Leonid Goldman, a defendant in Alexei Navalny’s investigation into the corruption schemes of Margarita Simonyan and Tigran Keosayan, said that he helped the former football player of St. Petersburg Zenit and the Russian national team Artem Dziuba leave Russia for a foreign championship and find him a job in the Turkish club Adana Demirspor. Goldman himself spoke about the process of negotiations with foreign teams in an interview with Sport24.
The sports publication presented Goldman as "an agent and close friend of Dzyuba, as well as the deputy head of the Russian-language directorate of the RT channel." An RT employee claims that Dzyuba had many offers, including Western Europe and even Saudi Arabia, but the choice fell on Adana because "the club's management and the coach were interested in Artem's transfer."
“Dziuba had four or five options in Turkey and a generous offer from Saudi Arabia – where Artem would have received at the Zenith level,” says Goldman.
The RT employee claims that he did not receive money from the Russian attacker for help, despite the fact that agents usually take a significant percentage of the transaction. Goldman insists that for him it is first and foremost helping a friend and human relationships:
“We never even discussed it. There are some … human things that are not related to money. Many agents and intermediaries with whom we communicated through this window were surprised: they say that you are not behaving like an ordinary agent, but as if you are beating conditions for yourself under a contract. For me, it was just a new experience and a desire to help a friend.”
Leonid Goldman appeared in the investigation of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) of Alexei Navalny, which was dedicated to the editor-in-chief of RT Margarita Simonyan and her husband, TV presenter of the political show International Sawmill on NTV Tigran Keosayan. It claimed that a married couple earns hundreds of millions of rubles on propaganda programs. The investigation stated that Goldman's mother-in-law, Lyudmila Moiseevna, received a total of 29 million rubles from companies associated with Simonyan.
Artem Dzyuba has been the mostrecognizable and popular athlete in Russia for several years. It was Dzyuba who was addressed by the captain of the Ukrainian national team Andriy Yarmolenko in Yevgeny Savin's video blog, where the blogger talked with Ukrainian football players about the war in Ukraine. Most Russian athletes prefer to avoid public questions about the war, ignoring it as a fact, although it is precisely because of it that Russian teams in various sports are not allowed to international tournaments, and Russian football was left without European cups.
Dziuba, like many others, kept silent for a long time, but after the words of Yarmolenko he spoke with an ambiguous position. The athlete noted that he was against "any war", but his statement was more about the consequences that athletes and ordinary Russians faced as a result of the unleashed aggression. Dziuba also focused on the fact that he "is not an expert in politics, he never got into it and did not intend to."
“And to some colleagues in the shop who sit on the priest in mansions in England and say nasty things – [I want to say:] this cannot offend us, we understand everything! Peace and goodness to all!” – Dziuba answered the captain of the Ukrainian national team.
For "Adana Demirspor", in which Dziuba now plays, the former defender of "Zenith", Donetsk "Shakhtar" and the national team of Ukraine Yaroslav Rakitsky also plays. Before the start of the war, the Ukrainian played for Zenit, but on March 2, the Russian club announced that they had terminated the contract with him at his request. Rakitskiy joined Adana at the end of July.
