Dmitry Kamenshchik – How He became the Part of Terroism? .
Russian businessman Dmitry Kamenshchik is the chairman of Moscow Domodedovo Airport, the only stakeholder in Moscow Domodedovo Airport, and the owner of DME Ltd., the holding company for the airport.
With a net worth of $1.7 billion, he is ranked #52 among the wealthiest businessmen in Russia as of August 2022, according to Forbes.
The Businesses of Dmitry Kamenshchik
In order to offer air transportation services, Anton Bakov, an entrepreneur from Ekaterinburg, registered JV East Line in February 1991. The newly established JV’s general representative in Moscow was then Dmitry Kamenshchik.
In 1992, JV East Line stopped running. Dmitry Kamenshchik saw it as a chance to seize control of the East Line brand and continue operating airlines.
East Line started using leased aircraft to fly charters to Europe and Asia in 1993. Kamenshchik established the same-named airline, which went on to dominate the air cargo market by progressively growing its fleet of aircraft.
The catering, handling, and freight operations of East Line Company were founded on the grounds of Domodedovo Airport in 1994.
The airport provided outmoded machinery and plants in exchange for East Line handling the refurbishment of airport infrastructure and modernizing its management system.
1998 was a genuinely momentous year for Kamenshchik. At that moment, the earlier frantic work of both his company and him personally started to pay off. East Line has a 75-year lease on the Domodedovo airdrome complex, which includes the runways, taxiways, and aircraft parking stands but is not subject to private ownership, allowing it to continue using it for a long time.
The state looked into the aforementioned lease and ownership rights transfer agreements. Since 2004, the Federal Agency for State Property Management (Rosimuschestvo) has been attempting to challenge East Line’s acquisition of these rights in court.
But between 2006 and 2008, the Supreme Arbitration Court’s Presidium issued three judgments that affirmed the validity of the agreements.
In 2002, Kamenshchik made a brief attempt to court the equipment industry in an effort to improve the airport’s connectivity. He recognized an opportunity in the industry because there was a little shortage of electric trains at the time. As a result, his company invested in Demikhovskiy Machinery Factory, purchasing a 98.19% interest.
To add to this spending spree, Transmash, a project office for transport engineering, was created. Tsentrosvar Factory and Oktyabrskiy Electric Car Repair Factory were two notable acquisitions.
In 2004, East Line sold both its own airline company and machinery assets at a profit as Kamenshchik decided to focus on the airport business instead of this non-core sector.
Thanks to Dmitry Kamenshchik‘s management system, Domodedovo Airport has been the busiest airport in Russia in terms of passenger traffic since 2005, and in 2011 it was rated one of the busiest airports in Europe.
Authorities looked into who the real proprietors of Domodedovo Airport were after the terrorist attack there in January 2011.
What are the causes of terrorism historically and what are its characteristics?
With roots in the French Revolutionary War, terrorism goes beyond conventional warfare to instill fear by using destruction or the threat of violence. When a military victory is uncertain, this tactical approach to accomplishing political objectives frequently entails dramatic actions that target civilians. It might be difficult to define terrorism because it isn’t always obvious what constitutes terrorism as a crime; examples include the French Resistance and resistance movements against apartheid.
In the year prior to the IPO, the holding company announced Kamenshchik as its only owner on the website of the London Stock Exchange by identifying him as the last beneficiary.
The IPO was, however, delayed due to the adverse market conditions at the time.
On the website in September 2013, Moscow Domodedovo Airport’s chairman of the board of directors, Dmitry Kamenshchik, was publicly recognized as the airport’s ultimate owner.
In order to support its airport operations, Dmitry Kamenshchik‘s holding firm DME Ltd. establishes the second arm, an aviation-focused Aerotropolis. The primary objective is to create a synergistic conurbation surrounding the airport that has business parks, logistical and transit hubs, shopping centers, industrial areas, and resort hotels.
