Cash-for-residency ring busted

TALLINN - Estonian Prime Minister and Reform Party chairman Andrus Ansip says he does not wish to comment upon the activities of several junior coalition member Pro Patria and Res Publica Union (PRU) top politicians in mediating residence permits to Russian businessmen, referring to inadequate information, but said that he does not consider such business ethical, reports National Broadcasting.

Last Wednesday’s show of the weekly ETV’s investigative journalism program ‘Pealtnagija’ (‘Eyewitness’) revealed, and Eesti Ekspress wrote the next day of a wide-scale business of mediating residence permits for Russian businessmen carried out by PRU politicians MP Siim Kabrits, MP Indrek Raudne and Tallinn City Council member Nikolay Stelmach. Namely, over a hundred wealthy Russian and Belarusian citizens were ascertained registering their companies at the address of an apartment in Tallinn that belongs to the PRU members.

While the men claim that their work was quite legal and involved attracting investment to Estonia and managing assets of wealthy foreigners, some sources claimed that the real aim of the business was to get the businessmen, as board members of a company, an Estonian residence permit and thus freedom to travel freely in Europe.

MP Raudne, who is one of the most powerful members of IRL, Tallinn City councillor Stelmach and another IRL MP, Kabrits, jointly own an apartment at Kooli 1/3 in Tallinn Old Town, in which  Russian millionaires have registered about a hundred companies, writes Estonian news service BBN referring to the investigation carried out by Eyewitness.
Ansip said that Interior Minister Ken-Marti Vaher has to find out how these residence permits were issued and whether the investments that were allegedly made were fictitious or not.

As BBN reports, at least in one case, the person who received an Estonian residence permit was notorious Russian business person Sergey Lalakin.
According to Vladimir Jushkin, the head of the Baltic Center of Russian Studies, Lalakin is a billionaire and former head of the Podolski mafia that in the middle of the 1990s was the most powerful criminal gang in the Moscow region with 2,500 firearms. His right-hand man, Boriss Unichenkovo, served as Sports and Tourism minister in the first government of Vladimir Putin, BBN writes.

“Trading with residence permits doesn’t speak about highly developed ethics. It is [too] early for me to give evaluations as to whether it was a crime or not. I hope that an analysis compiled by the Interior Ministry will give an answer to that,” said Ansip at a government press conference.

According to Ansip, the state cannot allow someone to “laugh at it.”
“If a permit was issued without cause, it has to be withdrawn,” he said, adding that PRU chairman Mart Laar holds the same opinion.