How a Friend of Putin's Daughter Is Connected to Vaccine Used in Kazakhstan

Starting this year, the national vaccination calendar in Kazakhstan includes vaccination against the human papillomavirus. 

A document concerning the vaccination is at Orda's disposal. The document lists a certain "R-Pharm Kazakhstan." Orda has looked into the matter.

Unchallenged

According to Kazakhstan's Committee for Sanitary and Epidemiological Control of the Ministry of Health (KSEK), the HPV vaccine has already been purchased. 

For vaccination against HPV in Kazakhstan, the quadrivalent Gardasil vaccine produced by Merck Sharp and Dome (USA), which protects against the most oncogenic types of HPV (6, 11, 16, 18), will be used. To date, 350 thousand doses of the HPV vaccine have been purchased in the amount of 9.7 billion tenge, KSEK assures.

The vaccination will begin in September for 11-year-old girls.

Questions do arise when studying the document our editors received. According to our source, this is a protocol of the bidding results for purchasing the Gardasil vaccine conducted by SK-Pharmacia LLP.

This document indicates that the auction took place in April 2024. The number of doses specified in the document is slightly less than the figure named by KSEK - 349.5 thousand. But the amount allocated for them in the document is almost twice as much as the department says: more than 17 billion tenge.  The only bidder was the R-Pharm Kazakhstan company.

There are two organizations in Kazakhstan called “R-Pharm.” One is the representative office of R-Pharm CJSC in Kazakhstan, and the second is R-Pharm Kazakhstan LLP. One person heads both. The only difference between them is their legal status. Both are directly related to the Russian pharmaceutical giant R-Pharm. 

Big Pharmacy

R-Pharm is a leading medicine supplier to state clinics in Russia. It sells both domestically produced drugs and those purchased outside the Russian Federation. The numbers demonstrate the scale of the company’s turnover: Its 2022 net profit amounted to 157 billion rubles, more than two billion dollars. 

Ten percent of R-Pharm's shares are owned by the Japanese company Mitsui and one percent by Cypriot RJ Pharma Holdings Limited. However, the remaining 89 percent still belongs to the Russians. As of 2022, they have been divided between several owners. Three of them are top managers of the company, and the fourth is a woman named Valeria Daeva. 

In 2023, the Russian investigative Scanner Project reported that Valeria Daeva is the mother of Russian millionaire Alexei Repik. He was the primary owner of R-Pharm until 2022. The division of 89% of the shares was a thinly disguised attempt to evade Western sanctions. Repik still fell under them in 2023. 

However, this does not prevent him from having direct ties to R-Pharm. As the Russian Forbes wrote, Repik became the sole owner of the Moscow Medical Center Research Lab last year. It was later reported that this center would become a testing facility for medicines produced by R-Pharm. 

According to open data, “R-Pharm Cosmetics” and “R-Pharm Medical Systems” still list Alexey Repik as a founder  (stakeholder). Together with his mother, who officially owns a third of the pharmaceutical giant’s shares, Repik heads the Solar City company: he is the founder (stakeholder), and Daeva is the general director.

Family Over Everything

Russian investigative projects have directly linked Alexey Repik to Vladimir Putin's family. In headlines, he is often called “a friend of Putin’s daughter.” Repik gained this “status” after an investigation conducted in 2022 by Vazhniye Istorii and Der Spiegel. 

Members of the Putin family used a Bombardier aircraft with tail number M-FINE. This business jet belongs to the offshore company of the famous Russian entrepreneur Alexei Repik, founder of the pharmaceutical holding R-Pharm,Vazhniye Istorii reported. 

Six months later, The Insider released its investigation. The authors discovered that Repik’s company, Ryatiko, imported expensive European wines into Russia, bypassing sanctions. They claim the wines were intended for Putin’s family. 

Repik is indeed no stranger to Putin. Putin meets with him annually in the Kremlin. Repik has acted as the chairperson of the public organization “Business Russia.” In January 2024, Repik was the moderator at Putin’s meeting with entrepreneurs in Khabarovsk. He sat to the left of the president. However, there are other eye-brow-raising moments.

Investigators suggest that it was precisely his closeness to Putin’s family that helped Repik halt claims from Russian antimonopoly officials. In 2018, they claimed possible collusion between R-Pharm and the Russian Ministry of Health. Nothing came of this.

The above Scanner Project investigation, released in January 2023, states that Valeria Daeva owned the R-Stroy construction company. According to the investigation, this organization is a crucial contractor for constructing new houses in Mariupol. On Russian job sites, R-Stroy has job vacancies in the occupied city.

Valeria Daeva is not among its heads. Yet, the Daev-Repikov family knows how to play things off as if they have nothing to do with anything.

Original Author: Igor Ulitin 

DISCLAIMER: This is a translated piece. The text has been modified, the content is the same. Please refer to the original piece in Russian for accuracy.