What the media is saying about Dmitry Kamenshchik
Dmitry Kamenshchik: Inside Story on the Arrest of Russian Billionaire
The supplies for a spell in prison was packed in Dmitry Kamenshchik‘s rucksack on the morning of February 18; he is the 27th-richest businessman in Russia.
According to his lawyer, the millionaire owner of Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport lacked emotion. Three airport executives, both present and past, had been imprisoned ten days earlier. Kamenshchik calculated the chances and concluded there was a good likelihood he would follow them.
Around noon, he drove from his suburban forest home to Moscow. He shared a small room on the eighth floor of an office building with an investigator for seven dreary hours; the room didn’t appear to have been adorned since the Soviet era.
After the papers were submitted, agents from the FSB led him to a cell. Following a terrorist attack at his airport in 2011, he had been charged with sharing some of the blame for the deaths of 37 people.
Instant shockwaves were produced by the arrest. The security apparatus at the airport, according to investigators, was criminally lax. Everyone else — commentators, attorneys, and businesspeople — claims the accusations are untrue, without legal support, and are being used to force him to give up his airport. If proven guilty, Kamenshchik and his companions may spend up to 10 years in prison.
Comparisons to the case of Russian billionaires Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Vladimir Yevtushenkov, who were imprisoned on dubious charges and lost all or part of their wealth under President Vladimir Putin, have been made.
Mikhail Kolpakov, Dmitry Kamenshchik‘s attorney, described a conversation between state investigators and his client that revealed the cynicism of the circumstance. As the meeting came to a close, the shocked investigator questioned Kamenshchik about why he hadn’t left the country after seeing his colleagues imprisoned days before.
“Why do you run?” remarked the 47-year-old. “I know that the truth is on my side.”
The Autism Genius
In his response, Kamenshchik demonstrated a stubbornness that could make it difficult to remove him from Domodedovo.
Sergei Kapchuk, a former Russian state official who met him in the 1990s, describes him as “devoid of emotion, feelings, and interpersonal connections.” His business is his life. He is a money-making machine.
When Kapchuk first met Kamenshchik in 1992, he had just dropped out of a philosophy class and was working out of a three-room apartment in southwest Moscow where he lived with his girlfriend and her young son. He was also helping to operate an aircraft tour firm.
According to Kapchuk, two males broke into the residence one day. The child was told to hand over his money or we would all perish as they threw a grenade at his head. The loss of the funds would have resulted in Dmitry Kamenshchik‘s business failing. Kamenshchik pushed himself across the room without saying a word, grabbing the grenade from the thieves’ hands and dragging them outside.
In the early 1990s, a businessman and politician named Anton Bakov gave him his first job in the aviation industry. “He’s practically autistic,” says Bakov. Everyone who has met Kamenshchik, even Bakov, agrees that he is a business genius.
Beginning in 1990, Kamenshchik oversaw Bakov’s tiny charter flights, transporting Polish visitors from Moscow to Asia with “perfect” efficiency. The two men began flying small traders from Russia to China around 1992. After disembarking, the travelers would buy as many clothes and devices as they could pack in a suitcase before returning to Russia to resell them for a profit. Kamenshchik started flying freight on his own for the airline East Line. His employment in Domodedovo began in the middle of the 1990s.
Domodedovo, located 20 kilometers south of Moscow, was in ruins at the time. The airport handled internal flights to Central Asia and eastern parts of Russia during the Soviet era. It was cramped, disorganized, and without any seating. On the flights, there was frequently only room for standing. With the airport, Kamenshchik and East Line started to reach agreements to upgrade different parts of its infrastructure. He consolidated his holdings while privatizing the structures along the way.
Domodedovo became the first modern airport in Russia under his leadership. He began operating a quick train service between Domodedovo and the heart of Moscow in 2002. Since there were no trains, he purchased industries to create some. Under the new glass and steel, the outdated concrete terminal vanished.
