Putin’s former banker warns about his health
Sergei Pugachev, who led the campaign that brought Putin to power, stresses that “it is clear that the Russian president is not in his best state.”
Sergei Pugachev, who was head of the presidential campaign that brought Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin 22 years ago, gave an interview to El Independiente in which he spoke about how the current president of Russia behaves behind closed doors and gave an indication about what his current state of health is.
Pugachev, nicknamed “Putin’s banker,” is an international investor who was part of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle at the turn of the century. However, since 2011 he fell out of favor with the Russian president and has been immersed in multiple criminal proceedings. As a result, his assets (which amount to 15,000 million dollars) were frozen and he was forced to leave Russia for Great Britain and later ended up in France, where he currently resides.
What one billion dollars really means
From that moment on, Pugachev has never missed the opportunity to take revenge by talking openly about a Vladimir Putin whom he defines as “a pathological liar” who “lies for no reason. He did it to me and he has done it again now in Ukraine. The bombs fall on civilian targets but instead Putin says they do not attack civilians”.
“Putin is not in his best state”
The person who was Putin’s shadow during his beginnings in the Kremlin said of the Russian leader, “It is evident that he is not in his best state. He was someone who took great care of himself.”.
Pugachev added that “Putin used to swim for four hours a day; then he received massages and they gave him a manicure and pedicure,” - care that, according to him, does not correspond to his current appearance.
“He is only 69 years old but he looks 90 years old. So, given all the money and resources he has, he’s probably very sick. Even people who have worked their entire lives in a mine look better,” Pugachev warned.
Putin’s obsession with money
The interviewee says that “when Putin was chosen as a presidential candidate, he made it clear that he was doing it for money. “He told us, ‘I can be your president; just pay me’”.
Regarding the wealth that Putin could have accumulated during his long term in office, Pugachev revealed, “Starting out from the fact that there was a tacit agreement to consider that all businesses belong to the leader, and that the businessmen accepted it as a new way of operating, the fortune built up by Putin and his family could exceed trillions of dollars”.
About this system, Putin’s former campaign manager points out that “the oligarchs understood towards the end of the 2000s that all the money they had amassed was common property. All their fortunes were under Putin’s responsibility or belonged to him. Today, the system is like a cooperative in the hands of Putin and those closest to him.”