“Putin’s Palace” claimed by a billionaire close to Putin

A Russian Black Sea palace is said to be the beneficiary of Vladimir Putin’s January 19, 2021 video released by Navalny’s team.

Billionaire Arkadi Rotenberg, a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Saturday that what opposition leader Navalny calls “Putin’s palace” is actually his property, set to be renovated into an apartment hotel.

Billionaire Arkadi Rotenberg, Putin’s former judo partner, announced Saturday that the luxury palace opposition leader Alexei Navalny accused Putin of owning was his property.

“A few years ago, I managed to reach an agreement with my creditors to become the beneficiary of this place,” Rotenberg’s press service quoted him as saying in an AFP report from Moscow on Jan. 30. He added that he intends to turn the palace into an “apartment-hotel”.

Everything has been done very carefully, efficiently and professionally,” he added. I hope that we will be able to complete the construction of the apartment-hotel within a few years.” .

Previously, an investigative video with hundreds of millions of views published by Russia’s main opposition leader Navalny on the YouTube oil tube accused Vladimir Putin of being the beneficiary of an opulent and huge “palace” on the Black Sea coast that allegedly cost more than one billion euros to build and contained luxury facilities such as a theater, casino, hockey rink and tarmac.

Vladimir Putin denied the accusations, which he said were intended to “brainwash” Russians and incite them to participate in protest demonstrations. Navalny’s team organized protests in hundreds of cities on Saturday and plans to take further action this Sunday.

Russian state television, for its part, showed pictures of the luxury Home, much of which is still under construction, showing a far cry from the luxury described by the other side, pointing to this as evidence of manipulation by Mr. Navalny’s team.

Navalny is currently in prison. His allies have assured that the reason the mansion is doing work is because of flaws in its construction, and that Vladimir Putin is indeed the beneficiary of the mansion, only borrowing the name of the middleman.

Navalny, 44, Russia’s main opposition leader, suddenly collapsed on a flight from Tomsk, Siberia, to Moscow in August 2020 and was taken to a hospital in Omsk, where he remained unconscious and was transferred to Berlin, Germany, where he was found to have been poisoned with a nerve agent.

On January 17, 2021, Navalny was discharged from the hospital and returned to Russia on a German flight, where he was arrested at Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport and immediately sentenced to 30 days of pre-trial detention.

On January 19, Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation released a documentary of his investigation, recorded while he was convalescing in Germany, accusing Putin of using bribes to finance the secret construction of a $1 billion luxury coastal palace.