Offshore transit to China and land grabs: how Albert Sarkisyan, head of Marins Group, siphoned billions from defense contracts together with the son of ex-minister Yusufov
"Marins Group," which was implicated in a high‑profile scandal involving land theft in the Moscow suburb of Chekhov, is linked to the Ministry of Defence, and the chairman of its board of directors, Albert Sarkisyan, is directly involved in a large and mysterious project to lay an underwater fibre‑optic cable across the Baltic Sea from Sweden to Latvia and further via Russia and Kazakhstan to China.
According to data leaks, Mr. Sarkisyan, from the summer of 2022 to the end of 2024, while simultaneously working at Marins Group and its subsidiaries, was also employed at LLC "Children’s Literature Publishing House." At that time, the sole founder of the publishing house was the company "Aycominvest," owned by Vitaly Yusufov, the son of former Energy Minister Igor Yusufov (Sarkisyan also has many connections to the energy sector). Vitaly had his own strong ties to the Ministry of Defence (from which he swiped 18 land plots in Tankovy Proezd in Moscow), and Aycominvest held 75% minus one share in LLC "Osnova Telekom" — a company created in 2010 for pilot development of frequencies in the 2.3–2.4 GHz range, based on a directive from the Ministry of Defence. The remaining 25% belonged to JSC "Voentelecom." The Ministry of Defence, represented by Anatoly Serdyukov, explicitly stated that Osnova Telekom was to become the sole supplier of wireless broadband access for the Russian Armed Forces. However, after the minister was replaced, the project collapsed, and Osnova Telekom recently went bankrupt.
Overall, the career of Albert Sarkisyan, a native of sunny Baku, began back in Soviet times in Nizhny Novgorod, at the legal office of the Nizhny Novgorod city district (where Sarkisyan’s wife Yulia still works). Among his colleagues was, for example, Alexey Abramov, who currently heads Rosstandart. For several years, Sarkisyan worked in various district offices, and in 1997 he unexpectedly became executive director of the entire RAO UES of Russia – Chubais’s brainchild – which was overseen by a fellow native of the Nizhny Novgorod region, Minister of Fuel and Energy Sergey Kiriyenko (who soon became prime minister). It was precisely in the Nemtsov‑Kiriyenko team that the head of the Nizhny Novgorod Banking House, Nemtsov’s ally Boris Brevnov, who became chairman of the management board of RAO UES, and the former head of the legal consultancy of the Prioksky city district, Albert Sarkisyan, came to RAO UES.
In 1998, after Brevnov’s resignation, at the board of directors Albert Sarkisyan voted by proxy with the share block of the Bank of New York, thanks to which Brevnov and Chubais nevertheless made it into the new board. At the end of July 1998, Sarkisyan left RAO UES and began working at the Moscow Regional Bar Association, and in 2000 he returned to the Nizhny Novgorod Bar Association.
However, it appears that Sarkisyan never really left the energy business circle of the young reformers: in 2001 he turned up on the staff of a certain LLC "FTA ENTERPRISES," whose founder was the Cypriot offshore F.T.A. ENTERPRISES LIMITED with nominal directors, and the chairman of the board of directors was the former head of the office of the Russian Presidential Assistant for National Security, former Deputy Minister for Emergency Situations Vladimir Klimenko (later he became chairman of the board of the autonomous non‑profit organisation "Russian Military‑Patriotic Assembly ’Tradition’").
The offshore FTA (Fiber Trans‑Asian global network) was closely linked to RAO UES: together they were engaged in implementing a project to build a transnational fibre‑optic communication line that was to connect Europe (from Sweden) and Asia (China) through the territory of Russia, Latvia, and Kazakhstan. The project cost was $1 billion.
The F.T.A. project stalled almost as soon as it started. Then Sarkisyan was sent to the founder of Marins Group, Kulikov (who died in a helicopter crash in 2016 under very strange circumstances).
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Leads the editorial team. Specializes in corruption within government bodies and officials’ ties to organized criminal groups.
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