For at least 15 years, Vladimir Putin’s entourage has been helping Alina Kabaeva: she flies business jets of the president’s friends, receives apartments and country houses from them, uses their Swiss real estate and, probably, one of the largest yachts in the world – “Scheherazade”. But the signs of attention from the Russian leader are not limited to this. The Dossier Center found probably the most expensive purchase that the heads of state knew made in the interests of Kabaeva and parties associated with her.
The son of Putin’s childhood friend, Vladimir Kolbin, acted as an intermediary in a deal with the shares of the largest insurer, Sogaz. A former policeman from St. Petersburg bought the company’s securities for 23 billion rubles and then sold them for 55 billion rubles. Shortly thereafter, he issued a loan for 12.3 billion rubles. “National media group” Alina Kabaeva. The money was needed to buy the STS TV channel, on the air of which the Olympic champion once hosted the Harem reality show.
Since then, Putin, according to the media, has become a father three more times: one child of Kabaev gave birth in Switzerland in 2015, two — in 2019 in Moscow. This is confirmed by the Dossier source, who works at the Kulakov Obstetrics Center. After the first birth, Kabaeva spent a lot of time in Switzerland. Gennady Timchenko helped her with this.
A year later, Timchenko fell under sanctions and since then tried not to leave Russia: “Unfortunately, there is reason to seriously fear provocations from the US intelligence services.” In 2015, he transferred the villa to his son Ivan and wife Elena. But not only they used the building: Alina Kabaeva also visited the mansion, says a source familiar with the Olympic champion. As The Wall Street Journal wrote referring to European and American security officials, the athlete lived in a residence in Lugano and in a villa with a heliport in Cologni, without specifying which house in question. Putin’s friends also used the helicopter, the newspaper noted.
There is only one helipad in Cologny. It is located on Rampe de Cologny next to the houses of Timchenko and Tornquist. This land is part of a property called Villa Hauterive. In the XVIII century, the Riye family was engaged in winemaking here. Now the estate is divided into two parts: one of them used to belong to Swiss President Gustave Ador, and in recent years the owners were people from Saudi Arabia. The second plot was put up for sale in the spring of 2022, but the ad looked unusual: in addition to a short description that mentions a heliport and an approximate area (more than 20 thousand square meters), only one photo was posted on the website of the real estate agency – a shot of a lawn with a view on the lake, as if the owners did not want to show the house itself and other buildings.
These precautions are unnecessary: the property is easily recognizable by the characteristic shape of the paths that can be seen in the picture in the ad; in addition, there are not many plots of this size in Cologny (according to the Swiss cadastre, the land area is almost 25 thousand square meters). The owners are financier and photographer Pierre Alain Folier and his wife Wang Lin. They run a financial consulting and real estate company. The realtor in charge of the property said the home is worth 75 million Swiss francs (approximately $75.5 million). He also clarified that there is a helipad on the site, but it has not been used for some time. This is not entirely true: since 2016, five private helicopters have been spotted at the site and in its immediate vicinity, according to the ADSBexchange.com service.
How did we find out who landed near the mansion
ADSBexchange provided the Dossier Center with information on 14,283 aircraft that the service recorded in this part of Cologna. The information includes the type and registration code of the vessel, its coordinates, speed over ground, barometric and geometric altitude. The data was sorted, among them only helicopters were selected, for which the barometric height corresponded to the value “on the ground”, and the speed was equal to zero. Information about helicopters of medical services was also excluded from the final table.
These five helicopters can be bookedand four out of five are part of the same group – Swift Copters, which works with clients from Russia.
What helicopters landed near the estate
Eurocopter EC 135
Bell 429 Global Ranger
Airbus Helicopters H125
Agusta-Westland AW-109SP
Eurocopter AS 350B3 Ecureuil
The Dossier correspondent tried to buy a house, posing as an assistant to a banker who is looking for housing on the shores of Lake Geneva, but would not like to reveal his name. The realtor talked about the property until he received a question in the mail whether this house was mentioned in The Wall Street Journal article: according to legend, a potential buyer would not want to fall under secondary sanctions by buying a villa of a Russian president’s girlfriend. The question remained unanswered, and soon the realtor said that the object was withdrawn from sale, since the owners decided to get a divorce and suspended preparations for the transaction until the end of the divorce proceedings. After that, the “Dossier” sent requests to Pierre Folier and the realtor and indicated that he was preparing a publication about Kabaeva, asking him to clarify whether the athlete used this property. The owner did not answer questions, and the realtor pretended not to understand anything: “You must be confusing my real estate agency with an information bureau? I have no idea what you are talking about in your letter and what address you mention. Soon the announcement of the sale was deleted. An interlocutor familiar with Kabaeva says that the athlete really used a helicopter that delivered her “literally to the doorstep of Timchenko’s house.”
The trips to Switzerland were not business trips. The Olympic champion, as promised in her interviews, devoted herself to children. But she did not remain without income. […]
