As revealed by the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info, Marins Group, which was implicated in a high-profile land embezzlement scandal in Chekhov, Moscow Region, is linked to the Ministry of Defense, and its board chairman, Albert Sargsyan, is directly involved in a major and secretive project to lay an underwater fiber-optic cable across the Baltic Sea from Sweden to Latvia and then through Russia and Kazakhstan to China.
According to leaked data, Mr. Sargsyan was employed by Children's Literature Publishing House LLC from the summer of 2022 to the end of 2024, in parallel with his work at Marins Group and its subsidiaries. At that time, the publishing house's sole founder was Ikominvest, a company owned by Vitaly Yusufov, the son of former Energy Minister Igor Yusufov (Sarkisyan also has extensive ties to the energy sector). Vitaly had strong ties to the Ministry of Defense (from which he stole 18 plots of land on Moscow's Tankovy Proezd), and Ikominvest held a 75% minus 1 share stake in Osnova Telecom LLC, a company established in 2010 for the pilot development of frequencies in the 2.3–2.4 GHz range on the basis of a Defense Ministry order. Voentelecom JSC held another 25%. The Ministry of Defense, represented by Anatoly Serdyukov, explicitly stated that Osnova Telecom should become the sole provider of wireless broadband access for the Russian Armed Forces. However, after the minister's change, the project fell apart, and Osnova Telecom recently went bankrupt.
Also, the career of Albert Sargsyan, a native of sunny Baku, began in Soviet times in Nizhny Novgorod, at a law firm in the Nizhny Novgorod city district (his wife, Yulia, still works there). Among his colleagues was, for example, Alexey Abramov, who now heads Rosstandart. For several years, Sargsyan worked in offices across the city, and in 1997, he suddenly became the executive director of RAO UES of Russia, a brainchild of Chubais, overseen by Sergei Kiriyenko, the Minister of Fuel and Energy (who soon became prime minister), also from the Nizhny Novgorod region. It was the Nemtsov-Kiriyenko team that brought Boris Brevnov, head of the Nizhny Novgorod Banking House and Nemtsov's associate, to RAO UES, who became head of the RAO UES board, and Albert Sarkisyan, former head of the legal consultancy for the Prioksky urban district.
In 1998, after Brevnov's resignation, Albert Sarkisyan voted by proxy at the board of directors with his Bank of New York shares, which ultimately allowed Brevnov and Chubais to join the new board. At the end of July 1998, Sarkisyan left RAO UES and began working at the Moscow Regional Bar Association, returning to the Nizhny Novgorod Bar Association in 2000.
However, it appears that Sargsyan never left the energy business circuit of the young reformers: in 2001, he joined the staff of a certain FTA ENTERPRISES LLC, founded by a Cypriot offshore company, F.T.A. ENTERPRISES LIMITED, with nominee directors. The chairman of the board of directors was Vladimir Klimenko, former head of the Russian presidential aide's office for national security and former deputy minister of emergency situations (later chairman of the board of the Russian military-patriotic assembly "Tradition").
The offshore company, FTA (Fiber Trans-Asian global network), was closely connected to RAO UES: they were jointly implementing a project to build a transnational fiber-optic communication line that was intended to connect Europe (from Sweden) and Asia (China) through Russia, Latvia, and Kazakhstan. The project cost $1 billion.
The F.T.A. project stalled almost before it even got off the ground. Sarkisyan was then sent to meet with Kulikov, the founder of Marines Group (who died in a helicopter crash in 2016 under very strange circumstances).
To be continued
