Mikhail Trepashkin - Career in FSB

Career in FSB

Mikhail Trepashkin started working in KGB in 1984 as an investigator of underground trade in stolen art. At the beginning of 1990s Trepashkin moved to Internal Affairs department of FSB where he worked for Nikolai Patrushev. He investigated connections of FSB officers with criminal groups. He won a medal for intercepting a plane-load of weapons sold by FSB officers to Chechen rebels.

In 1995, Trepashkin got involved in the Bank Soldi affair. The situation is described by Scott Anderson in his 2009 GQ article. Trepashkin was working on an FSB sting operation against a bank extortion ring linked to Salman Raduyev, a Chechen rebel who was then fighting against Russia in the First Chechen War. The sting resulted in a raid on a Bank Soldi branch in Moscow in Dec 1995. Trepashkin claims that the raid uncovered bugging devices used by the extortionists, whose serial numbers linked their origin to the FSB or Ministry of Defense. Furthermore, a van outside the bank was monitoring the bugging devices, and in this van was an FSB agent, who Trepashkin claims was working for the criminals. His name was Vladimir Romanovich. However, most of those arrested in the sting were released. Nikolai Patrushev took Trepashkin off the case, and began an investigation of him instead.

In 1997 Trepashkin wrote a letter to Yeltsin attempting to bring light to the case and corruption in the FSB. He resigned from the FSB, sued FSB leadership (he won), and got a job with the tax police.

At a press conference on 17 November 1998 Alexander Litvinenko, Victor Shebalin and few other members of FSB claimed to have received an order to kill Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Trepashkin. The group members claimed that the order came from an FSB department called URPO, the Division of Operations against Criminal Organizations.