Baltic States – CIS, Business, Estonia, Investments, Legislation, Real Estate

Andrus Ansip.

The Wednesday show of the weekly ETV’s investigative journalism programmed "Pealtnägija" (“Eyewitness”) revealed, and Eesti Ekspress wrote on Thursday of a wide-scale business of mediating residence permits to Russian businessmen carried out by PRU politicians MP Siim Kabrits, MP Indrek Raudne and Tallinn city council member Nikolay Stelmach. Namely, over a hundred wealthy Russian and Byelorussian citizens were ascertained registering their companies at the address of an apartment in Tallinn that belongs to the PRU members. While the men claim that their work was quite legal and involved attracting investments to Estonia and managing assets of wealthy foreigners, some sources claimed that the real aim of the business was to get the businessmen, as board members of a company, an Estonian residence permit and thus a freedom to travel freely in Europe, reports LETA.

MP Indrek Raudne who is one of the most powerful members of IRL, Tallinn City councillor Nikolai Stelmach and another IRL MP Siim Kabrits jointly own an apartment at Kooli 1/3 in Tallinn Old Town in which about Russian millionaires have registered about a hundred companies, writes Estonian news service BBN referring to the investigation carried out by Eyewitness.

Ansip said that interior minister Ken-Marti Vaher has to find out how these residence permits were issued and whether the investments that were allegedly made were fictitious or not.

As BBN reports, at least in one case, the person who received Estonian residence permit was a notorious Russian business person Sergey Lalakin.

According to Vladimir Jushkin, the Head of the Baltic Center of Russian Studies, Lalakin is a billionaire and former head of the Podolski mafia that in the middle of 1990s was the most powerful criminal gang in the Moscow region with 2,500 firearms. His right-arm man Boriss Unichenkovo served as a sports and tourism minister in the first government of Vladimir Putin, BBN writes.

"Trading with residence permits doesn't speak about highly developed ethics. It is early for me to give evaluations as to whether it was a crime or not. I hope that an analysis compiled by the interior ministry will give an answer to that," said Ansip at the government's press conference.

According to Ansip, the state cannot allow someone laughing at it.

"If a permit was issued without cause, it has to be withdrawn," he said, adding that PRU chairman Mart Laar is of the same position.