{"id":254,"date":"2015-06-17T22:45:33","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T04:45:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/supportthebitkovs.com\/?post_type=news&p=254"},"modified":"2015-11-06T14:46:57","modified_gmt":"2015-11-06T20:46:57","slug":"corrieron-7000-millas-aun-asi-putin-los-agarro","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/supportthebitkovs.com\/en\/news\/corrieron-7000-millas-aun-asi-putin-los-agarro\/","title":{"rendered":"Ran 7,000 Miles. Putin Still Got Them."},"content":{"rendered":"
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By:<\/strong>\u00a0Michael Weiss<\/a>
\nReference<\/strong>: The Daily Beast<\/a><\/p>\n

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Double Identity<\/h3>\n
06.17.15<\/span>5:25 AM ET<\/span><\/div>\n
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The Bitkovs had their lives and fortunes destroyed after they crossed Putin\u2019s people, but they believed they\u2019d be OK in Central America. Wrong.<\/div>\n
Igor and Irina Bitkov thought they were safe in Guatemala.The Russian couple had passed six happy years with new lives and new identities in Central America, convinced that their troubles were well behind them. But on\u00a0January 15, Igor, Irina and their 25-year-old daughter Anastasia were arrested in their home just outside Guatemala City. They\u2019ve spent the last five months locked up in pretrial detention, initially spending several days in cages located in the parking garage beneath the city courthouse sleeping on a concrete floor. All three are charged with the illegal possession of identity documents and face possible extradition to Russia. There, Igor and Irina are wanted for alleged financial crimes including fraud, theft and deliberate bankruptcy\u2014charges which they insist are politically motivated inventions.<\/section>\n
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Contrary to the Russian media\u2019s portrayal of them as robber-baron fugitives brought to heel in another hemisphere, the Bitkovs insist that they are the luckless quarry of a state capitalist system that has grown up under 13 years of Vladimir Putin\u2019s kleptocratic rule. Like many who have come before and will no doubt follow them, they say they are the victims of\u00a0reiding.<\/i>\u00a0This is a fairly common scheme whereby agents of the Russian government, organized crime, and rival financial interests (these categories are not always mutually exclusive) conspire to expropriate a successful business and then use a bought-and-paid-for judiciary to railroad the former owners.<\/p>\n

Igor and Irina Bitkov spoke exclusively to The Daily Beast via Skype from a hospital in Guatemala where they\u2019re being kept under 24-hour prison guard. Igor is being treated for ailments that developed during his captivity, including a kidney condition.\u00a0Irina is there with Anastasia, who suffered a nervous breakdown during the early part of her incarceration after she was deprived of her prescribed medication for bipolar disorder, a condition she was first diagnosed with after suffering the gruesome ordeal that prompted the Bitkovs to decide to leave their homeland close to a decade ago.<\/p>\n

In 1993, Igor and Irina Bitkov founded Lesinvest, <\/b>a timber company in Novodvinsk, a city in the Archangel region of Russia. The country at the time was still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dysfunction of former state enterprises unable to meet growing demand for natural resources. Many erstwhile Soviet-run manufacturing giants had gone bankrupt or were underperforming because of outmoded equipment or mismanagement by \u201cred directors.\u201d A fortune was there to be had by hungry, Western-focused capitalists who purchased foundering factories at cut-rate prices and modernized them. The Bitkovs were of that ilk.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the end of 1996,\u201d Igor said, \u201cour company\u2019s revenue was about $100 million. Because we adopted a complex approach, we supplied not only timber but equipment to different industries.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Husband and wife did so well that a year later they relocated to St. Petersburg and rebranded Lesinvest as the North-West Timber Company. Igor became director and Irina board chairman. They also acquired one of the oldest paper-and-pulp factories in Russia, in Kammenogorsk close to the Russian-Finnish border. They proceeded to overhaul it, and their ambition was matched by their success. By 2003, the Kammenogorsk factory was the largest manufacturer of scholastic exercise books in Russia. Two years later, in 1999, the Bitkovs purchased a second major plant, the Neman Cellulose-Paper Factory, in Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.<\/p>\n

