The former wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin has been linked to a Russian company collecting millions of dollars from an historic property in Moscow, an investigation by the Reuters news agency has revealed.
Lyudmila Putina was married to the
president for 30 years before the pair officially split in 2013.
She now promotes the Center for the Development of Inter-personal Communications (CDIC), working with the organization's publishing work, an unnamed source told Reuters.
The CDIC owns the historic Volkonsky House in Central Moscow, which generates millions of dollars every year from commercial tenants. One state-owned bank, VTB, paid more than $2 million to rent space in the building in 2015, records show.
That money is collected by a private company called Meridian, a firm which is owned in turn by a larger company called Intererservis.
According to corporate documents seen by Reuters, Intererservis has been owned by a woman with the same maiden name as Putin's former wife since 2014.
Company records show that the company had revenues of 225 million rubles ($3.89 million) in 2015, but do not provide a detailed breakdown on income or outgoings.
Reuters also found a number of other links between Volkonsky House, Intererservis, and Russia's former first lady. The Kremlin property department supervised renovation on the building, with Lyudmilla Putin even visiting to inspect the work, sources told Reuters. The building did not belong to the Russian state at the time.
Both Meridian and the CDIC have not replied to Reuters' requests for comment. The Kremlin said that they did not issue statements on the affairs of Putin's former-wife.
Read the Reuters investigation in full here.
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