The strange case of a defrocked Russian Monk who is the son-in-law of Russian-Jewish oligarch Timchenko
Defrosting on state orders. Secret son-in-law of Gennady Timchenko
Gennady TimchenkoAmong the projects of the Gorka Group are the construction of new roads and interchanges in Moscow, the design of the Moscow-Kazan high-speed highway, the reconstruction of several pavilions of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements, the Pirogovskaya Hospital, as well as the design and adaptation of the concepts of leading international architectural bureaus for cultural clusters in four regions of the country - branches The Bolshoi and Mariinsky Theaters, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery, "says the website of the group of companies and the website of the 2022 Eastern Economic Forum , of which Gorka is a partner. this is the new name of the company "GorKapStroy", created in 2006 by businessman Alexander Lavlentsev ... Lavlentsev, along with Timchenko, was a co-owner of another large developer company, ARKS, which also received billions of government orders. Largely thanks to this asset, Gennady Timchenko from year to year got into the rating of "kings of state order" by Forbes magazine. Until recently, the owner of Gorki was the son of Alexander Lavlentsev Vladimir, who in 2013–2014 was the vice-governor of St. Petersburg for housing and communal services and a participant in the 2019 scandal with the disruption of the construction of substations for Lenenergo .
Vladimir LavlentsevThe loudest and already scandalous project of Gorki is the reconstruction of the Peterburgsky sports complex, or rather, the construction of a new SKA-Arena ice stadium in its place for the 2023 World Ice Hockey Championship. The fact that the administration of St. Petersburg had given the contract for this construction to Gorka became known in December 2020. Shortly before that, Vladimir Lavlentsev went to work at Stroytransgaz Timchenko, and in August 2020, a man named Gavriil Frolov became the sole owner (90% share) of Gorka. construction of the stadium: during the demolition of the Peterburgsky sports complex , a collapse occurred , which resulted in the death of 29-year-old worker Matvey Kucherov ... In addition, the total cost of the reconstruction of the stadium and the construction of SKA-Arena in its place has grown from 25 billion rubles to almost 40 billion . It is unlikely that this will interfere with the implementation of the project: Gennady Timchenko not only heads the board of directors of the KHL, but also plays hockey with Vladimir Putin .
Gennady Timchenko (left) and Vladimir PutinWhen Frolov became the head of Gorka, the editors of the business media had nothing to write about him: until that moment, almost nothing was known about a businessman with such a surname. I had to be content with the dry language of extracts from the register of legal entities. There Frolov has been listed as a co-founder of Akantus Atelier LLC since 2014 , and since 2016 - as the owner of a 50% stake in a company with a similar name A-Atelier . "Akantus" specializes in the manufacture of iconostases and temple furniture. In the first place in the company's portfolio - the interior decoration of the chapel of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in the courtyard of the Valaam Monastery in St. Petersburg. A-Atelier, as follows from the copyright on the Acantus website, is a company affiliated with it. The co-founder of Akantus and A-Atelier, according to the Kontur.Fokus database of legal entities, is the same former vice-governor Vladimir Lavlentsev. Another work that Acantus is proud of also leads to Valaam - this is the chapel of St. Sergius of Radonezh, already on the island itself: Acantus Atelier, however, makes money not only by decorating churches: the company makes custom-made furniture for the home, but vacancies (already closed) written about " the possibility of working in a new developing direction of the company for the exclusive decoration of VIP-zones of large city-wide and federal facilities. "
Thus, the search for the mysterious Gabriel Frolov forced Radio Liberty to pay special attention to both the Valaam Monastery and its St. Petersburg office.
This is one of three mentions of Frolov the monk on the Internet. The second is a line in the list of those enrolled in 2010 for 1 course of the correspondence department of the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary. Among them - " Gabriel (Frolov) Victor Borisovich , monk", that is, the future hierodeacon had already accepted the monastic tonsure at that time.
