https://time.com/4816044/russia-putin-biarritz-protests-alexei-navalny/
The Secret French Hideaway Where the Putin Family Spends Its Time and Fortune
By Simon Shuster / Biarritz, France
June 13, 2017 12:07 PM EDT
Putin’s own daughters have mostly kept away from such pageantry, and the Kremlin has guarded their private lives almost as closely as its military secrets. Neither Maria Putina, 32, nor Katerina Putina, 30, has ever appeared on television. The state has not released any photos of them in adulthood, nor has it confirmed some of the most basic details about their lives, such as where they live, where they work and whether they are married. Considering the corruption scandals that plagued Yeltsin’s son-in-law, the marital status of the President’s children is no trivial matter in Russia. ...
That is about as candid as Putin has ever been about his family, which has left most Russians in the strange position of not knowing what his heirs even look like. Anyone curious about such matters would have to rely mostly on Western news reports on the identity of his younger daughter. A former classmate tells TIME that Katerina, who was born in East Germany during her father’s posting there as an agent of the KGB, studied at an elite German-language school in Moscow and had trouble fitting in, partly because of the bodyguards who followed her around to parties. She grew up to become a competitive dancer of acrobatic rock’n’roll, specializing in the category known as “boogie-woogie.”
According to investigations by Reuters and Bloomberg, Katerina is married to a young oil executive named Kirill Shamalov, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes magazine to be $1.25 billion. Their marriage helps illustrate just how tightly knit Putin’s circle has become. Shamalov’s father Nikolay is one of the President’s oldest friends. He is also one of the founders of Bank Rossiya, which the U.S. Treasury Department identified in 2014 as the “personal bank” for Putin and his close associates.
This habit of mixing friendship and finance was equally clear in the deal that Weber, the real estate agent, handled in 2012. According to property records obtained by TIME in Biarritz, the buyer of that property was the younger Shamalov, Putin’s reported son-in-law; the seller was the oil trader Gennady Timchenko, another one of Putin’s old friends. Weber confirmed that the documents are accurate. “I know why you’re here,” she told a TIME reporter who showed up at her office in May. “It’s about Putin’s family.”
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