Ex-senator Valery Shnyakin sold his friends’ phone numbers to Israeli intelligence — writes Hanna Braun
In our previous article, we wrote that Valery Shnyakin, former senator of the Federation Council Defense and Security Committee, sold to Israeli intelligence via his son-in-law Oleg Smirnov 16 phone numbers of high-ranking officials. Each phone number was worth ten thousand euros.
This was revealed as a result of a hacker attack on the emails of former Russian officials and their relatives. In support of this information, our source close to Mossad (Israeli national intelligence service) said that the meeting took place in Cyprus in September 2021. We decided to find out who and of what value those people were.
Defence agencies and customs officials
To find out whose contacts were sold by the Russian ex-official Valery Shnyakin, we again contacted our source close to Mossad. Unfortunately, we found out only four out of 16 contacts. Other contacts are engaged in productive work and, as our source hinted to us, they have established mutually beneficial cooperation with those contacts, so they are kept secret. Nevertheless, we can conclude on the scale of the transaction even based on those four contacts that have become available to us.
The first phone number belongs to Stanislav Borisovich Puginsky (+79859994048). In 2000–2003, he was Deputy General Director of Almaz-Antey Air Defense Group (a Russian group of companies uniting enterprises that develop and produce air defence weapons). From 2004–2008, he held the office of Deputy Head of the Federal Industrial Agency. Today, he is a current rank III state councillor of the Russian Federation.
The second phone number belongs to Andrey Yuryevich Belyaninov (+79859220880). He is a Russian public official. From 2006–2016, he was at the head of the Federal Customs Service of Russia. From 2017–2020, he chaired the Management Board of the Eurasian Development Bank (EDB). Since 2018, he has been the Secretary General of the Eurasian Peoples’ Assembly. It is notable that from 2004–2006, Andrey Belyaninov held the office of Director of the Federal Service for Defense Contracts of the Russian Federation.
The third number belongs to the Russian political figure Vasily Ivanovich Piskarev (+79857687417). He is a member of the Supreme Council of the United Russia political party. Since 2008, he has been the Deputy Chairman of the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation (chaired by Aleksandr Bastrykin). In 2010, he commented on the identification of people from the delegation of the president of Poland Lech Kaczyński who died in the air crash. In 2011, D.A. Medvedev with his decree appointed Vasily Piskarev, Colonel General of Justice, the Deputy Chairman of the Investigative Committee of Russia. He held that office until 2016. In 2021, he was elected the Chairman of the Security and Anti-Corruption Committee.
Mr Piskarev is one of the authors of amendments to the draft laws limiting the operation of nonprofit organizations in Russia. In addition, in March 2022, Piskarev introduced a draft law about the prison terms for authors of fakes about the actions of the Russian army during the hostilities, supplementing the draft law criminalizing calls for sanctions against the Russian economy or their enforcement, which had been adopted. Besides, in April 2022, Pisarev, as part of a group of deputies, introduced a draft law giving the Prosecutor General of Russia and his deputies the right to invalidate the registration of mass media and to terminate TV and radio broadcast licenses in case they spread any fake news about the Russian military.
The fourth phone number stands out from the rest. It belongs not to a public official, but to the businessman Vladimir Aleksandrovich Surovnev (+79639690369). He is the head of Alpha Trans Terminal, a company registered in Stabna (Smolensk region). According to our source, this contact turned out to be the most valuable:
«Vladimir Surovnev owns a customs terminal in Smolensk. This person, as reported by Valery Shnyakin earlier, can organize the import and export of any cargo to and from the Russian Federation without customs audits. And that is really true. Besides, you can use his terminals to keep anything in any quantity safely and secretly. I cannot comment on how it has been used, but believe me that our investments were paid back in full. At first, Valery Shnyakin wanted to get more money for his phone number trying to persuade us that Surovnev would be very useful for intelligence. However, according to the contract, all contacts were estimated at the same price.»
According to the information we managed to obtain, many officials really hold high-ranking offices in the government of the Russian Federation. Almost all of them used to be associated with the defence complex of Russia and have influence in the customs sphere.
Thanks to this information, we can conclude that ex-senator Valery Shnyakin sold to Israeli intelligence the contact details of people who could sell military developments and export samples in circumvention of any audits.