Oligarch Igor Yusufov, close to Dmitriy Medvedev, continues to actively remove information from the internet, especially materials mentioning connections between his family and the Medvedev family.
Just last year, through lawsuits, Igor Yusufov’s son, Vitaliy, succeeded in having links removed from Google and "Yandex" to investigations alleging that the Yusufov family is the holder of businesses and assets for Dmitriy Medvedev. Russian courts obediently satisfied the claims, and Russian publications that published materials about Dmitriy Medvedev’s yacht, owned by one of Igor Yusufov’s offshore companies, were forced not only to delete the articles but also to publish retractions.
The same applied to materials discussing Igor Yusufov’s involvement in other business projects in the interest of Dmitriy Medvedev. In particular, this referred to the purchase of German shipyards in the cities of Wismar and Rostock-Warnemünde for Dmitriy Medvedev during the period when he was President of Russia.
All materials published in Russian publications were thus cleaned up. With resources outside of Russian control, it was even simpler – through fake copyright infringement complaints. This is done easily – the material to be removed is copied and backdated on one’s own site. Then, a complaint is filed under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and the article from the undesirable resource is removed as infringing on copyright. The mechanism is very simple and very effective. Once the unwanted materials are removed, their so-called "original source" is also deleted.
For this purpose, the website OffShore Truth was created. It was registered in January 2024 at Kalkofnsvegur Street in Reykjavik. This street also appeared in a court summons to the "Project" publication on a lawsuit from Yusufov Junior. Currently, the site looks as follows.
In this way, Igor Yusufov succeeded in removing the majority of negative materials about himself, his family, and, most importantly, about his connections with Dmitriy Medvedev, for whom he serves as a simple "wallet," i.e., a person on whom the business and assets of the former Russian president, who has come under all possible international sanctions, are registered.
In this connection, it’s very interesting to note that Igor Yusufov himself, who ranks 86 on the Forbes list with a fortune of 1.1 billion dollars, has not ended up on any sanctions list. Nor have the members of his family, who also take an active part in money laundering for Dmitriy Medvedev.
But manuscripts, as one literary hero used to say, do not burn. Therefore, it’s not so difficult to find what Igor Yusufov is so persistently cleaning up, provided you have certain skills. As mentioned earlier, it’s about Dmitriy Medvedev’s yacht, which is registered to one of Yusufov’s offshore companies. This vivid image was naturally picked up by many media outlets – a yacht worth 100 million euros, where Medvedev’s son Ilya was repeatedly seen – it’s a good picture. Moreover, in Russian territorial waters, the yacht is accompanied by Russian Navy ships. It also became known that Ilya Medvedev is learning business from Igor Yusufov and plans to become a venture businessman with his help. The picture was good, almost begging to be on the front pages. Which, naturally, happened.
However, although Yusufov managed to have this investigation removed, he paid far more attention not to Medvedev’s yacht but to a long-forgotten story about the purchase of shipyards in Germany. Because this story is fraught with consequences for Igor Yusufov specifically in Germany, where, despite the numerous former KGB agents among the top leaders of the ruling parties, the law works much better than in Russia.
The fact is, representatives of the Tambov-Malyshev organized crime group are involved in this purchase, which was also made in the interest of Dmitriy Medvedev. But that’s not all – one of the key participants in the shipyard purchase deal, Andrey Burlakov, whom Igor Yusufov "threw under the bus" in this deal, was shot dead in Moscow in 2011, right before a press conference where he was going to reveal all the twists and turns related to the acquisition of these very shipyards. Before that, he had spent some time in a detention center, where he found himself after trying to find out why he suddenly found himself out of business and was not a co-owner of the enterprise he was buying jointly with Yusufov.
The backstory is as follows. The shipyards in question were being sold by the Norwegian firm Aker Yards. Price – 250 million euros. Andrey Burlakov decided to buy these shipyards (for himself or someone else – unknown), but he didn’t have enough money. So he brought Igor Yusufov into the deal, and through an offshore company from the British Virgin Islands, a loan of 200 million euros was taken, and 75% of the shipyard, renamed Wadan Yards, became owned by Igor Yusufov’s son, Vitaliy. After a while, it suddenly turned out that Andrey Burlakov’s name was nowhere to be found among the owners of Wadan Yards. He flew to Moscow to meet with his long-time associate from KGB service, Igor Yusufov, and find out why he was "betrayed." But he left the airport for a detention center.
