Nadezhda Grishaeva’s schemes: hotels, companies, and $19 million in assets across U.S. and Europe

• 16.12.2024 08:45

Russian basketball player Nadezhda Grishaeva, who was married to Igor Lebedev’s son, the late chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party, from 2016 to 2019, has been trying to have the Project’s investigation into Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s family and associates removed from multiple online platforms since 2022.

The Agency publication writes about this.

Nadezhda Grishaeva (Photo: Wikicommons )

In December 2022, Grishaeva personally contacted the OCCRP and the Project, offering to "share information or make a donation to a charity" in exchange for removing her name from the article. And in January 2023, unknown persons offered material support to the database of Russian officials rupep.org in exchange for the removal of Grishaeva’s page. All projects refused to remove the information.

In July 2023, in just two days (18-19 July), Google received 14 requests to remove from its search results the English-language version of the Project’s investigation into the Zhirinovsky’s family, published on the OCCRP website. The complainants claimed that they were the authors of the article and that its publication on the OCCRP website violated their copyright.

Nevertheless, Google rejected all complaints: On 22 September, the texts could still be found through the search engine.

However, this suggests that Nadezhda Grishaeva does not like the materials that have been published about her in the recent period. Moreover, it is clear that the initiator of the complaints and attempts to start a very expensive procedure to clean up the Internet is not only Grishaeva, but also the people behind her.

Former basketball player Nadezhda Grishaeva is the ex-sister-in-law of the late LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who owns a significant part of the property of Vladimir’s family. The divorce from his son, Igor Lebedev, which allegedly took place in 2019, is widely regarded as a pure fiction, as Lebedev (who now goes by the surname Garcia) and Grishaeva have maintained family relations and continue to withdraw their late leader’s fortune from the country.

Thanks to his father, Igor Lebedev, a former Deputy Speaker of the State Duma from 2011 to 2021, has retired from politics. He left public life and changed his name, surname and patronymic. Now he goes by the name of David Garcia and prefers to stay in the shadows.

This is exactly what is written in the materials that Nadezhda Grishaeva and people acting on her behalf are trying to remove from the Internet. But this is only part of what Garcia and Grishaeva clearly do not like. Because the aforementioned materials describe the schemes by which the late Zhirinovsky, with the help of his daughter-in-law, withdrew money from the party treasury and the state budget, which he often confused with his own pocket, and most importantly, the assets in Europe bought with this money and registered in the name of Nadezhda Grishaeva.

The fact that the operation to clean up the Internet is large-scale and very expensive is confirmed by the fact that a copyright infringement complaint was filed against Singapore’s MiceTimes, which wrote that "the Zhirinovsky family owns a total of 51 properties around the world worth approximately 9.8 billion rubles or $150 million". Out of this total, Nadezhda Grishaeva has properties worth $19 million.

Читайте по теме: Банк России может повысить ключевую ставку до 23% в декабре

The list is impressive. Why Grishaeva and the people behind her (it’s not hard to guess who they are) became concerned about the purity of their biographies quite a long time after the relevant publications is unclear. The fact that Zhirinovsky was very free with the money that fell into his hands was known even during his lifetime. After Grishaeva and Lebedev’s marriage was "dissolved", there was a lot of material about their property, which is mainly in warm countries.

It is not clear why this need has arisen now. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that Igor Lebedev’s surname change trick didn’t work, and his new identity, called David Garcia, has caused problems in the very West where he has escalated and which his father so masterfully cursed from the Duma rostrum and TV screens. Both the property he had acquired through hard work and the property he had taken to the damned abroad with no less effort, ran into difficulties. People in the "rotten West" are not stupid either, they can read. And, apparently, the police of the countries where the property registered to Grishaeva is located have begun to take an interest in its origin.

And these police, unlike the Russian police, take OCCRP’s information seriously. Thus, according to this information, Nadezhda Grishaeva has a hotel in Ibiza.

And the company Hoteles Europe Daniela Invest SL, which she owns jointly with a certain Galina Lebedeva, who is none other than the mother of David Garcia (Igor Lebedev in his maiden name) and the wife of the fiery fighter against Western values Zyrynovsky (by the way, as a child Wolfowitz had the original Russian surname Eidelstein, but that’s just a side note).

Grishaeva also has something in America, so hated by her late father-in-law - in 2020, the company Sport International Group Inc. was registered in the state of Florida.

Grishaeva also has something in Russia. This is the Anvil Fitness Club Moscow, the owner and trainer of which she publicly positions herself as the owner and trainer. At the same time, she is silent about the very impressive collection of other property that was transferred to her during Zhirinovsky’s life.

In this regard, it is of interest that Grishaeva is also trying to purge Russian sources that write about her property in Russia. While the situation with the Western press is more or less clear - law enforcement agencies there pay attention to such things and the public reacts strongly to publications about corruption - the situation with Russia is not entirely clear, given the way such things are reacted to here.

It is not yet clear why there is such persistence with regard to domestic sources that published materials about the property of Zhirinovsky’s daughter-in-law. Perhaps it is due to the fact that against the backdrop of the rather deplorable state of finances in the country, the authorities decided to shake up a little those who once helped the state fall into the financial abyss.

And since Zhirinovsky is unable to defend the interests of his family for natural reasons, and his son abruptly left politics, losing all leverage, they decided to shake them up a bit and started with Grishaeva, as the weakest link. However, this is still an assumption. The fact remains that Nadezhda Grishaeva is making enormous efforts to clean up the dirt on her person.

Zhirinovsky himself and his son Igor Lebedev are subject to EU sanctions, but Zhirinovsky’s wife Galina Lebedeva and Igor Lebedev’s second wife Nadezhda Grishaeva are not. It was their wives who owned luxury real estate and hotels in Spain, as described in the investigations by The Project and Baza published in February and March 2019. And this property could have been bought with the illegal earnings of the Zhirinovsky family in the Liberal Democratic Party.

Grishaeva did not respond to the Agency’s questions at the time of publication.