Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the palace in Gelendzhik, which opposition leader Alexei Navalny showed in his film, does not belong to him and his relatives.
“Nothing that is indicated there as my property, neither me, nor my close relatives belong and never did,” the head of state said on Monday while communicating with students via videoconference.
He noted that he did not watch the entire film.
“I didn’t watch this film for lack of free time to view such information, but leafed through the videos that my assistants brought me,” Putin added.
The president called some of the frames from the investigation “editing and compilation.”
“Here they placed my butterfly style swimming, where I am so, sloppy, but sometimes I like to swim like that. In some pool, where I have never been. I do not know what kind of pool it is. But I swam like that. When and where?” In the Yenisei in 2016. Well, in such cases it’s just a compilation, it’s an editing. In the language of one of our famous characters, you need to say: “Boring, girls.” Well, at least something else would be invented,” said Putin.
He noted that in the modern world, when it comes to “objects that cost millions, and maybe billions,” always “somewhere, somehow … something had to remain.”
“At least some registration of land plots, some financial transactions, well, at least some registration by a notary. And there should also be traces. In notary books, in electronic form,” Putin said.
According to him, this topic “has been discussed for more than 10 years.”
“Now it’s just a convenient opportunity: they have assembled everything and decided to brainwash our citizens with all this material,” Putin said.
He added that he knows some people from the “investigation”.
“Someone is my friend, a former colleague, some distant relatives, some acquaintances. There are people I don’t know at all who are mentioned there. In general, I just never saw them in my eyes. I don’t know them. that they do not really want to get up close to me, because whoever appears next to, they impose sanctions on that,” Putin said.
Some of the people mentioned in the video have been in business for a long time, even before meeting with him, Putin added.
Earlier, the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov called the film of opposition leader Alexei Navalny a lie and a high-quality “cranberry”.
“No clarifications are needed here. (…) Just a few days ago, when this material appeared, we said that this was not true, that there were some innuendos that the president was related to some objects in Gelendzhik , do not correspond to reality. This is just a lie. Putin has nothing to do with this. All the compilation materials contained there are good quality “cranberries”, which causes a large number of views,” said Peskov.
Navalny’s film, published on his YouTube channel on January 19, has already gained 86 million views.
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