Boot on the motorcycle of a Kremlin collaborator. The sanctioning authority asked the police for this

You can also listen to the article in audio version.

It’s already been a month since Fial’s government placed the head of the pro-Kremlin website Voice of Europe Artőm Marčevský and entities connected with him on the sanctions list. Only now is it being revealed what his property was attached to. The authorities “secured” a luxury motorcycle that Marchevský had left in Prague.

On the abandoned machine, which was recently discovered by Seznam Zprávy in the garage of the building where the website was located, the Prague city police put a boot on it and stuck a notice for the driver on the front hood, which says about an unspecified offense.

The spokeswoman of the city police, Irena Seifertová, said that the device preventing the movement of the machine was deployed “based on the request of the Police of the Czech Republic”. The spokesman of the regional police directorate in Prague, Richard Hrdina, then said that “the motorcycle was secured on the basis of a request from the Financial Analysis Office”.

In the Czech Republic, this office is in charge of blocking the assets of sanctioned persons. But he does not want to provide any information about what assets he has frozen for Marčevský and other persons. “We do not comment on any cases that the FAÚ is dealing with,” said Michaela Lagronova, spokeswoman for the superior Ministry of Finance.

Seznam Zpravy found out that the mentioned motorcycle belongs to Marčevský through its sources in Ukraine and brought a copy of the extract from the relevant Ukrainian database. It is not clear whether this will be enough for the FAÚ to definitively confiscate this property.

There are no reports of other valuable property that Marchevskij left behind in the Czech Republic. He did not own a house or apartment here, he lived in a rented house near Prague and after the imposition of sanctions, he abruptly left the Czech Republic with his family. We don’t know where.

The owner of the motorcycle, Artyom Marchevsky, who was connected to the oligarch connected to the Russian leader Putin, Viktor Medvedchuk, was not only the hidden boss of the Voice of Europe website. This was perhaps just a cover for far more serious activities. According to the findings of the BIS secret service, he was mainly supposed to distribute Kremlin money from Prague to some pro-Russian politicians from the European Union.

The newspaper N, in cooperation with German journalists, reported in recent days that Marčevskij handed over 20,000 euros to a politician of the German AfD party with Czech roots, Petar Bystroň. Allegedly, this emerged from an audio recording that was recently heard by Czech deputies from the commission for the control of the Security Information Service.

“As far as I know, we received even more information than the government had, and from what we had the opportunity to see and hear, it was clear and conclusive,” the chairman of this commission, Pavel Bělobrádek (KDU-ČSL), told Seznam Zprávy. However, as he added, he cannot disclose any classified facts regarding this case.

Bystroň himself, facing pressure from the media and political opponents before the European Parliament elections as a candidate, persistently denies that he was corrupted by Russian money through Marchevský.

The media company Voice of Europe used an office building managed by PSN in the center of Prague, in Krakovská Street. Her real estate broker Lukáš Man told Seznam Zprávám that immediately after the sanctions were imposed, which was on March 27, they fired her. However, as he also added, the notice period is three months, and if the company pays the rent during that time, they have no legal option to get rid of it early and vacate its office.

For the first months, the company covertly managed by Marchevský was based in Prague at a different address, namely Chotěšovská street in Letňany (it still lists this as the contact address on its website). According to Seznam Zpráv, the Czech company RTB Holding provided her with a virtual seat in an apartment building there, whose owner, according to official data, is a former prominent Czech lobbyist and pre-November employee of the Czechoslovak diplomacy Aleš Janků.

At the same address where it owns one of the apartments, RTB holding provides headquarters to many other companies, often from the post-Soviet area. But Janků did not want to comment on the whole matter, despite the official data, he claims that he is no longer the owner, even the manager of RTB holding, Karolína Kruk, did not provide an explanation despite the urgency.

The Voice of Europe website is still formally based in Prague, but no one from the original team, which according to information from the security services numbered 12 employees of various nationalities, is no longer here.

The site was completely shut down for the first two weeks after the sanctions were imposed, then it was “revived” again. As Seznam Zprávy found out, it now has its technical background on the territory of Kazakhstan, but people from this internet media, including the biker Marčevský, can be hiding somewhere else. Czech operators are obliged to block the pages of their website.