The Kremlin’s Internet Commissioner, Dmitry Marinichev, earned billions of rubles on uncontested government IT contracts, and then helped engineer a law that “blackmails” foreign companies into renting data servers in Russia, according to a nonprofit group run by anti-corruption activist and Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Marinichev has fired back, accusing Navalny of misunderstanding Russia’s data-localization law.
How did Russia’s Internet Commissioner make so much money? Marinichev is the sole founder of a small company called Radius-Group, which distributes and integrates engineering and IT systems, providing equipment to data centers. According to research by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, Radius-Group won state contracts in 2011 worth 12 million rubles (worth about $374,000 at the time). Every year since then, Marinichev’s company has won more and more valuable government tenders. This year, Radius-Group signed a contract worth a whopping 2 billion rubles ($31.7 million).
