A certain Mikhail Rabo has been arrested in Berlin. Mikhail Grunvald, the spokesperson for the capital prosecutor’s office, alleges that he played the key role in a so called “tambovskaya malyshev’s group” much talked about in the EU countries after 13 June. On that day, 400 employees from the Spanish counter-corruption agency made searchings in about 30 villas, hot spots and offices and arrested over 20 expatriate Russians from St Petersburg and other Russian regions (see issue 43 of Novaya Gazeta).    

German law enforcement bodies do not make a secret out of the fact their action in Berlin is related directly to those events. The Berlin businessman Rabo, 55, had been visited by “authoritative” persons arrested in the course of Troika operation shortly before the detentions done. What the arrested call to be a “birthday party” is considered to have been “thieves’ gathering”, by German investigators, a meeting where new schemes of laundering the Russian criminal money were discussed.   

As for Mr. Rabo himself, who used to be a member of the Central Council of the Jews from FRG, he is known in the criminal circles under the nickname of Kolokolchik (fittingly, Bell). This migrant from St Petersburg has an apartment in Halmstrasse in a prestigious living area Scharlottenburg, also a chic villa in Grunevald-Trabener Strasse. He is an owner of a restaurant near Oliver Plaza and a casino in Poland. He goes around in a limousine costing half a million Euros, allegedly received from an unknown person as a gift. Mikhail Rabo’s wife heads the Berlin branch of a Latvian Parex Bank.      

Many reputable German newspapers like Berliner Zeitung, Handelsblaat, Focus stress a close relation of Rabo with not unknown Kumarin who is considered to be the head of Tambovskaya criminal organized group, by Russian law enforcers. And Germans hint at his possible relations with Vladimir Putin when the latter was deputy Petersburg’s mayor and the head of Foreign Economic Activities Committee.       

After Rabo was arrested, Yurgen Rot, an expert for Russian mafia and the author of a celebrated bestseller “Gangsters from the East”, commented that although Kumarin (aka Barsukov), has a detailed information about Putin’s activities in St Petersburg, he is not likely to have a fortune like that of Khodorkovsky’s. It is more probable that he dies from some disease or maybe gets at large soon. Barsukov is no fool and he keeps to himself what he knows, considering it to be his guarantee of safety.     

Next days the Berlin’s court will be considering the question of passing the Mikhail Rabo’s case to the jurisdiction of Spanish justice.