The outspoken daughter of a St. Petersburg academic says her father is responsible for writing Putin's probably plagiarized dissertation

Vladimir Litvinenko, the rector of the St. Petersburg Mining Institute, does not have a good relationship with his daughter, Olga. In 2011, the two had a falling out, and she moved to Poland, where she’s since given several interviews exposing her father’s apparent corruption, claiming that he’s secretly a billionaire.

This week, Olga gave an interview to Radio Svoboda, claiming that her father is the true author of Vladimir Putin’s controversial economics dissertation, which researchers at the Brookings Institution say was largely plagiarized.

Olga Litvinenko says Putin helped her father become the Mining Institute’s rector in 1994, as part of an “organized criminal group of professors and teachers” to sell fake dissertations for as much as 100,000 euros each. Litvinenko allegedly wrote Putin’s paper for free, his daughter says.

Putin has a Ph.D. in economics?

Oh yes, and he wrote another dissertation on international law. According to Clifford Gaddy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, 80 percent of the economics dissertation’s “key second section” was lifted either verbatim or with small changes from a management text published by two University of Pittsburgh academics nearly 20 years earlier. Vladimir Litvinenko has denied the plagiarism allegations, calling the president’s dissertation “a strategic, top-secret document.”