We managed to find the only photo of the face of Frolov the hierodeacon in the community of the St. Petersburg courtyard of the Valaam Monastery on the VKontakte social network. It was taken in 2011 shortly after Easter.
Although the real name of the monk Gabriel is Victor, we assumed that he could change him and turn out to be that mysterious businessman Gabriel Frolov, about whose biography nothing is known.
Finding photographs of Gavriil Frolov, who became the owner of Gorka Group in 2020, also proved to be a difficult task. His only mention on the website of Gorka itself and in its social networks is the "working meeting on the object of the cultural and educational complex in Kemerovo" held at the end of January 2021 at the Mariinsky Theater, for which Gorka prepared the project documentation . Gabriel Frolov in the photo, as follows from the plate on the table, is the second from the left, wearing a mask.
Radio Liberty contacted the press service of the Mariinsky Theater with a request to provide other photographs of this meeting. This is how we received photographs from which it follows that Hierodeacon Gabriel Frolov from the St. Petersburg courtyard of the Valaam Monastery and the owner of Gorka are one and the same person. The similarity is noticeable with the naked eye, but it is also confirmed when analyzing photos by Microsoft's Azure Cognitive Services. Despite the almost 10-year difference between the pictures, it is an impressive 0.88 of the maximum unit (0.7 is enough for the statement that the two photographs contain the same person).
Meeting on the object of the cultural and educational complex in Kemerovo, Mariinsky Theater (2020)
After receiving photographs of the meeting at the Mariinsky Theater, we uploaded a fragment with the face of Gabriel Frolov to the paid face recognition service PimEyes. So we managed to find another photo of him that accidentally got into the public domain: it was taken in September 2020 in Sochi at the international forum "Innovative technologies and intelligent transport systems in road construction".
Gabriel Frolov (left)The name and surname are written on the badge - Gavriil Frolov. His name is never mentioned on the forum website. Comparison of this photograph with that of Hierodeacon Gabriel also shows a complete resemblance.
Gennady Timchenko and his wife Elena are actively involved in the restoration of the Valaam Monastery through a special charitable foundation. The goal of this foundation is "to preserve the unique architectural complex and the beauty of Valaam's nature for future generations." True, the current generation, if we are not talking about the novices of the monastery, has to leave their favorite places: people are deprived of work and housing, being resettled against their will to the city of Sortavala located on the mainland. At the same time, on Valaam, as shown by the investigation of the 7X7 edition in 2017, state-owned companies are building pompous church and secular structures, on which the state spends tens of billions of rubles. ... Vladimir Putin also traveled to Valaam more than once, including accompanied by a mysterious companion, whose unsolved identity excited social media users in the summer of 2017 .
Vladimir Putin, Valaam (2017)At what point Hierodeacon Gabriel Frolov left monasticism for business, it is impossible to say for sure - we can only assume that this happened not earlier than 2014. From the first day, the CEO of Akantus Atelier LLC founded this year was Gavriil Borisovich Frolov with the TIN number 471909648660, in 2016 he also became the sole founder of the company, and in 2019 a person with the same name and surname became the owner of Akantus and patronymic, but with a different taxpayer number - 780450871520. The same TIN is indicated in the databases of legal entities by Gabriel Frolov, who owns Gorka. TIN in Russia is assigned once for life and does not change either when the name is changed or when the surname is changed. Frolov could, after leaving the monastery, change his passport name from Victor to the one he received during the tonsure and was already familiar to him, "Gabriel",but if at the same time he received a new INN, this is a violation of the law. The fact that Gavriil Frolov from Acantus Atelier and from Gorka Group of Companies is indeed a former hierodeacon is confirmed by the data of the GetContact service, which shows how subscribers are registered in other people's phone books. The mobile phone numberindicated in the databases of legal entities as the number of Acantus Atelier LLC is recorded as "Victor-Gabriel Economy", "Gabriel Monk" and "Father Gabriel".
