The report “Putin’s Palace”, prepared by Alexei Navalny, turned out to be the most popular film published on the Internet in 2021. The two-hour documentary has been watched by over 120 million people on YouTube from January 19 to date.
The film “Putin’s Palace. The story of the biggest bribe ”was prepared by a team associated with the Anti-Corruption Foundation. In the summer, the organization was banned and considered extremist. In September, the Investigative Committee of Russia opened a criminal case against its founder Alexei Navalny and some of his associates, accusing them of creating, leading and acting on behalf of an extremist organization.
In the film “Putin’s Palace”, the authors indicated that a luxurious mansion on the Black Sea coast worth about 100 billion rubles belongs to the President of Russia. Its construction was to be financed by companies whose owners are closely associated with Vladimir Putin. The Russian President denied this, and businessman Arkady Rotenberg said that the palace complex was his property.
Navalny’s verdict
The producer and author of the film, Alexei Navalny, has been serving a sentence in a general regime colony in the Vladimir region since the end of March this year. An opposition activist was sentenced to a suspended sentence several years ago on charges of embezzling funds. At the beginning of the year, the court ruled to execute this sentence and sentence Navalny to a sentence of imprisonment for a term of about 2.5 years in a strict regime colony. At the end of March, the oppositionist went on a hunger strike. A few weeks later, he interrupted her at the request of the doctors.
In November, former prisoners of the penal colony where Alexei Navalny is located told the media that the oppositionist was being persecuted there. Other prisoners were forbidden to talk to him, and at the same time they had to demonstratively follow him.