Matthias Warnig is, in various ways, an exceptional person. The 65-year-old is the oldest German friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the most active German in Russian business circles. He is a former Stasi agent who became a banker in the 1990s. Since then, he has sat on the supervisory boards of numerous German-Russian banks and companies. He is currently the CEO of Nord Stream 2, and happens to play a part in the latest YouTube video by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), in which Russian opposition activists uncover an extensive network of corruption around the construction of a palatial estate for the Russian president on the Black Sea coast. In the video, Navalny mentions Warnig when talking about an exchange of letters between Putin’s ex-wife Lyudmila and a German friend of hers in the mid-1990s. One of the letters was sent from Warnig’s fax machine. The Russian opposition leader, citing a DW article, says that Warnig gave financial assistance to Putin, a former KGB officer in Dresden, and his family. It’s thought the two may have met through their respective secret services in the former East Germany, but the official line is that they only made contact later, in St. Petersburg, after both had changed… Read full this story
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