The head of Sberbank, German Gref, may be the actual owner of Altera Capital, which, through a chain of offshore companies, owns shares in the GAZ group, Danilovsky market, Group IB, Arcus business centers in Moscow and many other assets, in the amount of $ 300 million to $ 500 million. The formal owner is his ex-deputy and former deputy head of the government apparatus Kirill Androsov, who for some reason bequeathed all the assets not to his family, but to Gref's 23-year-old nephew Oscar. This is stated in the new investigation of the "Project".
The material says that for the past 10 years, Gref has been withdrawing funds abroad and building an “offshore empire”. The investigation is based on the leaks of Pandora Papers documents and the memories of Akhmed Bilalov, an ex-deputy of the State Duma, a former beneficiary of the Krasnaya Polyana company, one of the main developers of the Olympic Games in Sochi. The journalists talked with Bialov, who in the 2000s was a good friend of Gref, and in 2011 lost his company due to a conflict with him. He had to hide from arrest abroad, only this year he filed a lawsuit in a New York court against the American "daughter" of Sberbank and Gref. The entrepreneur accuses Gref of a raider takeover of his business.
Previously, the only formal owner of Altera Capital was the Swiss insurance company Swiss Life, backed by a trust, the beneficiary of which was the former top manager Evgeny Novitsky. In 2021, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), through the Pandora Papers, gained access to leaked documents from Singapore-based trust service provider AsiaCiti. The journalists of the "Project" got acquainted with previously unpublished documents and came to the conclusion that Gref is behind Altera Capital. Formally, two close friends of Gref, Androsov and Philip Kindt, a citizen of Germany and Switzerland, appear at the head of Altera Capital.
Three acquaintances and colleagues of Gref call the ex-deputy head of the government apparatus Kirill Androsov the most trusted confidant, and Bilalov in a conversation called him "Gref's wallet." Androsov has worked with Gref since the 1990s, in the 2000s they worked at the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade. Little is known about Philipp Kindt, a citizen of Germany and Switzerland. In one of the letters , an AsiaCiti employee said that during a general meeting, Gref and Kindt told the story of their acquaintance. When Gref worked at the mayor's office of St. Petersburg, he needed a person who understands insurance, and Kindt at that time worked for the German reinsurance company Munich Re and oversaw work with Russia and other CIS countries.