Vladimir Putin has put Colonel-General of Police Andrey Kikot in charge of “fighting illegal migration”. Our new investigation shows that Kikot himself has been making money off undocumented migrant workers for years. Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation has uncovered how Kikot’s family receives tens of millions of rubles from the developer Setl Group and other state companies through shell companies registered to his wife, mother and ex-wife.

Through the companies Est-Monolit and Energostroytekh, Kikot’s relatives get contracts for construction works almost exclusively from billionaire Maksim Shubarev’s Setl Group and from Gazprom structures. In just the last year and a half, these firms received over 2 billion rubles to their accounts. The money is funneled to subcontractors, while part of it remains with the Kikot family as a mark-up and dividends. At the same time, one of Kikot’s own companies has been caught by the police for illegally employing foreign workers — under the exact same article he is now supposed to enforce.

Setl Group’s main business is massive housing construction in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, where thousands of migrants work on its building sites. Kikot’s migration service regularly stages high-profile raids with dogs on the same sites from which his family receives money. With one hand the general “fights” illegal migrants; with the other, he profits from their labour.

For these services, Kikot and his relatives effectively live off their oligarch sponsor in luxury property: three apartments worth about 205 million rubles in Setl Group’s high-end MORE residential complex in St. Petersburg; a five-room apartment in an elite building on Sadovnicheskaya Embankment in Moscow; a rented 286-square-meter apartment on Prechistenka Street in a house where Putin’s closest circle live; plus a palace-like apartment in Yessentuki and expensive real estate owned by Kikot’s stepmother in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yalta. The total value of the assets we found exceeds 1 billion rubles.

By putting a man like this in charge of migration policy, Putin shows that the regime has no intention of solving the migration crisis — only of cashing in on it. This is not a fight against illegal migration, but a cynical business shared between law-enforcement generals and oligarchs. In our investigation we publish documents, bank records and property data on the Kikot family and call on journalists, Interior Ministry employees and everyone concerned about migration in Russia to study and share these findings.