In March 2009, a bookish-looking Russian senator stepped to the podium at the Brookings Institution in Washington. The occasion was the inauguration of a new think tank devoted to United States-Russia cooperation on financial and energy security, and the speaker, Andrey Vavilov, had donated money.
Mr. Vavilov was introduced as a brave individual who had toiled for years under adverse circumstances in Russia, a onetime deputy finance minister and former proprietor of an oil company. His talk, delivered in Russian, focused on the intricacies of the energy markets.
Behind the trappings of Brookings and his professorial demeanor, though, were some more ambiguous elements of Mr. Vavilov’s career.
At the Finance Ministry during the presidency of Boris N. Yeltsin, he helped develop a market-based economy that would ultimately mint vast riches for insiders. He also wielded enormous power over state revenue and expenditures, including decisions over which banks would garner coveted government deposits. A parliamentary anticorruption committee later investigated allegations against him of favoritism and abuse of power — charges that he denied but that would shadow him for a decade.
He had become extraordinarily wealthy during the early years of Vladimir V. Putin’s presidency, when the oil company he had acquired for $25 million was taken over in 2003 by a state-controlled enterprise for $600 million. It was widely alleged that the purchase price was excessive, and that money was funneled to politicians in the form of kickbacks.
Six years later, as Mr. Vavilov helped inaugurate one new venture in Washington, his personal fortune was bringing another piece of business to fruition in New York. A shell company tied to Mr. Vavilov was poised to buy a penthouse at the Time Warner Center for $37.5 million.
Mr. Vavilov’s purchase — all 8,275 square feet of it, with his-and-her master bathrooms and 360-degree city views — is an opulent example of how the flight of wealth accrued in the chaotic capitalism of post-Soviet Russia has been a powerful force behind the luxury condominium boom reordering New York City’s skyline. (Read a summary of this article in Russian.)
In the decade and a half since Mr. Putin came to power, Russians have socked away hundreds of billions of dollars overseas. Even as the Kremlin was promoting what it called a “deoffshorization” campaign to repatriate Russian capital, an estimated $150 billion left the country last year. Unless Mr. Putin can effectively lock the door, that flow may intensify if Russia’s economy and currency continue to founder.
For many wealthy Russians, a New York condo serves as a double parachute — a safe-deposit box of sorts, and a soft landing spot should the climate back home turn inhospitable or dangerous — even if that apartment sits dark and vacant for most of the year. In the process, the Russians, while not quite as ubiquitous as they are in, say, some of the tonier districts of London, have become the face of a sharpening debate about the impact of New York’s pied-à-terre economy.
In an interview with New York magazine in September 2013, the departing mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, described the wealthy foreigners as “a godsend” whose spending bolsters the city’s economy and provides revenue to take care of poorer New Yorkers. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?” the mayor said, and certainly many of his fellow citizens would agree. But to many others, the Russians, with their reputation for ostentatious wealth, are emblematic of a dangerously expanding gap between the city’s haves and have-nots.
The archetype of the condo boom is the Time Warner Center. Marketed during the real estate malaise that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the towers were heavily promoted to an international clientele. The Russians have come buying.
Many of the apartments were purchased through shell companies, but a New York Times investigation identified at least 20 that have been owned by Russians or citizens of other former Soviet republics who, in all, invested more than $200 million in Time Warner Center condos.
“This building has so many Russians, it’s unbelievable,” said Stratos Costalas, a real estate broker with Oxford Property Group who has sold apartments in the building.
There is evidence of even more Russian owners, but their identities are so carefully concealed that The Times was unable to definitively identify them.
For example, even the longtime renters of Apartment 63B in the south tower do not know the names of their landlords, though they believe they are Russian. Records show that the legal owner is a company called Daloa Group Holdings, but from there the trail goes cold.
Many of the Russians whom The Times was able to identify at the Time Warner Center were players in the epic deals of the Yeltsin era that privatized vast, hulking state companies and created the country’s most powerful oligarchs. And quite a few of their stories circle through that of Mr. Vavilov.
Mr. Vavilov did not respond to requests for an interview for this article. Nor did he speak up publicly a few years ago when a mysterious media blitz of charges and countercharges broke out involving a longtime adversary, a financier and former Russian lawmaker named Ashot Egiazaryan, who was seeking political asylum in the United States.
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A notation with The Journal article did not mention the criminal case, saying merely that Mr. Egiazaryan was living in the United States for his personal safety.
On April 19, 2011, Mr. Egiazaryan filed suit against Mr. Zalmayev in federal court in Manhattan, charging that he had led a malicious disinformation campaign against him. Mr. Zalmayev countersued, and, in the end, the legal confrontation essentially ended in a draw.
Mr. Egiazaryan’s lawyers had contended that one of their client’s rivals in the hotel deal was behind Mr. Zalmayev’s campaign, suggesting that Mr. Vavilov was merely a front. But documents produced in the discovery process and reviewed by The Times, show that in addition to financing the media campaign against Mr. Egiazaryan, Mr. Vavilov was covering Mr. Zalmayev’s legal costs. As of July 2012, nearly two years before the case ended, Mr. Vavilov had run through more than $1.14 million in legal fees.
At one hearing, the federal magistrate, Gabriel Gorenstein, complained of the lack of monetary restraint on both sides. “It’s mysterious to me as to why this litigation has ballooned to what it is now,” he said in a hearing. Mr. Vavilov, he later wrote, “obviously has no interest in the integrity of the United States asylum petitioning process. Rather, he apparently harbors an independent interest in harming Egiazaryan.”
Mr. Egiazaryan remains in the United States. The Justice Department would neither confirm nor deny Russian news media reports that the United States had turned down an extradition request.
Acquaintances say Mr. Vavilov, who resigned from the Russian senate in 2010, lives as a private citizen of Russia, a status that makes him less susceptible to government interference. “He has no political connection,” said Sergei Guriev, former director of the New Economic School in Moscow, where Mr. Vavilov has donated money and sits on the board.
Among Mr. Vavilov’s enterprises is a Russian company, SuperOx, which is developing high-temperature superconductors to improve magnetic levitation technology for high-speed trains.
His foundation has donated more than $1 million to Penn State, where he is a visiting scholar. He appears to relish that connection, displaying a football signed by Joe Paterno, the longtime coach, in his Time Warner pied-à-terre, according to someone who visited there.
The penthouse was recently put on the market for $68 million.
There are signs that Mr. Vavilov may be turning away from the United States.
He has taken a leave of absence this year from Penn State. “I think important Russians, just in general, it’s the case that people whose business interests are in Russia now, they feel very uncomfortable being seen as close to America,” said Barry Ickes, an economics professor there who has worked closely with Mr. Vavilov.
In an interview with the magazine Elle Man Russia, which was posted in English in October on his company’s Facebook page, Mr. Vavilov expressed disenchantment with the American people, characterizing them as overly strict and hypercompetitive.
“As for me (born in the Soviet Union and grown up further in Russia), in United States was built a cruel system, a cruel community, and people who are cruel to each other,” he said.
Masha Goncharova contributed reporting.
To contact the reporters, email louise@nytimes.com or sauls@nytimes.com.
Design, graphics and production by Tom Giratikanon, Mika Gröndahl, Josh Keller, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Graham Roberts, Shreeya Sinha, Rumsey Taylor and Jeremy White.
A version of this article appears in print on February 12, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
