Who is Andrey Matus, the ‘fixer’ who reportedly gave Navalny’s team info linking a Khodorkovsky ally to attacks on Russian dissidents?

In mid-September, Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) released an bombshell investigation accusing former Yukos executive Leonid Nevzlin of hiring men to attack Navalny allies Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov as well as Alexandra Petrachkova, the wife of exiled economist Maxim Mironov. The allegations were based on messages apparently written by Nevzlin that were provided to the FBK by someone named Andrey Matus, whom the foundation referred to as a “fixer” with links to Russian law enforcement. Nevzlin dismissed the FBK’s investigation as having been “concocted in Moscow” and denied all of the group’s claims. His defenders, including his longtime associate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have also suggested the “leaks” may be part of a disinformation effort by Russia’s intelligence services. One source of uncertainty regarding the situation is the fact that Nevzlin’s alleged messages came from Matus, about whom relatively little is known publicly. Journalists from The Bell dug into this murky figure’s biography and business dealings, and even spoke to Matus himself. In English, Meduza shares a summary of their report.

Andrey Matus was born and raised in Russia’s Krasnodar region. The 39-year-old got his first criminal conviction in 2004, though it’s unclear what his offense was. In 2016, despite not being officially employed at any Russian companies or owning stock in any businesses, he drove a Bentley Continental.

Until 2019, according to Matus, his sole place of employment was a firm called Gurman. The company, which was registered to his relatives, packaged canned meat and bid on contracts with the Russian Coast Guard, a unit of the Federal Security Service (FSB). Some years, the company reported $0 in revenue. In 2019, it was dissolved by the Federal Tax Service.

Matus denies that he ever worked in government procurement, saying that he simply rented out space in the meat processing facility. “I was employed at Gurman, my meat processing plant. I registered part of the business to my relatives, but they never took part in it. Yes, the company’s financial reports didn’t show any revenue, but that’s just how Russian business works — you’re asking questions you already know the answer to,” he said.

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An acquaintance of Matus told The Bell that, in reality, Matus sold fixer services to Krasnodar businessmen and officials. According to this source, Matus would learn from Russian security services how much it would cost to solve a given issue, add a 25 percent markup, and act as a middleman. However, when he tried to operate at the federal level, representing clients from Moscow in the Krasnodar region, he ran into trouble: according to the acquaintance, Matus would “try to fool” both his local contacts and his federal clients by misleading both sides about the cut he was keeping for himself.

Ultimately, Matus was charged with fraud after promising to help Svetlana Yarovaya, the deputy mayor of the town of Anapa, get rid of a criminal case over alleged abuse of power for a fee of 37 million rubles ($400,000). Yarovaya paid Matus the money, but he failed to resolve the problem. In 2018, he was sentenced to five years in prison, but he was released on parole in 2019. “Yes, I engaged in fraud, but I returned all the money and I believe I’ve atoned for my guilt,” he told The Bell.

The Nevzlin messages

In 2022, according to Matus, he moved to Turkey, where he opened a company and started a restaurant. Then, in 2023, he returned to Russia for reasons related to his work for Leonid Nevzlin, whom he’d met through the editorial team of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s news outlet MBK Media. Another one of Khodorkovsky’s media projects, the Dossier Center, has reported that Matus had served as an informant for journalists at several outlets.

Matus gave The Bell a new account of how he obtained Nevzlin’s compromising messages:

According to Matus, he initially only shared the messages from the phones with the FBK. When they “dragged their feet” on publishing the information, he brought the material to the police, who he says may have provided it to RT. (The Russian propaganda outlet, which published Nevzlin’s alleged correspondence a few days before the FBK did, claimed to have received the messages from a source in the Russian opposition.)

According to The Bell, Andrey Matus may owe his law enforcement connections to his father, Dmitry Matus, who once co-founded a company that bid on repair and cleaning contracts for the FSB Border Service, among other things. In 2014, the older Matus became the head of a company that serviced a resort owned by Western-sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska. According to one source who spoke to The Bell, top Russian officials and security officers frequently visited the resort, and Dmitry Matus met many of them personally. He now reportedly heads multiple companies with links to Deripaska.

The Bell’s source claimed that Andrey Matus took advantage of his father’s connections in the past but that they eventually had a falling out. Matus himself, meanwhile, told journalists that his work and his father’s work never overlapped since Matus Sr. has always worked under official contracts, while Matus Jr. “works for himself.” He also denied having any ties to the FSB, saying: “I’ve been out of the country for four years, and before that, I was in prison. I don’t even know who works there now.”

Matus said that he’s been working for Nevzlin for the past three years. He claimed that his decision to send Nevzlin’s messages to the FBK was an altruistic one: “Hitting women with strollers, in my view, is just too much,” he explained. Matus told The Bell that he’s currently in Moscow.