Early in 2016,
Lorene Weber, a real estate agent in the French town of Biarritz (city on Atlantic coast of Basque country, France is 35 kilometers from the border with Spain), began getting calls and emails from journalists about a deal she handled in 2012.
She remembered
it well. The buyer and the seller had both been wealthy (rich people) Russians, well-dressed
and soft-spoken, not the flashy (too bright, big or expensive) types who like to park their yachts in the
nearby marinas of San Sebastian. Rather than sending their lawyers, the two men
had come to handle the deal in person, which suggested to Weber that they had
nothing to hide. So the reporters’ questions surprised her: Was she aware, and
could she confirm that this property was linked to Russian President Vladimir
Putin?
For almost as
long as Putin has been in power, the question of his personal wealth, and that
of his friends and family, has been a frequent obsession for investigative
journalists. Numerous leaks and whistleblowers have given credence (the believe that something is true) over the years to reports
that Putin has access to billions of dollars; the Kremlin has fastidiously (having a strong dislike) denied them all.
But in the past
few months, new revelations about the secret fortunes of Russian officials have
begun to fuel mass protests around the country – most recently the ones that broke out on Monday, at which more than a thousand people were arrested
in Moscow and St. Petersburg. As TIME reports this week, many of the protestors are teenagers born under Putin's rule, who have
known no other leader.
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