Vladimir Putin has denied claims he owns a palace, in his first comments since critic Alexei Navalny linked the president to an opulent £1bn development on the Black Sea coast.
The Russian president said he had “not had the time” to view the 2 hour long investigation, released online by Mr Navalny’s team shortly after the Putin critic’s jailing last week.
Nonetheless, the extracts he had seen represented an obvious attempt to “brainwash” Russians using “ten year old rumours.”
“They decided it was a good time to put things together and brainwash our citizens,” he said. “This is just a compilation, a cut and paste job.”
In a complicated formula, Mr Putin said neither he nor close relatives had ever owned the property. That formula appeared to sidestep the main claim made by Mr Navalny’s team that oligarchs gifted the palace to the president as way of a bribe.
Mr Navalny’s report has already been watched over 85 million times, one reason why the Russian leader felt obliged to make a comment.
© 2021 Independent
Someone’s scared. Well, good luck with that one, bunker-boy!
Dictators tend to hide their ownership of property, shares etc. And no dictator has ever left office voluntarily.
Wow, 85 million, that is really impressive. A blizzard of imponderables start to come up:
If only half of them are strongly outraged by it, then perhaps half of that number again: c. 21 million, would be determined enough to get on the streets and stay there until the revolution gains traction, more and more get on the streets, regime members start switching sides and the putinazi murder gang is extirpated. Once critical mass is achieved, the people would be unstoppable. But the question then is would the rodent dictator start to order mass killings? And at that point, would his own side turn on him?
Putin’s statement would carry more weight if he announced who this monstrosity did belong to. Anyway the truth is that this palace belongs to the Russian public, that’s who the money was stolen from in the first place.
If Putin did say who supposedly owns it, no one could trust him. He certainly wouldn’t out himself.