Alina Kabaeva
This is where Putin’s first lady resided – a Swiss villa was to be sold for 75 million francs
Everyone knows, but nobody talks about it: Alina Kabaeva is considered Vladimir Putin’s first lady
© Sergei Savostyanov / Picture Alliance
Alina Kabaeva has been said to have been Vladimir Putin’s wife for 20 years. The secret First Lady of Russia has been mainly in Switzerland in recent years. She is even said to have Swiss citizenship. Where she resided there now revealed a sale advertisement.
Koschei the Immortal is the name of the greatest villain in Russian folklore and fairy tales. He’s guarding a big secret: his soul is stuck in a needle. This is hidden in an egg. The egg is in turn hidden in a duck. The duck in a rabbit. The rabbit is sitting in an iron box. The box is buried under an oak tree on an island far out to sea. Why the effort? If the needle breaks, Koschei dies.
Vladimir Putin seems to have taken the legendary figure as a role model in more ways than one. The Kremlin boss guards countless secrets. His private life is one of his biggest. The whereabouts of his assets are probably just as secret.
Alina Kabaeva is the center of this secret universe. For 20 years she has been the woman at the side of the Russian ruler. The couple is said to have four children, including twins who are said to have been born in Switzerland. Although Putin has never made his relationship with Kabaeva public, the whole world now knows who is playing the role of Russia’s first lady. It was not for nothing that sanctions were imposed on the former gymnast in May of this year. In the sanctions lists, she is officially listed as a confidante of Putin. (Read here what evidence there is of the relationship between the President and the “Amazon”.)
Alina Kabaeva returns to Russia
At the beginning of the war Kabaeva stayed in Switzerland. But in March she hurriedly returned to her homeland. The villas that Kabaeva used for her stays in the Alpine republic are probably no longer needed. One of the homes should now be sold, how Research by the investigative Russian network “Dossier” demonstrate.
The owner of the property demanded 75 million Swiss francs (approx. 76.9 million euros). On paper, the villa in the municipality of Cologny on the left bank of Lake Geneva belongs to financier Pierre Alain Folier and his wife Wang Lin. You run a business that provides financial advice and manages real estate. In the spring of this year, one of her properties was put up for sale.
But the advert that went with it attracted attention because of its sparseness. On the real estate agency’s website, apart from a brief description mentioning a helipad and an approximate area of 20,000 square meters, only one photo was published, the journalists of “Dossier” note. The recording showed a meadow overlooking the lake, as if the owners did not want to show the house itself.
The villa was presented with this image in the advertisement of the real estate agency
Details lead to the property
The ad has since been deleted. But the details mentioned and shown were sufficient to identify the property. The shape of the paths on the property is very special and easy to recognize, writes “Dossier” and provides screenshots of the ad. In addition, a A look at the Swiss cadastre shows that there are not many properties of this size in Cologny. All plots of land and the geoinformation from official surveys are recorded in the register. According to this inventory, the land of the property measures almost 25,000 square meters.
But it was above all the aforementioned helipad that led to the identification of the object. In Cologny there is only one – on the street called Rampe de Cologny, between the houses of Russian oligarch Gennady Timchenko and his Swedish business partner Torbjörn Törnqvist. In 1997, the two founded the oil trading company Gunvor. Timchenko is one of Putin’s most loyal companions and claims to have known him since 1994. Western intelligence services assume that Timchenko is using his stakes in Gunvor and other companies to channel billions abroad – with and for Vladimir Putin.
That American Wall Street Journal had reported in April of this year, citing European and American security officials, that Kabaeva was staying in Switzerland primarily in a house in Lugano and in a villa with a heliport in Cologny.
The property on the shores of Lake Geneva
Based on the known details and the recording that the real estate agency placed for the advertisement, identified the verification team of the star the house marked in red as the villawhich Kabaeva used as accommodation in Switzerland.
The red dot marks the villa where Alina Kabaeva used to stay in Switzerland. Gennady Timchenko’s house can be seen in the lower left corner. It is currently registered to his wife and is subject to confiscation due to sanctions.
Journalists pretend to be prospective buyers
The journalists from “Dossier” contacted the agent who was supposed to sell the villa and pretended to be interested. He told them the price of 75 million Swiss francs and confirmed that there is a helipad on the site. The real estate agent gave away information about the villa until the alleged prospective buyers asked whether it was the house that was mentioned in the “Wall Street Journal”. After all, they do not want to be subject to sanctions if it is actually a villa belonging to the girlfriend of the Russian President, the journalists wrote as a reason for this question.
But there was no answer. Shortly thereafter, the agent claimed that the property was being withdrawn from sale as the owners are divorcing and will not sell until the divorce proceedings are complete. The ad disappeared.