It’s a wedding gift, says Putin aide with the £397,000 watch

By Margaret.

Dmitry Peskov, President Putin’s veteran spokesman, was photographed at his wedding last weekend wearing a Swiss wristwatch that is claimed to be worth £397,000 — four times the Kremlin official’s declared annual income.

Alexei Navalny, the opposition campaigner, spotted that Mr Peskov, 47, was wearing a limited edition Richard Mille RM 52-01 watch at his lavish wedding on Saturday to Tatyana Navka, 40, an ice dancer and the 2006 Olympic champion, in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi.

Mr Navalny demanded yesterday that the Kremlin explain the provenance of the timepiece, photographs of which have caused outrage online.

He said that the watch was beyond Mr Peskov’s means if his official income was to be believed, and that anti-corruption legislation required him to forfeit the watch if it was a gift.

The Kremlin has not responded to the allegations, although one prominent guest at the wedding leapt to Mr Peskov’s defence, claiming that the watch had been worn deliberately as part of an elaborate practical joke to fool journalists.

Oleg Mitvol, a politician who was at the wedding, told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper that the groom had borrowed the watch from a rich friend for the wedding photographs, knowing that they would be scrutinised.

Later last night, however, that version melted away as Mr Peskov claimed that the watch was a wedding present from his bride.

“It’s a gift from Tanya,” he told RBK media group. “The watch really is very expensive. But it is considerably less expensive than some comrades are saying.”

The opposition rejected Mr Peskov’s explanation and posted a photograph of him wearing the same watch bearing a skull design on the dial while hugging Ms Navka two weeks before the wedding.

It is not the first time that luxury watches have landed Russia’s elite in the spotlight. Mr Putin is known to have a penchant for extravagant wristwatches. In 2012, a report by an opposition group said that by studying photographs of the Russian leader, they had calculated that Mr Putin has a collection of wristwatches worth almost £500,000 — considerably higher than his salary.

The president also has a habit of giving away expensive watches. In 2009 he gave a £5,500 Swiss Blancpain watch to a factory worker, a month after he had given a watch to the son of a shepherd.

Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has also been criticised for wearing an expensive watch.

In 2012 a £19,000 Breguet watch he had been photographed wearing was airbrushed out of an image, sparking ridicule online when the reflection of the watch was still visible on a shiny surface.

The Russian opposition, and Mr Navalny in particular, have tried to build their political platforms by exposing official corruption and belittling the Kremlin’s efforts to prevent it.

Last week a defence ministry official, who in May was supposed to have been jailed for five years on charges of embezzlement, was purportedly spotted at a bank in an expensive district of central Moscow.

Yevgeniya Vasilyeva, 36, the former director of Oboronservis, a military property company, had been the key figure in a huge corruption scandal in which millions had gone missing.

Her lawyer said it was nonsense that she had been spotted in Moscow, but MPs for the nationalist Liberal Democratic party have demanded that the prison authorities clarify her whereabouts.

MPs are reportedly drafting legislation that would prescribe longer jail terms for criminals who pay lookalikes or doubles to serve their jail terms for them.