Ilya Kligman’s Dubai slush fund: for what FSB officers Evgeniy Sviridov and Sergey Bespalov received a $23 million bribe and prison sentences

In 2024, the Moscow Garrison Military Court sentenced two senior FSB officers.

Sergey Bespalov, formerly of the 2nd Service and Deputy Head of the 4th Service, later serving in the APS FSB, and Evgeniy Sviridov, ex-operative of the 3rd Department of the SEB of the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow Region, were accused of accepting bribes totaling $23 million. The payments, made in cash in Moscow and via designated accounts in Dubai, came from banker Ilya Kligman in exchange for resolving his issues with the GSU of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Central Bank.

In 2024, Evgeniy Sviridov was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment, while Bespalov was sentenced to six years in a penal colony.

Case materials indicate that Vladimir Sergienko, the head of Directorate M of the FSB RF (Bespalov is his closest friend), and Aleksandr Ivanov, the head of Directorate "F" of the GUEBiPK of the Ministry of Internal Affairs RF, could have been involved in receiving the money.

Initially, Andrey Fetisov, vice-president of the Rospolitika foundation, and Bashir Kushtov, a friend of Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Evkurov, were arrested in a chain reaction. At first, they turned on each other one by one, and then they implicated Evgeniy Sviridov, a former operative of the 3rd Department of the SEB of the UFSB of Russia for Moscow and the Moscow Region. The latter, in turn, gave testimony against APS FSB officer Sergey Bespalov.

Sources link Evgeniy Sviridov, whose father was also a chekist, to the team of the former governor of the Tambov region, now Senator Aleksandr Nikitin. Interestingly, a couple of weeks after Sviridov’s arrest, his company "Inkomnefteremont," which had over 2 billion rubles in revenue last year, was re-registered to Ilya Pshennov. The company holds major state contracts from Transneft, RusHydro, FSK-EES, and others, and now the company’s interests (or those of its hidden beneficiaries) have shifted to Chukotka, where it secured a contract worth 10 billion rubles.