"A hierodeacon is a monk who has been ordained a deacon. He takes vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience. A hierodeacon always has the prospect of becoming a priest, and a bishop, and a patriarch - any patriarch or bishop was once obliged to be a hierodeacon. Valaam Monastery - this is a huge amount of work and money passing through it, given that everything on Valaam was rebuilt practically from scratch, - says the priest and church historian Yakov Krotov... - How often do people leave monasticism? In principle, this is a scandal, since the vows are given for life. This is a medieval outlook on life: the enemy is forever, the monk is forever, the king is forever, and you cannot go anywhere. But in the modern world, of course, everything is different: there were cases when bishops left and got married, when they left abbots, all the more so from hierodeacons. In 1996, when there was a "tobacco scandal", one of the bishops, who organized the excise-free deliveries of tobacco and alcohol to Russia, simply left Russia for the United States and lives there as a private person. The name "Gabriel" Victor Borisovich Frolov, most likely, he took it when he was tonsured a monk, and when he left, he may have decided to make him his passport name as well. There is no ceremony for leaving monasticism, although formally he was to be given a paper stating that he was deprived of the right to wear a cassock, to perform sacred rites and must repent of what he had done. I think that such a paper was written somewhere, but it was hardly even sent to him. The rite of disarming is among the Catholics, in Orthodoxy it was rarely practiced. It looked like a kind of civil execution: a person was put on, sequentially removed from his vestments and removed from the temple, and the soldiers-guards brought him in and out. Before the 1905 revolution, this was a kind of "administrative offense", within the church, of course. They rarely left monasticism. "
Valaam monasteryThe vows of poverty and obedience are probably not the only ones that Gabriel Frolov had to break. As Radio Svoboda found out, shortly after leaving monasticism, he could marry the eldest daughter of Gennady Timchenko himself, no less mysterious person than the former monk himself. The former monk and the billionaire's daughter "Little is known about [Gennady Timchenko's] eldest daughter Natalia: she is a graduate Oxford, a specialist in English literature, currently lives in Russia and works in the film industry, " wrote business portal Finparty in 2018 in an article about the heirs of Russian billionaires. Unlike her younger sister Xenia , who openly participates in the Timchenko family business and married the son of the former Minister of Transport of the Russian Federation Gleb Frank, public information about Natalya, except for the words about Oxford wandering from publication to publication, cannot be found. Gennady Timchenko himself spoke about Oxford in an interview with TASS in 2014:
Ksenia FrankThe editors managed to restore some details of the biography of Timchenko's eldest daughter and explain exactly how she might be connected with the rapid career rise of the former Valaam monk, thanks to just two lines in the list of VIP clients of one of the most expensive St. Petersburg private clinics, which is Radio Liberty received from the source as a screenshot of the admin system. One of these two names is Natalya Gennadievna Browning , born on November 11, 1978. We noticed that the query "Natalya Browning Timchenko's daughter" was used by Yandex, although it does not provide any specific links. Nevertheless, we were able to confirm that this is indeed the name of the eldest daughter of the Russian billionaire.
According to an extract from the England & Wales Register, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1916-2005, obtained through the FamilySearch service ( link , free registration is required to access), in November 2002, a marriage was registered in the Kensington and Chelsea area of London: Natalia G Timtchenko left married to a man named Peter GF Browning. The only person with such a name and initials, whom Radio Liberty managed to find in the open bases of Great Britain, is Peter Gavin Folis Browning , the same age as Natalia and a graduate of the same Oxford University in the department of modern linguistics. Peter Browning is the founder of two PR agencies , one of them, Browning Environmental Communications, offers services on communication at the intersection of ecologists, the climate agenda and energy. The fact that Natalya Timchenko really took the name Browning follows from the official message of the Luxembourg registrar , published on July 28, 2012. Then Gennady Timchenko transferred the stakes in the SOGECO PARTICIPATIONS SARL company registered in the principality to members of his family - Elena and Ivan Timchenko, Ksenia Frank, as well as Natalia Browning, who was born on November 11, 1978 in St. Petersburg (at that time Leningrad). The date of birth coincides with the date in the list of clients of the Russian clinic. From the same message, it follows that at the time of the transfer of shares, Natalia Browning had British citizenship, an address in London in the same area of Kensington and Chelsea (27 Barkston Gardens), in addition, was divorced.
