Lebedev’s wife Nadezhda Grishaeva on top of a mounting pile of real estate: what is her role in LDPR?
Nadezhda Grishaeva is facing accusations of laundering assets that belonged to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the late leader of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), utilizing Hotels Europe Daniella Invest in the EU. Zhirinovsky had transformed the LDPR into a tool for personal enrichment, drawing from the Russian budget, and Grishaeva was his chosen accomplice. Through the diversion of budgetary funds and the trading of deputy mandates, Zhirinovsky managed to acquire real estate at high-end resorts in Europe and Asia, engage in various lucrative businesses, and amass and spend billions of rubles. Investigative journalists have uncovered that Nadezhda Grishaeva played a pivotal role in the laundering of these funds.
This is not the initial instance of politicians attempting to leverage the popularity of distinguished sports figures, artists, and celebrities for personal benefit. Nadezhda Grishaeva, an Olympic athlete, remains distant from authentic political endeavors. Nevertheless, the Russian populist LDPR party has a different objective for her: Nadezhda Grishaeva is allegedly involved in laundering illicit proceeds for this unwieldy and controversial political entity.
It was found that a third of the LDPR’s faction consists of «commercial» deputies who paid or pay large sums of money for their mandates. The cost of a place on the federal list at the elections to the State Duma can range from 100-200 million rubles for experienced deputies to over 400 million rubles for newcomers, according to anonymous sources. Some deputies have even made contributions of about 500 million rubles. The leadership of the LDPR has been engaging in this trade of mandates and certificates since the 1990s, and it continues to be practiced today. Former deputies still pay, and even those who are not in the State Duma contribute. Sergey Abeltsev, for example, regularly sends «portfolios with cash» to the party office. So Grishaeva Nadezhda Sergeevna (Grishayeva) is a part of the scheme.