Putin’s dancing daughter said to run fund backed by dad’s allies
Source: Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) — Russian executives close to Vladimir Putin are backing an ambitious startup incubator and science center next to Moscow State University that may prove lucrative. Given the nature of Russian business under Putin, that’s not a huge surprise. The twist in the story, first reported by billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s newspaper RBC Daily, is that the young woman running two entities involved in developing the $1.6 billion project, Katerina Tikhonova, is Putin’s youngest child, according to four people familiar with the matter.
Neither of Putin’s daughters, Katerina, 28, or Maria, a year older, has ever given a media interview and the Kremlin has never released photographs of them as adults. Snippets and rumors have bounced around the Internet. One of the few things Putin, 62, has ever said about Katerina is that she was named after her maternal grandmother, Ekaterina Tikhonovna Shkrebneva.
Putin, who said in 2013 that he and his wife Lyudmila were divorcing, broke years of silence about his daughters in November, telling TASS that both in fact live in Moscow. That appeared to signal their entry into public life, at least for Katerina. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said he saw no reason to comment.
The Moscow State project is a direct competitor to Skolkovo, the unfinished Silicon Valley-inspired hub championed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, according to Stanislav Belkovsky, a Kremlin adviser during Putin’s first term. “That’s her project, the anti-Skolkovo,” Belkovsky said. A person who has known the Putin family for decades confirmed Tikhonova’s role on the condition of anonymity.
Read more: http://www.biznews.com/briefs/2015/02/02/putins-dancing-daughter-said-run-fund-backed-dads-allies/
More on the kleptocracy running the totalitarianism in Russia, robbing the place blind.
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