The house in which the London apartment of Gennady Timchenko's eldest daughter is located:
Just a few days after the transfer of shares, that very lengthy interview of Timchenko to the TASS news agency came out, in which he said that Natalya "returned to Russia a few years ago" in order to realize herself in her homeland. The surname of Timchenko's eldest daughter left over from her first husband makes it possible to find out what this realization might have been. According to the Kontur.Fokus database, Natalia Gennadievna Browning in 2010 became the sole founder of Step Productions LLC , which confirms the information about "work in the film industry" wandering from one curriculum vitae to another. This company, rewritten to another person in 2020, left practically no traces of its activities, apart from the video intro published in several places - to the never-released documentary film "Mist". Open sources also confirm the interest of Timchenko's daughter in literature - she studied in this specialty in a paid graduate school at St. Petersburg State University.
In 2014, Natalya Gennadievna became the sole founder of another legal entity - the very same workshop of wooden furniture "Akantus Atelier", the general director of which was appointed Gavriil Borisovich Frolov. Timchenko's daughter left the Akantus founders in June 2016, when Gavriil Frolov became the sole owner of the company. In 2017, Mikhail Borisovich Frolov (presumably Gabriel's brother) became the owner of Akantus , and in 2020 Gabriel Frolov (already with a new TIN) and Timchenko's protege Vladimir Lavlentsev became the founders in equal shares.
The relationship between the daughter of billionaire Natalia Browning and the former monk Gabriel Frolov could not be limited to a joint business. This is indicated by another line from the mentioned list of VIP clients of the St. Petersburg clinic: this is the daughter of Natalya Browning, who was born a few months after Natalya left Acantus. The girl's middle name is Gavrilovna.
In the air travel database obtained by Radio Liberty through the Seamless Horizon system of the analytical company C4ADS, we found that Gavriil Frolov made at least two joint flights with Natalia Broyning (as the Browning surname is transcribed in booking systems), the date of birth of which coincides with the date of birth of the elder daughter of Gennady Timchenko. In September 2015, they returned on one flight from the Cypriot city of Paphos to the Moscow airport Vnukovo, and in December of the same year, about 9 months before the birth of their daughter Natalia with the patronymic "Gavrilovna" - from Helsinki to Sheremetyevo. In the second case, "Broyning" and Gavriil Frolov are marked in the system as flying together. The solved mystery of the former monk who became the owner of the largest construction company is not the only one.what can you learn from the list of the clinic's VIP-clients, which has come to the disposal of Radio Liberty. What is this clinic? We are talking about the Sogaz medical center, which is managed by Vladimir Baranov, a business partner of the senior daughter of Vladimir Putin Maria .
Back in January 2020, the Reuters news agency wrote about this clinic as a place where the wounded in Syria and Libya fighters from "PMC Wagner" were treated . In the next investigation, Radio Liberty will talk about exactly how this happened; why the clinic on Malaya Konyushennaya street can without exaggeration be called the "clinic of the Ozero cooperative" ; In addition, we will open the veil of secrecy over yet another highly classified area of the clinic's activities - in which patients underwent examinations under the code "women's sports." The owner of the company, Gavriil Frolov, is a former hierodeacon of the St. Petersburg courtyard of the Valaam Monastery and the spouse of Natalia Browning. We received no answer. The mobile phone number of Gavriil Frolov, indicated as the number of LLC "Akantus Atelier", at the time of publication of this material, as follows from the message of the answering machine, was "not serviced".