Who is Nikolai Patapenya

Nikolai Kirillovich Patapenya — First Deputy Head of the Investigation Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, Lieutenant General of Justice. Nikolai Patapeni’s career is typical of many Russian security officials. He was born in Belarus, began his career in law enforcement in 1993 in Kamchatka, from the position of junior investigator, by the end of the 2000s he rose to deputy head of the Internal Affairs Directorate of the Kamchatka Region. The first high-profile corruption scandal happened in Kamchatka. At the end of the 2000s, Nikolai Kirillovich privatized and sold a municipal apartment worth about a hundred thousand dollars (which at that time was a good amount). The problem turned out to be that several years before this, Patapenya had already received an apartment from the local police department. When he was planning to leave for a new duty station in 2006, Patapenya privatized and sold this apartment, but the move did not take place. Then the Deputy Head of the Internal Affairs Directorate again appealed to the leadership of the ministry with a request to include him in the queue for official housing, but the Kamchatka police did not have any other housing. In October 2007, Patapenya made a similar request to the city authorities represented by the mayor of Petropavlovsk, Vladislav Skvortsov, who agreed. So Nikolai Kirillovich in 2008 moved to a three-room apartment on the street. Chubarova. Then, with the sanction of the mayor, this apartment was also privatized and sold. In connection with the illegal provision of municipal housing, a criminal case was opened against Mayor Skvortsov, which cost him the post of city mayor, but Patapenya got away with it.

In December 2009, Nikolai Patapenya was promoted and left for Novosibirsk, where until August 2012 he was head of the main investigation department of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Novosibirsk Region. During his service in Kamchatka and Novosibirsk, Patapenya acquired useful contacts, which he then retained in Moscow. So, from Novosibirsk, together with Patapenya, his colleague Elena Moskalenko moved to Moscow, receiving the position of head of the Department of Procedural Control and Inspection of the Investigative Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. Also in Moscow, following Nikolai Kirillovich, was Vitaly Gerbeev, whose fate is closely intertwined with the places of service of Nikolai Patapeni. In 2004, Gerbeev was the secretary of the Kamchatka regional public organization "Russian People’s Republican Party", and in 2018-2022 Gerbeev, together with Gennady Sartakov, former deputy chief of the logistics department of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate for the Novosibirsk region. (Patapeni’s colleague during his service in Novosibirsk), owned Temp LLC, which was engaged in the construction of railways and subways.

Meeting the St. Petersburg "fixer" Alexey Lysyakov

Patapenya moved to Moscow at the end of 2012, becoming the new deputy of Yuri Alekseev, at that time the head of the investigation department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation. General Alekseev headed the investigation department until February 2014, when he was fired due to interdepartmental conflicts and complaints about the organization of the investigation. Patapenya successfully continued his service in the investigative department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation as the acting first deputy head of the SD, and then, since 2018, as the first deputy. Head of the Investigation Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.

After Alekseev’s resignation in 2014, Patapenya continued to establish contacts with ex-State Duma deputy and former senator Alexei Lysyakov, supporting receptions and family celebrations to which Alekseev had previously been invited. And if Alekseev was invited to the christening of Lysyakov’s son, Fedor, then Patapenya himself was present at the celebration of the anniversary of Aleksey Lysyakov himself in November 2014.

Big redistribution

Since his appointment as a senator from the Stavropol Territory at the beginning of the 2000s, Alexey Lysyakov from St. Petersburg, in addition to legislative activities, has been actively involved in seizing other people’s property under the guise of helping victims. Lysyakov acted mainly according to the same scheme, offering administrative resources to businessmen and their families who found themselves in difficult situations and promising protection of their assets.