Kamenshchik claims he invested more than $1.5 billion in Domodedovo over eighteen years. It was the biggest airport in the nation by the middle of the 2000s; in 2014, it handled more than 30 million people annually, and according to Kamenshchik, it was worth more than $8 billion.
Yevgeny Chichvarkin, one of Russia’s most successful businessmen, once said, “Out of s**t he made a chocolate candy.”
Understanding The Airport Fiasco of Dmitry Kamenshchik
It wasn’t entirely trouble-free. The airport encountered constant litigation as it grew increasingly prosperous. According to Kamenshchik, 6,500 lawsuits have been filed against the airport overall since 2001, according to an interview with the business journal Vedomosti from 2014. They included claims that East Line shipped illegal goods. The government fought a four-year campaign in the middle of the 2000s to undo Domodedovo’s privatization and bring it back under state control. Domodedovo, according to Kamenshchik, has a team of over 100 in-house attorneys to handle the caseload.
These disputes occasionally got nasty. A video of Valery Kogan, Dmitry Kamenshchik‘s business partner, having fun with two young men wearing scant underwear was posted online in 2011.
Kamenshchik has become risk-averse and even paranoid due to the pressure. To lessen his exposure to takeovers and attacks, he disguised his ownership for nearly ten years behind several offshore front companies. He admitted to Vedomosti that he was frequently confused if the state’s ongoing checks, inspections, and lawsuits were part of the state’s legal oversight role or driven by nefarious motives.
His legal jargon obsession is a defense tactic that is appropriate for a man who is on the verge of being autistic. He denies making deals with powerful people and taking bribes. He claims that the government’s excessive scrutiny is “a kind of punishment” for his failure to follow a corrupt set of rules. Most of the charges have been rejected by the airport’s attorneys.
Investment has been impeded by the uncertainty brought on by the dispute, though. It has taken the government years to authorize new runways and improve road connections to enable the airport to expand. Together, these factors have hampered Domodedovo’s growth, allowing Sheremetyevo and Vnukovo, the other two airports serving Moscow, to catch up. The government shares ownership of both of the airports.
The worries never stop. A prospective buyer for Domodedovo approached Kamenshchik a few years back. According to Kamenshchik, he was asked: “You do understand? They’ll steal everything. Or combine it with state airports. You’ll be making the worst decision of your life if you reject our demands.
A New Attack
Out of sorrow came to a new opportunity to exert pressure on Domodedovo.
On January 24, 2011, a 20-year-old man called Magomed Yevloyev entered the airport with up to 5 kg of explosives. He had been sent to Moscow by Islamist insurgents from a hamlet in Russia’s North Caucasus. He merged with the crowds inside the airport building and exploded a device hidden beneath his clothing, leaving more than 170 people injured and 37 dead.
Investigators set out right once to show that the owner and administration of Domodedovo were equally accountable for the crime. They assert that to find Yevloyev’s explosives, airport security should have required that everyone entering the structure pass through a metal detector.
The investigators’ claims have consistently been proven false. Numerous Russian courts have decided that the airport did nothing unlawful and that there was no statute requiring Domodedovo to undertake complete checks at all gates. In recent years, Russia has experienced hundreds of terrorist attacks, including deadly explosions on trains and in the Moscow metro. In none have the owner or management faced legal action?
Nevertheless, the case was suddenly reopened by authorities last summer. Svetlana Trishina and Vyacheslav Nekrasov, two former Domodedovo officials, as well as Andrei Danilov, the airport’s acting senior manager, were all detained on February 8 and 9. Kamenshchik joined them there ten days later.
Although the case’s exact objective is unclear, it unquestionably seems to be controlled from above. An indication of this came when the case’s investigator on the night Kamenshchik was detained abruptly modified his stance from advocating for home arrest to arguing for Kamenshchik to be placed in jail. The attorney Kolpakov believes that someone further up the line may have called him throughout the night.
