Perhaps most surprising of all the Panama Papers’ Russian revelations is the role that a St. Petersburg cellist and musical director has played in controlling a good chunk of Putin’s personal fortune. Fittingly, the man is also Putin’s best friend and godfather to his first-born daughter, Maria. Sergei Roldugin was previously known to own 3.2 percent of Bank Rossiya’s shares. He has now been outed as raking in $9.2 million a year and keeping $27 million in cash via a hitherto undocumented 12.5 percent stake in Video International, Russia’s largest advertising agency, which at one point controlled 70 percent of the country’s ad market. Video International was founded by Mikhail Lesin, Putin’s former press minister, who turned up dead last November in a Dupont Circle hotel in Washington, D.C., the result of “blunt force injuries of the head” and “the neck, torso, upper extremities, and lower extremities,” as the city medical examiner announced months later.