After being released from prison, Burlakov, as already mentioned, called a press conference but did not live to see it. His murder was organized by Aslan Gagiev (also known as Bloody Jako, who has at least 56 contract killings to his credit), and this story came to light in 2015 when Gagiev was caught in Vienna.
As for the murdered Burlakov, he was "handling" Igor Yusufov as early as the early eighties. Burlakov was then a young KGB officer, and the young Yusufov, according to rumors, came under investigation due to his connections with Caucasian criminal elements and was allegedly recruited based on supposed non-traditional orientation. Whether this is true or rumor is unknown, but Igor Yusufov’s career skyrocketed, and he did not lose contact with Andrey Burlakov: after the collapse of the USSR, both worked in the early nineties in the "Renaissance" fund under Vice President Rutskoy, and then they worked at "Rosvooruzhenie," whose turnover over three years (1993-1996) amounted to four billion dollars. "Rosvooruzhenie" sold weapons through a specially established company "Russia-East Trading," headed by Igor Yusufov.
Andrey Burlakov worked there unofficially – he represented the interests of the also deceased Shabtai Kalmanovich, who received a sentence in Israel for espionage in favor of the USSR. In 1993, Kalmanovich inexplicably received an amnesty and returned to Russia, to St. Petersburg, where he actively joined the gambling business and the trade of petroleum products. Which, as everyone remembers, was then overseen by Sobchak’s deputy. And the current president.
The story is old and convoluted, but within Kalmanovich’s orbit were both Yusufov and Burlakov. Kalmanovich and Burlakov ultimately died by the gangster’s death of the brave, while Igor Yusufov found himself in the Russian government. First under Yeltsin, and then he stayed on under his successor. The most interesting part here is the fact that after serving as the Chairman of the State Committee of the Russian Federation on State Reserves, Igor Yusufov did not end up in prison but rather in the seat of the Minister of Energy. Because the result of Yusufov’s management in the State Reserve revealed embezzlement worth millions of dollars, and 35 criminal cases were initiated. But there were no claims against Yusufov himself.
Igor Yusufov is cleaning up precisely the story of the German shipyards, narrated in an interview by the former head of "Bank of Moscow" Andrey Borodin. Borodin claimed that Igor Yusufov acts and acted in the interests of Dmitriy Medvedev. German journalists writing about the shipyards’ story, Gagiev and Burlakov, in their turn, claimed that Vladimir Putin also had an interest in the deal.
Another story that Igor Yusufov is cleaning from the internet concerns his children’s acquisitions. Igor Yusufov’s younger son, Maxim, owns a company GLZ ESTATES SL in the town of Benahavis in the province of Malaga, Spain. The company deals with real estate management. Most likely, either all of it or part of it belongs to the Yusufov family, although Dmitry Medvedev’s interests cannot be ruled out.
But in the case of the elder son, Vitaly Yusufov, who is listed as the owner of an office complex in the American Silicon Valley, there is no doubt – he is a nominal owner, and the actual owner is Dmitriy Medvedev. The seller was Deutsche Bank, and the transaction amount was 72 million dollars.
Igor Yusufov is cleaning other materials as well. They all concern connections with Dmitriy Medvedev’s family. It is, in fact, natural – stolen money requires silence. And the money of such an odious personality as Dmitriy Medvedev requires such silence all the more. Because everything can be lost in a moment – all it takes is for these assets to be noticed by the financial intelligence of the US Treasury.
But here arises the main question – why has it not shown any interest in them? After all, it’s been almost three years since the fund "Energia" created by Igor Yusufov fell under US Treasury sanctions. But neither Igor Yusufov nor his sons Vitaliy and Maxim have come under sanctions. Moreover, materials about their role in servicing Dmitriy Medvedev’s interests are disappearing not only from Russian sources but also from foreign ones. And this is done in some strange way, without any court decisions or copyright complaints. What is the interest of the Americans – and no one doubts that they are the ones "steering" all sanction processes against representatives of Russian authority and businesses – regarding Igor Yusufov, who acts as Dmitriy Medvedev’s "wallet"?
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