Security officers and bribes on the path to freedom: how billionaire Vyacheslav Kantor is seeking the lifting of sanctions - and what will stop him

In 2020, the Evening Murmansk newspaper called billionaire Vyacheslav Kantor (11th place on the Forbes list, worth more than $11 billion) almost Vladimir Putin’s best friend.

The advertising note became the basis for adding Kantor to the EU sanctions list: now the billionaire cannot travel to his beloved Sardinia. Kantor owns the Akron fertilizer plant and runs the European Jewish Congress. Kantor’s lawyers dispute the personal sanctions and insist that in fact he earned all 11 billion honestly, and saw Putin only briefly and has no connection with the authorities.

This is, of course, a lie. The Dossier Center found out that the billionaire owes his fortune to a man named Yuri Zubakov, the former deputy director of the SVR. Until 2011, Zubakov was a member of the Security Council and worked as Deputy Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev. Zubakov was Kantor’s patron for a long time and even served on the board of directors of Akron. When the company had to be saved from sanctions, its shares went to Zubakov’s daughter-in-law.

Kantor’s connections with the security officers are family; his father, the director of a large department store, also enjoyed the patronage of the KGB. If this proof of connection with the authorities of the European Union is not enough, we have one more: in November 2022, Kantor’s company paid for a vacation worth almost a million rubles to the Smolensk Duma deputy from United Russia, Yuri Chernyak.

Whatever one may say, it’s a bribe - Akron’s large production facility is located in the Smolensk region. But it’s better to listen to Kantor himself. In his interviews, he endlessly praises Putin, repeats word for word theses from Russian propaganda manuals and completely shares the course of the Russian government.