Olympic-scale perks: How much are Putin-affiliated oligarchs paying Alina Kabaeva, Russia's unrecognized first lady?

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In 2001, Alina Kabaeva was found guilty of doping, although she denies the allegations. The disciplinary commission of the FIG (International Federation of Gymnastics) disqualified her for one year and removed Kabaeva's title of world champion. The grounds for the decision was the detection of the drug furosemide, used to promote rapid weight loss, in the gymnast's biological sample. Furosemide is also used as a masking agent in the administration of anabolic drugs.

Nevertheless, the year 2001 was an important one in the development of the gymnast’s career. On Dec. 1, 2001, the 18-year-old gymnast was first mentioned on the Kremlin's official website after Vladimir Putin attended a “sports show,” where a glowing Kabaeva was photographed next to the president.

2001 was also the year that Kabaeva joined the ruling United Russia party's supreme council. In 2005, she was elected to the State Duma. During her time as an MP, Kabaeva earned approximately $103,000 a year. Then, in 2014, she left parliament to succeed Kirill Kovalchuk as chairperson of the board of directors of the National Media Group (NMG). Her predecessor’s relative, Yuri Kovalchuk, was one ofPutin's ex-partners in the Ozero dacha housing cooperative, and he remains a major stakeholder in NMG.

Yuri Kovalchuk

The real estate of Kabaeva's family that is known to journalists is valued at $12.8 million. NMG does not disclose the management's compensation and has not responded to media inquiries to that effect. Kabaeva's earnings were unknown — until the database of Russia's Federal Tax Service was leaked, disclosing the former athlete's official income at NMG for 2018 to be roughly $8 million (The Insider managed to verify this data). It is difficult to say whether 2018 was a particularly lucrative year or whether she receives the same salary now — NMG did not respond to our inquiry.

For the sake of comparison, , former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who chairs the board at oil giant Rosneft, receives less than one-tenth of this amount — $600,000 a year, according to the company’s official report. On the whole, members of Gazprom's board of directors earn an average of $1.1 million a year. In other words, even the inflated executive salaries at the country's largest corporations pale in comparison to Kabaeva's income. As The Insider discovered, Olga Paskina, the CEO of NMG, also earns much less than Kabaeva.

The National Media Group owns shares in REN-TV, Channel One, STS, Channel Five, Izvestia, and Sport-Express. These media outlets are subsidized by the state budget, meaning that NMG manages taxpayers' money.

In addition to NMG, Kovalchuk's family controls Rossiya Bank. As Forbes wrote, Kovalchuk practically received the bank from Putin's hands. The bank had been set up with money from the Soviet Communist Party and was transferred in the early 1990s from the Communists to Kovalchuk and his associates. The transfer occurred under the external management of Anatoly Sobchak, deputy mayor of St. Petersburg at the time. One of Sobchak’s closest aides was none other than Vladimir Putin.

Kovalchuk's other key asset was Video International, the longtime leader in TV advertising that had essentially monopolized this market. Since 2010, Kovalchuk has been handling all proceeds from commercials on state-run federal channels. Today, Kovalchuk owns a stake in the National Advertising Alliance, which replaced Video International. With an annual turnover of roughly 20 billion rubles, the company controls nearly all of Russia's television advertising.

How did a gymnast whose professional experience consisted mostly of mastering ball and hoop techniques come to head a major media holding? Why is the company of Putin's ex-business associate paying Kabaeva exorbitant sums? What could Kabaeva and Putin possibly have in common? The Insider will refrain from any speculation on the subject. However, Kabaeva's sky-high NMG salary is far from being the only source of enrichment for the ex-gymnast's family. Her inner circle frequently enjoys the seemingly inexplicable generosity of various high-net-worth individuals.