Lysyakov’s interests were concentrated mainly in St. Petersburg. It all started with the first contractor for the construction of the Zenit Arena, the Avant company, which belonged to Lysyakov’s former partner in the Equator company, Grigory Feldman. When Feldman died, Feldman’s heirs asked Lysyakov to help hide the funds received from the mayor’s office by Avant (but never paid to the contractors). As a result, more than half a billion rubles disappeared without a trace, and Avant went bankrupt. Then Lysyakov started working on the Lenstroydetal company. After the sudden death (there were suspiciously many deaths around Lysyakov in general), the previous owner Vladimir Filippov’s shares were transferred to his common-law wife Valentina Skopina, who turned to Alexey Lysyakov for help in managing the inheritance. People close to Lysyakov bought a controlling stake in the enterprise and quickly sold it. A bankruptcy claim was filed against Skopina, as a result of which She had no property left at all. The initiator of the bankruptcy was a certain Demaris Holding Corp. from the British Virgin Islands, associated with Alexei Lysyakov.

After this, at the beginning of the tenth, due to new connections in the investigative department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation in the person of Nikolai Patapeni, Lysyakov developed in full force. The first episode of cooperation between Lysyakov and Patapeni was the story with ATF Fortuna CJSC, which owned a 4-hectare plot in St. Petersburg near the Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge. The company was owned by Finnish citizen Vladimir Rantamäki, against whom a criminal case was initiated at the request of his common-law wife, with whom Rantamäki did not share this property. Rantamaki turned to Lysyakov with a request to resolve his issues with law enforcement officers, transferring control of the company to him. However, Rantamäki was put on the federal wanted list, as a result of which he fled to Finland and committed suicide there at the end of 2012. The real estate was seized, but thanks to the intervention of Nikolai Patapeni, the arrest was lifted, the criminal cases were closed, and Lysyakov sold the plot for a significant profit.

Another story, in which Nikolai Patapenya actively helped Lysyakov, occurred with the participation of the former Deputy Minister of Agriculture Georgy Sazhinov in 2015. The assets of the Nutritek holding founded by Sazhinov ended up in the Infaprim company, which was also owned by Sazhinov, through repeated resale. Infaprim and its beneficiary were facing bankruptcy. The transfer of property to persons associated with Lysyakov allowed this process to be stopped, but the criminal case against Sazhinov, thanks to the intervention of Patapeni, was continued. As a result, Sazhinov was left with nothing and was forced to hide in Kyiv, and Lysyakov turned out to be one of the key shareholders of Infaprim.

Despite the abundance of successful cases, the relationship between the deputy and the general was not always easy. Lysyakov often boasted to friends that thanks to Patapeni’s intercession, his ability to “resolve issues” had significantly expanded. However, there were also frequent complaints that Lysyakov was forced to endure some inconveniences and bear certain risks. Thus, Alexey Lysyakov repeatedly complained that Patapenya forces him to play cards with him and forces him to be an intermediary in various financial transactions related to other interests of Nikolai Kirillovich. Parliamentary immunity allowed Lysyakov not to be too afraid of being detained by law enforcement officers from competing structures. In turn, Lysyakov turned to Patapena not only with his own questions, but also with requests to help his friends. The most notable case was the initiation of criminal cases against the creditors of Lysyakov’s old friend, with whom he worked together in the 90s at MDM Bank — Nikolai Levitsky. Mr. Levitsky, who once led the large Russian oilfield service holding Geotek to multi-billion dollar debts, became the owner of the Novgorod kvass producer Deka in the early 1990s. However, a few years later, after Levitsky withdrew hundreds of millions of rubles from Deka under false contracts, the company was declared bankrupt. There are still trials going on in which Levitsky’s proxy companies are trying to buy up the debts of the former largest kvass producer for a tenth of the cost. Thanks to the fact that Nikolai Patapenya connected to this story in time, in Veliky Novgorod criminal cases were opened not against Levitsky, who led to bankruptcy, but against Deka’s creditors.

