Mikhail Trepashkin

Mikhail Ivanovich Trepashkin (Russian: Михаи́л Ива́нович Трепа́шкин) (born 7 April 1957) is a Moscow attorney and former Federal Security Service colonel who was invited by MP Sergei Kovalev to assist in an independent inquiry of the Russian apartment bombings in September 1999 that followed the Dagestan war and were one of the causes of the Second Chechen War.

Mikhail Trepashkin started working for the KGB in 1984 as an investigator of underground trade in stolen art. At the beginning of the 1990s, Trepashkin moved to the Internal Affairs department of the 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, described by Scott Anderson in a 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. In the van was Vladimir Romanovich, an FSB agent who Trepashkin claims was working for the criminals. However, most of those arrested in the sting were released. Nikolai Patrushev took Trepashkin off the case, and began an investigation of Trepashkin instead.

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