A car for Kabaeva’s mother and an entire sports center for her sister

Lyubov Kabaeva, the ex-athlete's mother, runs the Kuntsevo Sports and Fitness Complex in Moscow. According to the Spark database, the facility belongs to Reserv-M, an entity controlled by Kabaeva's sister Leysan (more about her and her company below). The Kuntsevo complex earned $1.8 million on government contracts. Kabaeva's mom also makes money renting out space to the Moscow City Sports Department and Rosneft.

A curious detail: Lyubov Kabaeva's Range Rover is registered with the traffic police under the same cell phone number as presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov's Mercedes-Benz. Peskov and Kabaeva appear to share the same car dealer, as the number belongs to Anna Kvaratskheli, assistant to Kamo Avagumyan, co-owner of the Avilon car dealership.

Alina Kabaeva also runs a charitable foundation helping low-income families in need and children with disabilities. However, as the TV channels she manages raise SMS donations for sick children, the Kabaeva Foundation spends only 0.4% of her personal income on such causes. According to the charity's report to the Ministry of Justice, last year it spent $29,500 on “charitable aid within the framework of its statutory activities.” The charity spent almost just as much on salaries for its employees, with Kabaeva's sister’s among them.

Leysan Kabaeva receives $5,000 a year from her sister's charitable foundation. She also earns a little more ($6,200) from the Kuntsevo sports complex run by her mother.

The Kabaeva Foundation is headquartered in Moscow at 7 Mozhayskoe Highway, Building 1. According to an extract from the Russian State Register available to The Insider, this building, with an area of 4,052.9 square meters, along with the neighboring one, belongs to a sports and fitness complex controlled by Kabaeva's sister's firm Reserv-M. The total cadastral value of the buildings together with the land plot (under long-term lease from Moscow) is $11.7 million.

Leysan Kabaeva has owned Reserv-M (and through it the sports complex) since 2010. She took over the company from Finansovye Sistemy (Financial Systems), an entity affiliated with the family of Industry Minister Denis Manturov and Stanislav Chemezov, the son of the Rostec head.

And this is not the only asset Kabaeva's sister got from the hands of Putin allies. She received the apartment on Veresaeva Street from Grigory Baevsky, who works for oligarch Arkady Rotenberg. Baevsky also has a business of his own — the St. Petersburg-based construction company Zeleny Gorod (Green City), which has received road construction government contracts totaling $193 million. Its main customers are entities of Rosavtodor, an enterprise controlled by the Ministry of Transport. The ministry was until recently headed by Yevgeny Dietrich, whose ministerial appointment had been lobbied by Arkady Rotenberg.

Grandma and assistants

Baevsky also did a favor for Alina Kabaeva's grandmother, giving Anna Zatsepina a plot of land and a house in the prestigious gated community of Uspenskoye in the Odintsovo district of the Moscow Region. As The Insider discovered, Zatsepina, 85, is officially registered in the village of Nikologory, Vyaznikovsky district, Vladimir Region. The extract from the State Register suggests that the owner of her house is Valentina Golovacheva; meanwhile, the actual resident of the house was a woman named Ekaterina Golovacheva — a former board member of the Kabaeva Foundation.

Golovacheva, along with Alina Kabaeva and her mother, was on the charity's board of directors until 2018. She has recently been replaced in the managerial triumvirate by Yulia Nazarova. Acquaintances of Golovacheva have labeled her in their contact lists as being Kabaeva's personal assistant. The Insider also learned that she works at the National Media Group.

Nazarova, 38, used to go by the last name Selkina. Back in 2005, she co-founded the Murmansk Foundation for Public Development and Education with Vladimir Selkin — presumably her brother.

Today, Vladimir Selkin owns Art-Metal, which cuts ferrous scrap and waste for Translom, a company with ties to the Rotenbergs. Translom receives scrap metal from the Ministry of Defense without a tender, based on a presidential decree, and sells it at a markup. The company's profits for the last three years amounted to $40.5 million. Translom is also affiliated with Stroyservis, which enjoys overpriced contracts from the Moscow Mayor's Office to repair streetcar tracks, as Navalny's Moscow headquarters had revealed.