According to the tax base leaked on the Internet, in 2020 the head of VTB Bank Andrey Kostin received 11,436,137,038 rubles and 33 kopecks. Of this money, Kostin received two million from the United Grain Company, another million each from the All-Russian Bank for Regional Development and from Rosneft (Kostin owns 0.001% of the authorized capital of the oil company). The rest of the money Kostin got from the state bank VTB, which he has been managing since 2002. In addition, for 2019 Andrey Kostin was a minority shareholder of VTB: he owned 0.00183% of the bank’s ordinary shares.
What exactly such impressive payments to Kostin consist of – salaries, dividends, bonuses or something else, is not indicated in the tax leak. It is impossible to verify this data in an official way. Five Big Stories employees found their 2020 earnings leaked. Not all incomes were presented there, but those that were found were indicated accurately. Thus, we can assume that Kostin received at least the amount indicated in front of his name – perhaps more.
Andrei Kostin regularly got into rating of the most expensive top managers in Russia according to Forbes (published in 2012-2017), and in 2014 even took first place – according to journalists, that year he earned $ 37 million (about 1.5 billion rubles at the rate of 2014). Then Kostin named Forbes figures are “complete nonsense” and stated that his annual income was several times lower – 240 million rubles.
Kostin is not indifferent to the topic of his windfall profits. In 2016, there was a scandal when the same annual rating came out without specifying Kostin’s reward. Forbes journalists then accused the owner of the publication Alexandra Fedotova in interference in editorial policy – he personally demanded that Kostin’s income be excluded from the publication. Journalists even tried to sue, but predictably lost.
Kostin’s multibillion-dollar income for 2020 (more than $158 million at the average exchange rate of that year) makes him the clear leader of the top-management salary race taking place at the expense of the Russian budget. As FBK found outanother very wealthy (and no less vulnerable) contender for this position is also the head of a state-owned company, the head of Rosneft Igor Sechin – earned only 3.3 billion rubles in 2020.
“Important Stories” sent a request to VTB. If the company gives a meaningful answer, we will publish it.
The article has been amended: the name of the All-Russian Regional Development Bank has been corrected.
@tddd, 08/10/2023 06:21 PM: Sechin’s salary – tears: banker Kostin earns 6 million rubles per hour. Or 100,000 rubles per minute – twice as much as the average Russian in a month. In 2020, the head of the loss-making VTB Bank, Andrey Kostin, received as much as 11.4 billion rubles in income, Important Stories found out. This is only slightly less than budget revenues Jewish Autonomous Okrug or the Republic of Kalmykia in the same year. And a little less than the budget of almost half a million Bryansk.
The head of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, is a poor man compared to Kostin: his income is four times lower. And even the heads of Netflix, eBay or Microsoft with such earnings can’t brag. It becomes clear how a modest civil servant Kostin can afford to give his mistress, a TV presenter Nail Asker-Zade, yachts, planes and huge estates on Rublyovka — Inset K.ru
