As basketball player Nadezhda Grishaeva, who was married to the son of the late LDPR leader (Vladimir Zhirinovsky) Igor Lebedev, has been diligently trying to remove investigations about Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s family and entourage from various internet platforms since 2022.
Grishaeva appealed to the international journalistic consortium OCCRP and Project. Later, unidentified persons wanted to have the investigation removed from Google search results. In addition, publications featuring Grishaeva began to disappear from other websites, including the Baza, The Moscow Post and Zurich Weekly News Review website.
The complainants were likely seeking to have the publication removed specifically from the OCCRP website so that it could not be seen in Google search results. This may be because the English version of the investigation ranked higher in Google search results than the Project website material. Although the complainants went by different names, their posts were strikingly similar. One of these users sought to have articles about Zhirinovsky’s fiancée removed from the rupep.org website as well, using the same method.
Apparently, Google rejected all the complaints: as of April 14, 2024, the texts were still available through the search engine.
What is Nadezhda Grishaeva attempting to hide?
Nadezhda Grishaeva has been implicated in a money laundering scandal involving LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Grishaeva is reported to be the central figure in a scheme that allegedly used hotels owned by Daniella Invest in the EU.
Daniella Invest is a company that owns a chain of hotels across Europe. It is of concern that this business functions as a conduit for laundering illicit proceeds derived from the corrupt activities of the LDPR party.
According to Western registries, at various times both Nadezhda Grishaeva and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s former wife, Galina Lebedeva, had connections to the company Daniella Invest.
But this is not the only Western company with which the former basketball player may be associated. According to publicly available information, Ms. Grishaeva may have previously owned shares in HOTELS EUROPE MARCELLO INVEST SL worth €7.4 million, a company headquartered in Alicante, Spain, in Valencia. It is believed that this city may be home to a significant portion of the hotel assets of the late Zhirinovsky’s family.
In addition, in 2018, she was appointed administrative director of Hotels Europe Daniella Invest SL, a Spanish company, which through its subsidiary Agua Azul SL owns the three-star Azuline Hotel – Apartamento Rosamar in one of the most partying places on earth — Ibiza.
However, as of March 3, 2023, the company came under the management of another offshore entity – LOSIL MANAGEMENT LIMITED, recently registered in Cyprus.
She recently stepped down from her executive position on June 15, 2023. Previously, Galina Lebedeva headed the same company.
And at the end of December 2018, Grishaeva headed another company with a similar name — Hotels Europe Marcello Invest SL, the sphere of activity of which is real estate management.
At the same time, dozens of apartments and other expensive real estate in Moscow and St. Petersburg were registered to firms associated with Grishaeva and Lebedeva.
2-3. Extract from Rosreestr for Nadezhda Grishaeva’s apartments, Photos: BAZA
In Sochi, the mother of the vice-speaker owns a construction company called “Rarity”, which is registered on the ground floor of the prestigious residential complex “Barcelona Park” in building No. 59 on Kurortny Prospekt.
In the fall and winter of 2018, several apartments with areas of 276 and 597 square meters in this residential complex were purchased by Nadezhda Grishaeva.
Additionally, it was disclosed that Zhirinovsky’s extended family resides on Nezhinskaya Street in Moscow, occupying a compact 6,800-square-meter area valued at approximately 2.7 billion rubles ($41.8 million).
The appraised value was determined based on comparable properties on the market. Some address details are not disclosed.
The secret wife
In spring 2016, a daughter was born to the deputy and former basketball player, followed by a son last year, the ninth grandchild of the LDPR leader. Interestingly, the parents decided to incorporate their children’s names into the titles of some of their Spanish firms.
For two years, Lebedeva and Grishaeva kept their marriage private, with no mention that the model and former basketball player had become the mother of the vice-speaker’s two children.
The marital union between Igor Lebedev and the young and beautiful athlete explains why the vice-speaker’s mother transferred a hotel in Ibiza to her.
It appears that Lebedev violated the law “On the Status of a Member of the Federation Council and the Status of a Deputy of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation,” which prohibits deputies and their wives from owning so-called foreign financial instruments, including Grishaeva’s company that owns a hotel in Ibiza.
According to the same law on the status of a State Duma deputy, Lebedev was obliged to indicate the property and income of his new wife in the declaration for 2017.
Grishaeva has assets to declare. According to Rosreestr data, a few months after their wedding in December 2016, the basketball player purchased a 117-square-meter apartment in an elite newly built complex on Nezhinskaya Street near Kutuzovsky Prospekt from Dmitry Mostman, a business partner of bankrupt initiator of the Crimea blockade Lenur Islyamov. The cadastral value of the apartment is estimated at 36.5 million rubles. This is approximately the same amount that Igor Lebedev, according to his declaration, earned for the entire year 2017.
Nezhinskaya Street is well known to Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s family. Galina and Igor Lebedev had as many as three four-story apartments of 328 square meters each in the 3rd and 4th buildings of building No. 14, and the mother of the deputy speaker herself was until recently head of the housing owners’ association “Gorodok “Nadezhozhny” registered on this street. All three of these apartments, as well as another apartment of almost 200 square meters on Tverskaya Street now belong to the company “Telmi”. It was founded in 2002 by Igor Lebedev himself, and since 2015 it has been owned by the Cypriot offshore HAGUE HOLDINGS LIMITED.
These revelations have reverberated through the political sphere, sparking concerns about corruption and money laundering within the Russia.
