Commenting on the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s series about the 1990s, released in April 2024, former Deputy Prime Minister and First Deputy Chairman of the State Property Committee of the Russian Federation Alfred Koch said that he noticed in it evidence of the authors’ connection with the Kremlin. We decided to check the validity of this statement.
In the first part of the documentary series "Traitors", released on YouTube on April 16, the head of the FBK investigation department, Maria Pevchikh, holds in her hands a copy of the decree on the privatization of Sibneft, which Boris Yeltsin signed in 1995. First, Pevchikh shows the front side with the text of the decree, and then turns the sheet over and shows the signatures with which officials endorsed the document. On April 22, Alfred Koch, who held the post of first deputy chairman of the State Property Committee in the mid-1990s, stated during a stream on the YouTube channel of journalist Evgeny Kiselyov, that thereby Pevchikh allegedly betrayed her source in the presidential administration and proved that she herself works for the Kremlin.
In a conversation with Kiselyov, Koch argued his assumption in detail. “This version with signatures on the [reverse] side goes to the secret archive. No one has access there, except for a limited number of people,” Koch said. He added: “The document that Pevchikh was holding in her hands was a copy of a document that is kept in a single copy in the presidential administration and access to which is only through security clearance. She could only receive this from the hands of a high-ranking official of the presidential administration, who, of course, would never have given her these documents if he had not had the go-ahead at the very top, including the FSB. She doesn’t know this, which is why she so recklessly revealed her source. But I, an old bureaucrat, tell you firmly: this is greetings from Sergei Vladilenovich [Kirienko].” Full recording of the broadcast on YouTube received 135,000 views.
The former official argued that the decree in exactly this design, with signatures on the back, cannot be found in the public domain. However, a Google search immediately brings up this document on the website “Yeltsin Center" The organization's fund contains copies of most of the decrees of the first Russian president. Among them the same decree of November 27, 1995.
On the same page you can download the text of the decree in pdf format. Contrary to Koch's claims, both the front and back of the document are publicly available.
If you compare screenshots from the film “Traitors” and photos on the Yeltsin Center website, you can be sure that this is the same document.
After the accusations made by Koch against the Singers during the broadcast, Kiselev clarified whether the reverse side with visas always remained secret and was not published in the public domain. Koch responded that this applies to all presidential decrees. But if you turn to other similar documents published by the Yeltsin Center and randomly select any of them, you can see that this is not so. For example, according to the 1993 decree “On conferring the honorary title "Honored Forester of the Russian Federation"", like other similar documents that are publicly available on the Yeltsin Center website, there is a visa on the reverse side.
Thus, Koch's statements are not true. A copy of the presidential decree is in the public domain, from where, as later told Pevchikh, she took the document for the film.
Cover photo: YouTube screenshot
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