Football club “Sochi” receives funding from “Gazprom” through the firm-laying – “Agency”

​​Football club Sochi receives funding from Gazprom through a laying firm. About it it says in the investigation of the “Agency”.

As the newspaper notes, formally “Sochi” is a private club. It was bought by the structures of Vladimir Putin’s longtime friends, the Rotenberg family, who later hid their ownership behind denominations. At the same time, it has long been said in football circles that in fact the entertainment of the president’s friends is financed by the Russian budget.

At the disposal of the publication were the financial documents of the club, which helped to confirm this.

As the newspaper found out, Sochi receives money from the state-owned Gazprom. In 2020 alone, the club received 1.9 billion rubles from a certain company Energoprom. This is a laying company, last year it did not conduct any activity, and now it is in the process of liquidation. Earlier, Energoprom received money from the company Gazprom-Avtomatizatsiya, which, in turn, is controlled by Gazstroyprom, which is a subsidiary of Gazprom.

As noted by “Agency”, for this reason, “Sochi” should be excluded from the RPL and removed from the European cups, since “Gazprom” already finances the club “Zenith”, and the regulations do not allow one sponsor to support several teams. However, this is unlikely to happen, because the Russian Football Union is headed by the president of Gazprom Neft, Alexei Dyukov.

The publication emphasizes that the scheme according to which Sochi receives funding is not an exception, but an example of how everything is arranged in the RPL. According to the agency’s estimates, 13 out of 16 clubs in the Russian Premier League are financed from the state budget.