Opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Tuesday that Vladimir Yakunin's children and grandchildren are living in luxury homes abroad, while the head of Russian Railways touts the value of patriotism and accuses the West of undermining Russia.
The opposition leader satirized Yakunin's anti-Western ideas, saying his children live in the countries that he regularly lambasts. The head of Russian Railways was not available for comment.
“We did not expect such self-sacrifice even from the most patriotic patriot,” Navalny quipped in a scathing expose published on his blog that cites foreign government documents. “Down the voracious throat of the odious West, which is devoid of spiritual values, Vladimir Ivanovich Yakunin threw his dearest possession — excluding his love for Vladimir Putin — his family.”
The eldest son, Andrei Yakunin, lives with his family in a luxurious London home that he purchased for 4.5 million pounds ($7.2 million) in 2007 and registered with a Panamanian offshore company, Navalny said.
Despite his grandfather's protestations against the use of Western history textbooks in Russian schools, his grandson Igor Yakunin reportedly attends the prestigious Highgate School in London, Navalny wrote.
Yakunin's expatriate grandson does have a place to come home to in Russia, however, as there is a 4-room Moscow apartment registered in his name, the opposition leader said.
The apartment, which was “received free of charge from the government” when the boy was about seven years old, is located in the same building where Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin's daughter owns a luxury apartment, Navalny said.
Meanwhile, the younger son, Viktor Yakunin, has settled in an elite housing complex on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where his eight-year-old daughter attends an elite academy, the post read.
Oddly, Viktor Yakunin and his family are registered not at this residence, as required by Swiss law, but at another location in central Geneva, where the offices of state-owned oil giant Rosneft and a charity founded by billionaire Gennady Timchenko happen to be located, Navalny says.
In another part of his tirade, the opposition leader ridiculed a book by Yakunin that criticizes the West.
“There, amid omnipresent and disgusting homosexual orgies and politicians writing the Dulles Plan for the purpose of worshipping Satan — amid all these atrocities brilliantly described in Vladimir Yakunin's book — we find all the suffering children and grandchildren of Vladimir Yakunin,” the politician joked in a reference to accusations frequently made by anti-Western writers.
Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation has targeted Yakunin several times in 2013, identifying a network of offshore companies that allegedly conceals the Yakunin family's business interests and publishing photographs of an extravagant country house reportedly owned by the official.
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