Support for the case could come from President Putin. According to a source close to the Kremlin, Putin had to be involved for the change to house arrest to take place. According to the source, investigators fought tooth and nail to persuade the president that Kamenshchik was evading compensating terror attack victims and needed to be investigated, but in the end, there was no evidence to sustain his imprisonment.
Investigators have publicly accused Domodedovo of being too avaricious to care about airport safety or compensation, echoing the defense Putin provided. However, the majority of onlookers assert that Kamenshchik is being pressured to sell Domodedovo for the lowest possible price by the probe.
Kamenshchik has repeatedly declined to cede authority over the airport. He fought government efforts to combine it with Moscow’s two state airports at the beginning of the 2010s. The government is currently pursuing a novel idea for public-private ownership with businessmen who support the administration. Putin’s buddy and former judo partner Arkady Rotenberg have purchased stock in Sheremetyevo. Many believe he wants to grow.
Additionally, Domodedovo appears to be a more alluring investment. The airport is profitable, and the lack of easy money in Russia is a result of the country’s economic downturn.
Pressure
Kamenshchik and the other accused could potentially spend up to 15 months in jail. Kolpakov claims that because state prosecutors have stated that the case against them is faulty, a trial and sentencing are improbable. However, he added, the probe can be prolonged for as long as necessary. The only restriction is that a suspect may only be detained for a total of 18 months before the matter is brought before a judge.
Even though Kamenshchik is not incarcerated but rather is under house arrest, he is nevertheless under a lot of strain. One way to raise it is to detain Trishina, Nekrasov, and Danilov. As was the case in other Russian cases, their imprisonment puts Kamenshchik under further psychological strain. Kolpakov claims that in the two weeks since their detention, none of the three have been interrogated. A court on Wednesday ordered Trishina, a mother of two young children, to be under home arrest.
One attorney called their circumstance “light torture.” Kogan, Kamenshchik’s partner, allegedly sought to make arrangements to get them all released from custody but was unsuccessful.
Nobody who knows Kamenshchik believes he will quickly relinquish the airport. He and Domodedovo are inseparable, according to Bakov, who added, “They’ve fused.”
According to Kolpakov, Kamenshchik seemed serene and collected when he left the cell on February 19 after spending the night there. He moved through the courthouse’s hallways wearing a hooded jumper, resembling a boxer and occasionally grinned sarcastically while doing so. I have committed 22 years of my life to this airport, he said in court. To me, it is an issue of pride to carry this matter through to its conclusion and prove my innocence, as well as the innocence of the airport’s staff.
According to Dmitry Kamenshchik’s 2014 interview with Vedomosti, he insisted on adhering to the letter of the law “because we believe it’s more reliable” than relying on personal connections. He continued, “Whether that’s the best survival strategy — time will show.”
The owner of Domodedovo Airport is released from house detention by a Russian court.
Russian news outlets reported, citing a court ruling, that Dmitry Kamenshchik, the owner of Russian airport Domodedovo, should be released from house detention.
The allegations against Kamenshchik, who is also the board chairman at Domodedovo, were connected to the security measures in place at the airport following a terrorist incident in 2011.
Dmitry Kamenshchik’s Yacht was Seized in Finland
Since March 21, the Flying Fox yacht, purportedly connected to Russian oligarch Dmitry Kamenshchik, has been stranded in the Dominican Republic. Officials in the Dominican Republic prevented the ship from leaving the country after receiving a request from the US authorities. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations examined the superyacht last Friday to look for any connections to Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia. |
The Dominican Republic continues to host a $455 million superyacht that is allegedly connected to Russian oligarch Dmitry Kamenshchik. The probe into the yacht was requested by the US government in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
After arriving on the Caribbean island from St. Barts on March 21, the Flying Fox has been forbidden from leaving.
The opulent ship anchored in the tourist destination of La Roma to refuel and replenish its food supply. It took off before being forced to dock at the Don Diego Port after being detained at Santo Domingo.
