Leontiev & Zheleznyak had no role in the Navalny card project

On May 15, 2012, ACF announced the Navalny card project, and GQ published an “inside scoop” on LIFE Group’s bank being behind the collab. That is how the dissenting bankers legend was born.

But even the GQ piece admitted Probusinessbank’s senior spokesperson had shrugged it off. According to the magazine’s source, the bank co-owners were clueless about it. But then the article got updated on that same day. Slava Solodky, LIFE’s vice-president for advertising and public relations, retracted the story. He wrote, “We have nothing to do with this project—and never did.”

On that very day, Alexander Zheleznyak, too, said the bank had nothing to do with the project. His statement was not published until later. Perhaps the employees somehow entertained the idea, but the chairman of the board knew nothing about it.

Panteleev’s statement

The fact that Bank24.ru had nothing to do with the Navalny card project was corroborated by Eduard Pantellev, the former chairman of the board at Bank24.ru and member of the board at Probusinessbank. He said:

“The idea of launching a co-branded card with part of a commission fee donated to the Anti-Corruption Foundation was not conceived by Sergei Leontiev. I personally repudiated the idea as it did not align with the bank’s strategy. We found it unacceptable to endorse any political activism as it ran against the best interests of the bank’s customers and shareholders, that is, the bank’s profitability. In my opinion, politics should be kept out of the business processes.”

Panteleev testified in Prague. Now he is based out of London and stays involved with the banking projects. When testifying, he was safe and could not be browbeaten into this statement by the repressive Russian regime.

He asserts that the bank declined to launch the card project not because it was pressured into it by Russia’s intelligence agencies.

Given the above, it is safe to assume the two banksters had nothing to do with Navalny. If there is anyone who can be referred to as “Navalny’s banker,” it is Mikhail Fridman. Navalny opened an account with Fridman’s Alfa-Bank in 2012. That account was used to raise the funds for his mayoral and presidential campaigns. By contrast, Yandex.Money closed the opposition platform’s accounts for their campaigns. The Alfa-Bank account was alive and kicking until 2020. Neither the bank nor its owner was affected by the collaboration.

Or take Alexander Lebedev and his National Reserve Bank (NRBank), for example. Unlike Probusinessbank, they were publicly speculating about launching the Navalny card for several months. They didn’t, in the end. Besides, Lebedev owns a stake at Novaya Gazeta. Moreover, remarkably, back in the day when he was a minority shareholder at Aeroflot, he appointed Alexei Navalny to the board of directors. During his stint with the airline, Navalny was looking into potential corruption schemes and chronicled it on social media.

That is what it means for a banker to have a political stance. Lebedev’s bank ended up getting eviscerated. But somehow it didn’t have an outstanding debt to its customers and depositors. Do you know why? Lebedev was not stealing money from his customers. Here’s what Lebedev had to say.