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To help finance the refurbishment of both plants, North-West Timber took out a sizable loan from Sberbank, Russia\u2019s largest state-owned financial institution, in the amount of \u20ac450 million, or well over half a billion dollars. Igor said that loan was never paid out in full\u2014such were the caprices of Russian banks\u2014and North-West Timber had to seek additional loans to make up the shortfall. The largest came from Gazprombank and VTB, also controlled by the government. \u201cWe\u2019d been working with all three banks since 2000. We never had any late payments or problems. Nothing,\u201d Igor said.<\/p>\n

Nor did he and Irina face any political pressure or harassment from greedy officials during the first 10 years of North-West Timber\u2019s expansion. \u201cIn fact, we were supported by authorities at the regional and city levels in both St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad.\u201d That changed in 2003.<\/p>\n

The Bitkovs say that beginning that year, government officials began urging them to participate in electoral fraud on behalf of the ruling United Russia party. \u201cWe were supposed to make mandatory payments to those candidates. It was a kind of \u2018request\u2019 in the Russian way,\u201d Igor said. Factory workers at the Kaliningrad plant were were told to vote for designated candidates and were offered free transportation to and from the polls on Election Day.<\/p>\n

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Donetsk Rebels Surrounded, Commander Says<\/div>\n
Inform<\/div>\n
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In 2005, Irina said, she was prevailed upon by one official to both join United Russia and the Russian Union of Entrepreneurs and Industrialists, headed at the time by Yevgeny Primakov, a Soviet-era official who, under Boris Yeltsin\u2019s government in the 1990s, served as director of foreign intelligence, foreign minister, and prime minster. Primakov himself met with the Bitkovs and \u201cinvited\u201d Irina to become the head of United Russia\u2019s local branch in Kaliningrad in 2007. She declined, mainly because by this point she and Igor had grown wary of Putin\u2019s politics and had begun discreetly backing elements of the then-inchoate Russian opposition.<\/p>\n

Then 16-year-old Anastasia was kidnapped. \u201cShe went on a date and didn\u2019t come back for three days,\u201d Igor remembers. \u201cWe were very worried and we tried to determine her whereabouts but failed. I called the police and also my friends in the local police department [in St. Petersburg] because we needed to act very quickly. My friends found out where she was and even contacted her abductors. I received a message that I had to pay $200,000.\u201d\u00a0Igor gave the money to his contacts in the St. Petersburg police department. \u201cThey released my daughter, but we found out she had been raped and was in a very traumatized psychological state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anastasia grew anorexic and distant;<\/b> once devout, she abandoned her faith and refused to go to church. She\u2019d eventually be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which her family says was brought on by her trauma. The doctors who examined her also told them that she\u2019d been drugged during the three-day disappearance, accounting for her short-term amnesia about what had transpired. And the St. Petersburg police filled in more relevant details for Igor and Irina.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThey released my daughter, but we found out she had been raped and was in a very traumatized psychological state.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Their daughter, the officers said, had been taken by a notorious criminal gang in the city, one that specialized in industrial espionage and the collection of\u00a0kompromat,<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>or\u00a0<\/i>embarrassing, blackmail-able information on high-value targets. The gang was known to drug its victims, just as it had done to Anastasia. It also had conspicuous ties to the FSB and would not have kidnapped the daughter of a rich paper magnate without the agency\u2019s say-so. Igor\u2019s contacts in the police asked him if he\u2019d had any run-ins with the Russian services in the past. He hadn\u2019t. \u201cAfter that,\u201d he said, \u201cI made up my mind to evacuate my family from Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Bitkovs first took Anastasia to Tibet for three weeks because she\u2019d always wanted to go there. They then checked her into a medical clinic in Israel where she could recover physically and psychologically from her trauma. She stayed until September 2007, then moved to Britain and enrolled in school. She has never returned to Russia.<\/p>\n

Igor and Irina, meanwhile, did travel back to oversee their two big development projects. The climate in Russia had now changed for them. \u201cThe people in the banks started to keep a distance from us,\u201d Igor said. \u201cIt became impossible to get new credits.\u201d There were several break-ins at North-West Timber\u2019s offices at night, with corporate documents and digital data stolen. Each time, the night watchmen professed not to have seen untoward activity. The Bitkovs also allege that they were personally spied on. \u201cOur house was even bugged,\u201d Igor said. \u201cWe even found the wires in the power sockets in the bathroom.\u201d<\/p>\n

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