Editor’s Note
This article details the lavish lifestyle in Dubai of Sergei Chemezov, a sanctioned Russian defense official and close Putin ally, as documented in a joint investigation. It raises questions about the enforcement of Western sanctions.
By Sergei Titov and Systema
Private beachfronts, million-dollar bathtubs, evenings of wine, whiskey, cigars, and karaoke – or performances by Russian pop stars whose fame stretches back to the 1990s.
Those are some of the trappings of an “ultraluxe” villa complex in Dubai where Sergei Chemezov – the Western-sanctioned head of the massive Russian state defense conglomerate Rostec and a close ally of President Vladimir Putin since they were KGB officers in communist East Germany – spends time with family, friends, and associates.
Chemezov, 72, became friends with Putin when they lived in the same apartment building in Dresden in the 1980s, when Chemezov was a KGB general and Putin a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet spy agency. In 1996, when Putin became President Boris Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff, he made Chemezov head of the Kremlin’s foreign economic relations department.
Rostec and its sprawling web of units and subsidiaries manufacture many of the weapons and components Russia uses in its war against Ukraine, now in its fourth year since Putin launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Chemezov has supported the invasion and echoed Putin’s narratives in public comments, accusing the United States and its Western allies of provoking the war and saying they risked triggering a global war. The Rostec CEO since 2007, Chemezov was hit with US, UK, and EU sanctions following the Russian seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
Since 2015, he has been visiting the United Arab Emirates at least once a year, according to leaked border crossing data. A source who is familiar with Chemezov’s inner circle said that the villa Chemezov uses was purchased a few years before the complex was finished late in 2018, and that Chemezov and his wife “put a lot into it, like a second home,” personally choosing the interior and closely monitoring the construction.
The villa they built is the costliest of the three styles at the complex, Sapphire, each of which has beach access and some of which are fitted with a $1 million bathtub made crystal or quartz – rose or green. In 2020, Sapphire villas cost $25.8 million, and the current asking price is about $31 million.
The other styles are Emerald and Ruby; all of them have at least seven bedrooms, a hammam bath, a climate-controlled wine cellar, a landscaped garden, and a swimming pool.
Formally, the two-story, 2,170 square meter home Chemezov uses is owned by a firm called Neve Limited, according to data published by C4ADS, a US-based nonprofit data-analysis and global-research organization. Systema was unable to track down information about Neve Limited, but the C4ADS data shows an e-mail address and phone number that leaked documents suggest are those of Natalya Agapova, a lawyer who has longstanding financial ties to Chemezov and his family.
One and two doors down from the Chemezov villa are slightly smaller homes used by the heads of two Rostec subsidiaries: Nikolai Kolesov, the director of Russian Helicopters; and Aleksandr Mikheyev, the director of Rosoboronexport, the main Russian arms sales company.
The villa Mikheyev uses is registered to his son, Aleksei, according to C4ADS data and Dubai land records. The formal owner of the one Kolesov uses is a local UAE company, Veles Electronics, which the late Putin foe and anti-corruption crusader Aleksei Navalny’s associates linked to the Russian Helicopters chief in a recent report.
Chemezov often spends time with Mikheyev and Kolesov when he stays in Dubai, sources with knowledge of the Rostec leadership told Systema, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Their gatherings typically involve drinking alcohol, smoking cigars, and singing karaoke, sources said – though sometimes it was patriotic Russian pop stars such as Oleg Gazmanov and Grigory Leps, both under EU sanctions since 2022 over their support for the war, doing the crooning.
The sources of wealth that enable state-owned company chiefs like Chemezov, Mikheyev, and Kolesov to afford such property are murky, though the latter also controls a lucrative network of private military industry companies.
A haven for rich Russians, particularly for those hit by sanctions over the war in Ukraine, Dubai is on the Persian Gulf — but the roots of XXII Carat are deep in Russia. The developer was a company called Forum Group, based in Yekaterinburg and founded by Oleg Cherepanov, a prominent businessman who was known in the Ural Mountains city as Cherep – “the Skull.”