company's plants. Khromchenko's former business partner is also connected to Rotenberg: she co-founded Unicom with Alexei Sakun, the son of the ex-general director of TSM (Transstroymekhanizatsiya), a transport infrastructure company within Rotenberg's Mostotrest Group.

Notably, Siluanov spoke in favor of adopting the so-called “Rotenberg law,” under which Russian businessmen could demand compensation from the state budget for losses they incurred due to Western sanctions. Moreover, Rotenberg's road construction business largely depends on the benevolence of the Ministry of Finance, which approves the allocation of funds for its projects.

“That’s what she said”

Replying to The Insider’s questions, Olga Khromchenko did not deny her personal connection with Minister Siluanov but maintained that he had not provided her with any business assistance: “My business started before I met Anton Germanovich. He had nothing to do with it. So what if my companies' projects get approval from the Ministry of Finance? It is a government body like any other, along with the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Anton Germanovich is not involved in any way. He’s become the talk of the town for nothing.”

When asked about the origins of the money that paid her way into participation in federal-level projects, Khromchenko said that her business associate had lent her a hand: “We've been friends for a long time. Our kids went to the same daycare center (Khromchenko has a daughter from a previous relationship). I became friends with his wife first, and now I’m a friend of the family.” Alexei Stroganov, the main business partner of the finance minister's girlfriend, declined to explain her role in their joint projects.

Olga Khromchenko may indeed have started a business before meeting Siluanov, but the concession agreements were signed in 2020, when they were already romantically involved.

Ilya Shumanov, Executive Director of Transparency International-Russia, sees the situation as a case of corruption: “It's not the most common form of conflict of interest. It doesn't matter if the companies were established before or after the relationship started. Especially if [Khromchenko] had no prior experience with such concession agreements. In this case, it does not matter whether the minister heads a specialized or a general department or not: if documents pass through him, he can directly or indirectly influence the business of a person close to him — even if the approvals are signed by his subordinates and not the minister himself. In addition, facilitation in such cases often takes place informally.”

A messenger application indicates that Minister Anton Siluanov “read” The Insider's attempt to reach out to him, but he did not respond as to whether he had declared the conflict of interest in any way.