Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation blacklists Alfa Group partners it previously sought to extricate from sanctions
Alexey Navalny’s associates at the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) have updated their list of “bribe-takers and warmongers,” adding the names of Alfa Group Consortium’s shareholders Mikhail Fridman, Alexey Kuzmichev, and German Khan to the list.
ACF’s Director Ivan Zhdanov says that all three Alfa Group partners “deserve” their place on the blacklist, which the foundation positions as a catalog of nominations for international sanctions.
Earlier this month, the prominent Russian journalist Alexey Venediktov made public two letters appealing to the EU authorities to remove the sanctions from the same three Alfa Group shareholders, as well as the oligarch Petr Aven. Both letters had been signed by ACF’s Chairman Leonid Volkov. What scandalized Russia’s liberal opposition is that Volkov had signed them surreptitiously, without making his position public.
Commenting on the decision to add Alfa Group partners to the ACF list of Putin’s enablers, Zhdanov explained the foundation’s inconsistent position:
At some point, we got the mistaken impression that this decision could wait, and that Fridman & Co. might take the side of the good at any moment, becoming a vivid example of people who take the side of the good, condemn the war, and state their position.
“Regrettably,” Zhanov said, “in the second year of the war, they still haven’t found the words.”
Speculating about Fridman’s and Khan’s likely connections to Putin, Zhdanov said: “I hope that our decision will be yet another signal to those who don’t condemn the war and remain bystanders.”