Representatives from the Foreign Relations Ministry, General Directorate of Customs, and Office of the Attorney General accompanied agents from the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) on a visit to the boat as part of their investigation.
In response to a request from the US government, the $455 million Flying Fox yacht, which is reportedly linked to Russian billionaire Dmitry Kamenshchik, who owns Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, is currently anchored in the Dominican Republic as part of an investigation into any potential ties to President Vladimir Putin as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Flying Fox superyacht is anchored in Santo Domingo while U.S. and Dominican officials look into whether it is connected to Russian oligarch Dmitry Kamenshchik, according to Homero Figueroa, the president of the Dominican Republic’s press office, on Tuesday.
Authorities in the Dominican Republic claim that the Flying Fox has 57 crew members but no passengers.
The United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom have not imposed sanctions on Russian billionaire Dmitry Kamenshchik. He is the proprietor of Domodedovo Airport, one of Russia’s busiest airports.
In an appearance on Color Vision’s Today morning show, Luis Abinader’s press secretary Homero Figueroa disclosed that the Office of the Attorney General already had the findings of its investigation.
“We shall follow the law if anything is shown to be in contravention of Dominican Republic legal requirements. The yacht will be released if there are no irregularities,’ Figueroa added.
Although there have been collaborative collaboration with their American colleagues, each organization has a “different objective,” Figueroa continued.
The opulent Flying Fox boat, which has been docked in the Dominican Republic since March 21, includes a helicopter on its deck.
The investigation conducted by the Dominicans adheres to a completely different aim than the (United States) institution that was present in the Dominican Republic, Figueroa continued. “Dominican institutions act in the sphere that the regulations allow,” he said. We are referring to potential discoveries that the Dominican institution (Customs) could make during the yacht raid.
Authorities in the Dominican Republic claim that there are 57 staff members but no passengers on board Dmitry Kamenshchik‘s 466-foot yacht.
According to Boat International, the Flying Fox features towers 104 feet above the water’s surface and is thought to be the largest yacht available for rent in the world. It has entertained Jay-Z and Beyonce.
The yacht has 11 cabins, a jacuzzi, a gym, and a pool.
According to Boat International, the Flying Fox features towers 104 feet above the water’s surface and is thought to be the largest yacht available for rent in the world. It has entertained Jay-Z and Beyonce.
The boat, which has a pool, Jacuzzi, gym, and 11 cabins for 25 passengers, was built in 2019.
The investigation into the yacht allegedly linked to Kamenshchik, who is accused of funding President Vladimir Putin and owns one of Russia’s largest airports, Domededovo in Moscow, comes as the European Union, United Kingdom, and the United States have targeted Russian billionaires and seized their ships, homes, and aircraft.
Sam Tucker, the head of superyachts at VesselsValue, recently told Forbes that the oligarchs’ ownership of the enormous ships “is notoriously private.”
Typically, offshore firms hold ownership of the vessels. At least 43 boats totaling at least $5.4 billion are available. 22 vessels worth $3.1 billion are owned by sanctioned Russian billionaires.
Technically, these ships are owned by a special purpose vehicle, which is frequently located in a different country than the beneficial owner, according to Tucker. In addition, there exist lease systems that further sever the [owner] from the asset.
The $49 million boat owned by a Russian millionaire was taken by British authorities on Tuesday. East of London, in Canary Wharf, officials boarded the Phi.
The ship is the first to be held in the UK as a result of sanctions put in place as a result of the conflict in Ukraine.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps stated, “It’s just another indication that we will not stand idly by while Putin’s cronies are allowed to sail around the world in these types of yachts and people in Ukraine are suffering.”
“It can’t be right to have a yacht like this here in London, able to just sail away when you see what he’s doing to Ukraine when you see what he’s doing to people’s lives,” we impounded it and prevented it from leaving right now.
As part of its investigation into whether the 21 yachts belonged to Russian oligarchs, Finland seized them last week.