Three years ago, on September 19, 2018, upheavals in the Moscow government followed, as a result of which one of the key positions – Deputy Mayor for Economic Policy and Property and Land Relations and Head of the Department for Economic Policy and Development of the City of Moscow – was taken by a little-known native of Kursk, Vladimir Efimov. At the time of his appointment, he was 37 years old, which is very young by Russian bureaucratic standards.
However, as an official, Vladimir Vladimirovich Efimov is by no means young – he began his career as a civil servant almost immediately after graduating from university, when, having worked for a little less than a year as an economist in the non-profit organization Center for Social and Labor Rights, in 2004 he moved to the capital Department of the Federal Antimonopoly Service.
From that moment on, the impeccable biography of the civil servant Vladimir Efimov began, which eventually led him to the chair of the vice-mayor of Moscow. Moreover, after four years of service, in 2008, Efimov received the class rank of state adviser of the Russian Federation of the 3rd class, which is very, very good, given both his age and the length of service as a civil servant.
In 2011, Efimov moved from civil service to municipal authorities – he headed the Moscow Department of Land Resources in the status of a capital minister, becoming the youngest minister of the Moscow government. In February 2013, in the course of optimizing the structure of the executive power of the capital, the departments of property and land resources of the city were merged into the department of city property, the leadership of which was entrusted to Efimov. In February 2017, Efimov headed the Department of Economic Policy and Development of Moscow, and in September 2018, Sergei Sobyanin appointed him his deputy for economic policy and property and land relations.
A brilliant biography of a young and promising official. This is for those who do not understand the intricacies of Russian politics, and even more so – are far from understanding what property and land relations are in the capital of the Russian Federation. For for such people, Efimov’s biography looks alarmingly glossy, downright popular. To begin with, for some reason, a MGIMO graduate goes to work in an incomprehensible non-profit organization, from where he abruptly jumps immediately to the position of deputy head of one of the key departments of the Federal Antimonopoly Service, and not somewhere in Kostroma, but in the capital. And this is at 23 years old. And then makes a dizzying career.
In addition, it is not clear how a simple native of Kursk, who has “poor, but wealthy parents” (as Efimov himself says), managed to enter the elite MGIMO, where the path to mere mortals is ordered. By the way, there he studied on the same course with Ksenia Sobchak. The secret of the parents remained a mystery – more than that they are “not rich, but well-to-do”, nothing is known.
However, there are persistent rumors that the first steps in the life of Efimov were helped by his connections in the FSB. His or his parents are unknown, but it is known that Vladimir Vladimirovich at a fairly young age (in 2008) received a departmental award from the Federal Security Service – the medal “For Merit in Ensuring Economic Security”. Although he did not serve in the FSB.
In general, the list of awards of Vladimir Vladimirovich is rather strange:
Some of them, like the medal from the FSB (for some reason, Vladimir Vladimirovich hides it and does not mention it in most versions of his biography), although they look rather strange, they played a very significant role in his life.
As, for example, the medal “In memory of the 1000th anniversary of Kazan.” Why does she look weird? Well, Efimov comes from Kursk, if he was in Kazan, then he was passing through, by origin he was by no means a Tatar, a veteran or a rear worker (the opposite – this applies to residents of the Tatar capital), who were awarded a medal, is also not why he should be awarded it ?
It turns out that Vladimir Vladimirovich received this medal with the support of Marat Khusnullin, who at that moment headed the Ministry of Construction, Architecture and Housing and Communal Services of the Republic of Tatarstan. And Efimov headed the Department for Control of Housing and Communal Services, Construction and Natural Resources of the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia. Here is such a coincidence.
As well as the following – in December 2010, Marat Khusnullin became the Deputy Mayor of Moscow for urban planning policy and construction. And in 2011, Efimov also moved to the Moscow government, and the scope of his activities was very tightly intertwined with the scope of Khusnullin’s activities – we recall that Vladimir Vladimirovich headed the Moscow Department of Land Resources.