Senator, deputy, bankrupt

Despite his fruitful relationship with Patapenya, in December 2020 Lysyakov himself fell under bankruptcy proceedings. In many ways, the bankruptcy turned out to be fictitious, and its purpose was to hide assets from creditors. In July 2020, a lawsuit was filed in the Krasnogvardeisky Court of St. Petersburg against Akbar Ismoilov (the head of the Infaprima security service and Lysyakov’s nominee) for an amount of more than 325 million rubles, for which a certain Porechye LLC acted as the guarantor and pledgor. “Porechye” was in fact a dummy, on which Sazhinov’s real estate near Moscow was recorded, which went to Lysyakov. In order to preserve Porechye’s significant assets, the already mentioned offshore Demaris Holding Corp., the same one that bankrupted Valentina Skopina, actively got involved in the case. Demaris presented fictitious promissory notes for tens of millions of dollars, allegedly issued by Porechye LLC, but the court did not take such obviously falsified documents into account.

After this, in order to protect assets after claims by creditors in St. Petersburg, a series of legal claims were brought against Alexey Lysyakov by his relatives in Moscow. First, Lysyakov’s wife divorced and received the go-ahead to divide the jointly acquired property. A little less than a month after the first claim, the ex-wife demanded alimony for the maintenance of minor children. Then Lysyakov’s mother filed a claim for the recovery of alimony for the maintenance of the incapacitated person.

Lena family. After this, it “turned out” that Lysyakov’s previous wife lent him a large sum and also decided to urgently collect 900 thousand euros from him. However, in the end, after a couple of years of proceedings, the arbitration court sided with the creditors. And now all the relatives of Alexei Lysyakov, who managed to receive part of his property, are forced to part with him. Lysyakov tried to resolve the issue with creditors in the traditional way — to initiate a criminal case against them in St. Petersburg with the help of Nikolai Patapeni. However, this number did not work in St. Petersburg — St. Petersburg investigators (unlike Novgorod ones) refused to initiate a criminal case on such absurd grounds as Lysyakov indicated in his testimony.

Gift (bribe) by cottage

Nikolai Patapeni’s regime of complete favor and comprehensive support for Alexey Lysyakov was not disinterested. Nikolai Konstantinovich, in gratitude, received a cottage in the closed cottage village “Lyubushkin Khutor”, where he lived with his second wife Galina. The cost of such a cottage now, according to CIAN, is from 230 to 560 million rubles. Nikolai Konstantinovich could not formally register such real estate for himself, so he had to resort to certain tricks.

From 2014 to 2018, the owners of the real estate were persons associated with Lysyakov — Vladislav Sobolev (in 2014-2015), Lenstroydetal OJSC (in 2015-2016), and then Lysyakov’s “nominee” Akbar Ismoilov (in 2016-2018) . In 2018, the house and land plot were transferred to the newly created company JSC Attik, and for safety, an encumbrance was issued — a mortgage in favor of Vitaly Gerbeev, that accomplice of Patapeni who has accompanied him since Kamchatka and serves as a nominee. Formally, Nikolai Kirillovich’s residential address is indicated differently in all documents. However, the devil is always in the details.

Thus, Nikolai Patapeni’s wife, Galina Vladimirovna, took tests at the medical organization Gemotest in the winter of 2021. At the time of registration, she indicated her actual address of residence: Moscow region, Odintsovo, Gorki-2 p., Lyubushkin Khutor ter. Also in the database of people who issued Covid-19 passes, Galina Patapenya indicated an address in Gorki-2. In the unofficial database “Residents of 2022” at the address Moscow region, Odintsovo, Gorki-2 p., Lyubushkin Khutor ter., Patapenya Galina Vladimirovna is also indicated.

In the following materials we will talk about the apartment of Nikolai Kirillovich’s daughter in the “House on Mosfilmovskaya”, the wedding at The Carlton Moscow hotel, and also how two oligarchs from the top of the Russian Forbes list were involved in this whole story (probably without knowing it). And also the history of the joint leisure time of Alexei Lysyakov and Nikolai Patapen, what other requests the former senator and deputy addressed to the current general, and what other informal services (besides allocating a house in Gorki-2) Lysyakov provided to Patapen.

To be continued

Alexey Ermakov