Political smuggling

A Russian official has been caught financing a foreign politician for the first time—and one opposed to the incumbent authorities, at that. The scandal has already damaged the reputation of the current human rights commissioner, Oleg Mironov. The State Duma is due to elect a new ombudsman on 22 May, and Mironov’s chances of keeping his seat have sharply diminished.

The doctor-smuggler

On 5 February 2003, passengers in the VIP lounge of Sheremetyevo-1 Airport witnessed the following episode. Customs officers approached a middle-aged passenger departing on a flight to Yerevan and asked whether he was carrying any undeclared foreign currency. “No!” the man said, shaking his head. They asked him again. The answer was the same. “Then please show us your briefcase,” the officers insisted. It contained $120,000: 12 bundles of hundred-dollar bills, with the details of a Czech bank on the packaging tape.

“Is this yours?” they asked the passenger again. “Mine,” he conceded. The smuggler turned out to be Moscow doctor Yuri Ryabtsev. Prosecutors immediately opened a criminal case over the incident, assigning the investigation to officers of the FSB Directorate for Moscow and the Moscow Region. It was the security officers who had to establish where Ryabtsev had obtained such money, whom he was taking it to and why he had not declared it.

The very first interrogation exceeded all expectations. The doctor said that the day before, Russia’s human rights commissioner’s adviser, Arbak Khachatryan, had handed him the $120,000. Armenia’s presidential election campaign was then in full swing, and the money was allegedly intended for the PR campaign of candidate Artashes Geghamyan, President Kocharyan’s main opponent. Geghamyan’s people were supposed to meet Ryabtsev at Yerevan Airport, where he would hand over the briefcase.

$120,000 for the Armenian opposition’s election campaign

The Russian customs operation followed a tip from officers of Armenia’s Ministry of National Security (MNS), who had warned their Russian counterparts about the passenger carrying money. According to Izvestia, Armenian intelligence services were secretly monitoring the telephone conversations of President Robert Kocharyan’s principal rivals. Naturally, candidate Artashes Geghamyan—a member of the republic’s National Assembly and leader of the National Unity party—also came to the MNS’s attention. To jump ahead, he finished third in the election, winning more than 17% of the vote. One of Geghamyan’s trusted associates was Arbak Khachatryan, a former aide to Armenia’s former president, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who in February 2003 was working as an adviser to Russia’s human rights commissioner, Oleg Mironov. Khachatryan oversaw the “holy of holies”: finances.

Apparently, officers of the Ministry of National Security learned about the delivery of $120,000 from an intercepted telephone conversation between the adviser and someone in Armenia. A secret encrypted message was immediately sent from Yerevan to the FSB requesting that the courier be detained. To make the request more convincing, the dispatch accused Arbak Khachatryan of every mortal sin: selling several Igla portable surface-to-air missile systems to Chechen militants in 1997; organising the murder of the well-known Armenian television journalist Tigran Naghdalyan, chairman of the Council of Armenian Public Television and Public Radio; and, finally, simply supporting “destructive forces seeking to drive a wedge into Russian–Armenian relations.”

The “Lefortovo” ombudsman

It should be taken into account that the Kremlin unofficially supported Robert Kocharyan during the election. As is now clear, cooperation also took place at the intelligence-service level. In that sense, the criminal case against Arbak Khachatryan is telling. On 4 February, FSB officers began tapping the adviser’s telephone with court authorisation. It was from transcripts of conversations between Khachatryan and Yuri Ryabtsev that the security officers learned who would take the money to Yerevan and when. Ryabtsev was detained on 5 February, charged with smuggling and released on bail of 120,000 rubles. Arbak Khachatryan was less fortunate. He is named in the case as the organiser of the smuggling. On 9 February, he was placed in Lefortovo. Mironov’s adviser refuses to testify, citing Article 51 of the Constitution.

“Yes, Khachatryan did indeed give Ryabtsev $120,000, but it was to buy a house in Yerevan, not for a presidential candidate’s election campaign,” Khachatryan’s lawyer, Vladimir Levin, explained. “Ryabtsev was, in effect, the Khachatryans’ family doctor, and when he flew to Armenia on some occasion, Arbak asked him as a friend to take the money. Khachatryan did not ask Ryabtsev to carry it illegally. Yuri Ryabtsev is entirely to blame for what happened. The evidence of Khachatryan’s guilt rests solely on transcripts of his telephone conversations. But they contain absolutely nothing and, incidentally, it is not known whether they were obtained lawfully.”

Vladimir Levin also explained the origin of the $120,000. “Khachatryan’s Czech business partner repaid a debt to him. That is why the dollar bundles were wrapped in tape from a Czech bank. The businessman who returned the money has already given the relevant testimony to investigators,” the lawyer said.

Meanwhile, Valery Voloshin, press secretary of the human rights commissioner’s office, commented on the situation as follows.

“Arbak Khachatryan came to work for us at the end of last year. He was recommended by one of the State Duma’s respected members. I will not give the name. We took him on for a probationary period. However, Khachatryan never demonstrated his abilities and, in fact, appeared at his workplace only two or three times. So we dismissed him even before the criminal case was opened, and we now know nothing about Khachatryan’s fate. We will regard any attempt to link human rights commissioner Oleg Mironov and Arbak Khachatryan as a deliberate attack on the reputation of the country’s chief ombudsman. The State Duma will elect a new commissioner on 22 May. Mironov’s main rival is deputy Pavel Krasheninnikov. I think he will rub his hands with pleasure when he reads an article like this.”

Izvestia established that Arbak Khachatryan had indeed been officially dismissed from his position as Mironov’s adviser at the end of last year. However, on 2 February 2003, a week before his arrest, Oleg Mironov sent President Vladimir Putin a draft document granting Arbak Shaumyanovich Khachatryan the rank of “state counsellor, first class.” Mr Mironov’s press secretary learned of this document from Izvestia and was unable to comment on it.

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