Building without land is impossible. How much is a square meter of capital land – I think it is not necessary to explain. The majority of Russians in all the years of their work will still not be able to save up for it. In addition, Vladimir Vladimirovich opened another “window of opportunity” – he became the head of the Moscow City Property Department. The annual purchase of reagents and fuel for municipal equipment, the purchase or lease of land in Moscow, the privatization of buildings and industrial enterprises, the leasing of municipal property, control over trade pavilions, cafes, restaurants – all these issues needed the signature of Vladimir Efimov.
“Moscow owns 45 million square meters of non-residential real estate and about 400 thousand apartments and rooms that have not yet been privatized” – this is a quote from an interview with Vladimir Vladimirovich in 2016. How much is a square meter of real estate in Moscow – again, we will not go deep, everything is clear anyway.
Just recall that at the same time, in 2016, a scandal erupted. It turned out that the Department of City Property announced the reduction of the queue for housing by half, but social activists caught Efimov’s officials by the hand: it turned out that they simply removed citizens from the queue under far-fetched pretexts. More than half of the families who left the Housing program received no housing at all. On the other hand, DGI employees and persons close to them, using insider information about plans to demolish dilapidated housing, in July-August 2016 purchased a lot of apartments in different districts of Moscow – probably in order to cash in on the subsequent buyout of their living space.
True, this affected Vladimir Vladimirovich in a completely unexpected way – instead of a prison, he ended up in the chair of the head of the Department of Economic Policy and Development of the City of Moscow, subsequently adding to this position the status of vice-mayor of the capital. He is in this position to this day.
You can, of course, say that all this is a cleverly rigged fiction of envious people. But there is still data on the financial situation of the vice-mayor. For example, declaration.
Moreover, at the time of Efimov’s arrival in the Moscow government, it looked like this:
Modest apartment, rather modest income. Nothing special. But in 2020, the official’s declaration already stated the following:
Incomes increased tenfold, many square meters of the capital’s golden real estate appeared, which Efimov manages on duty. True, most of these meters are recorded on the spouse, but which of the officials’ wives are not at the same time successful business women? True, the rich wife of Vladimir Vladimirovich, Tatyana Demidova, is not engaged in private business, but worked for a long time in the FAS system, including checking purchases signed by her own husband. Now Tatyana Pavlovna has become the director of the department of budget policy in the field of the contract system of the Ministry of Finance of Russia.
So the declaration itself should have alerted the relevant services, but… In addition, evil tongues claim that everything that Vladimir Efimov writes in the declarations is just the tip of the iceberg. For he does not mention in them, for example, that he owns a golf club in the Spanish resort of Marbella (Marbella), he also has at his disposal two comfortable motor yachts of class B-Offshore (open sea vessel), designed for 6 passengers and 4 team members. All this is recorded (not for nothing that Efimov graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations of the Russian Foreign Ministry with a degree in Economics, Finance and Credit) for offshore companies. So – try, get to the bottom.
Another scandal is connected with Marbella, already international. It’s a long-standing affair, but it’s worth mentioning – in 2014, being heavily drunk, Vladimir Efimov and his longtime partner, a very famous and odious metropolitan figure Maxim Liksutov (then deputy mayor of Moscow for transport and the development of the road infrastructure of the capital) staged a casino drunk brawl. The fight with the Spanish police, not without the help of casino owners who were interested in rich clients who left fortunes at the gambling tables, was hushed up. But Liksutov was less fortunate than his “accomplice” Efimov – he was banned from entering Spain. And Vladimir Vladimirovich escaped with only a fine.
Fight by fight, who is right and who is wrong is a debatable issue. But where do the two Russian officials get the money to be regular VIP customers of the casino? Well, the average is not even a Russian, but an average resident of Moscow, answer – have you been to a casino in Spain for a long time? And not even in VIP status, but just?
Like this. In the meantime, Vladimir Vladimirovich continues to faithfully serve the Muscovites. True, further development in the city seems to have reached a dead end – he is unlikely to be allowed to lead the capital. True, there are options – you can follow your wife to go to the Ministry of Finance. Or talk to Marat Shakirzyanovich Khusnullin, who is now working in a much higher position – Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. He now has much more opportunities than when he awarded Efimov a medal in honor of the anniversary of Kazan. So, as we see, there are growth reserves.