Alexandru Babakov was born in Chisinau. He has graduated from the Lomonosov State University in Moscow, learning political economics and doing post-graduate studies there.

Mr. Babakov is the deputy chairman of the Russian State Duma and a member of the faction of Spravedlivaya Rossija (Just Russia), which counts 28 lawmakers in the 447-strong house. It’s his fourth term.

For four years, he worked as the manager of Albion CZ spol SRL, a Czech company handling assistance and trading services, which was closed in 2014.

According to the Panama Papers dossier, between April 2007 and September 2011, while serving as a member of the State Duma, Mr. Babakov fully controlled AED International Ltd., an offshore firm in the British Virgin Islands. In September 2011, he donated the firm to his 23-year-old daughter Olga.

Official documents from AED International Ltd. show that Mr. Babakov is one of the owners of VS Energy, a Ukrainian energy holding with a turnover of 235 million dollars in 2015. It has branches in Lithuania. Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and all are run from Ukraine and Russia.

Alexandr Babakov emerged as a central piece in a scandal in Ukraine in 2012. The law enforcement agencies proved that he had seized all key hotels in the Kiev downtown: Rus, Premier Palace, President, Dnepr, and was fighting in a court of law for Slavutich Hotel. Ukrainian media said Babakov’s assets in Kiev could be used by Moscow to trouble the European Football Championship, which was due to take place in Ukraine.

The newspaper Fokus named Alexandr Babakov as one of the 100 richest Ukrainians (53rd spot), estimating his fortune at 91 million US dollars. French official records show that the Babakov family owns a luxury mansion near Versailles, the former residence of French kings.

In 2012, President Vladimir Putin appointed Mr. Babakov as his special envoy for cooperation with Russian expats’ organizations abroad. In this position, he funded the far-right French party Popular Front. The latter received the first tranche from a 9-million-euro loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank.

His vote on 20 March 2014 to turn the Crimean Autonomous Republic into a Russian federal region attracted sanctions from the European Union, Canada, and Switzerland. In 2017, the United States slapped Mr. Babakov with its own sanctions, and the United Kingdom joined the suit in March 2022.

As for his criminal links in Ukraine, there are records showing that Alexandr Babakov returned to Ukraine in late 1990s as a leader of the organized crime group called Luzhniki. The group had run businesses in a violent way, torturing people into concessions, threatening rivals, and kidnapping. Thanks to the former Russian ambassador to Ukraine, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and the first ideologists of the so-called Russian World, he participated in the assembly of the Russian Club, which included ex-presidents Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovich, and Viktor Medvedchuk, godfather to one of Putin’s daughters.