“We have done exactly what we have promised,” the Kremlin’s loudest critic announced Monday on social media. “We present to you the Anti-Corruption Foundation International – an international non-profit anti-corruption organization.”
Former Belgian Prime Minister and member of the European Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and historian, Anne Applebaum, American political scientist, political economist, and writer Francis Fukuyama, and Navalny’s wife Yulia Navalnaya are now on the advisory board of the Anti-Corruption Foundation International (acf).
“The Foundation will be completely transparent and clear, and the first contribution to its existence will be the Sakharov Prize, awarded to me by the European Parliament,” Navalny stressed, referring to the 50,000 euro (US$50,318) Freedom of Thought prize he received.
He reiterated that “corruption kills,” and that this has never been more clear than now, as Putin is pounding Ukrainian cities.
“Putin and his circle have done everything to stay in power — and steal, and steal, and steal some more. High on their own supply, they started a devastating war,” Navalny said.
The Foundation – acf, he added, has the power to make sure that “these murderers and thieves can’t enjoy their ill-gotten gains.”
“We will find all of their mansions in Monaco, their villas in Miami, their riches everywhere — and when we do, we will take everything from the criminal Russian elite,” he stressed.
As Russia’s most known anti-graft organization, the FBK and Navalny himself have faced numerous lawsuits for their journalistic investigations into the wealth of the country’s oligarchs, such as Oleg Deripaska or Yevgeny Prigozhin, or top officials, like former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, up to the very top – President Vladimir Putin.
Although Navalny’s FBK had nothing to do with extremism, and was instead investigating and revealing corruption deeply rooted among the elite of the Russian Federation, Russia’s Interior Ministry designated in June 2021 the Moscow-based, non-profit Foundation as an “extremist” group, classifying it alongside the Islamic State.
Navalny’s Headquarters and the Citizens’ Rights Protection Organization were both included in the same bundle.
Jailed in one of Russia’s scariest prisons – IK-6 Federal Penitentiary Colony in the village of Melekhovo, Navalny remains determined to shed light on corruption and crime at the very top of the Russian state.“We have been fighting Putin since 2011. We will fight him until we win,” he concluded.
