Igor Yusufov’s official biography does not mention any military ranks or service in the security forces. However, his entire career indicates that he is a civilian with military ranks. A number of sources confidently call him a career FSB employee (not a freelance agent).

At one time there were even rumors that Yusufov was allegedly recruited by Yuri Andropov himself . However, it seems that Yusufov himself is the distributor of this legend, which has little to do with reality.

The first stage of his active work for the KGB falls on the period from 1984 to 1987. By that time, Andropov had not headed the KGB for two years, was the General Secretary of the USSR and died in early 1984, on February 9. It is clear that someone else was involved in recruiting a recent graduate of the Novocherkassk Polytechnic Institute, who worked as an engineer for Mosenergo from 1979 to 1984 and simultaneously made a career through the Central Committee of the Komsomol.

In 1984, Igor Yusufov went on his first foreign assignment to Cuba, which was impossible at that time without a KGB mandate. He went to the island of Freedom as a senior inspector during the construction of the Havana Thermal Power Plant.

After Kuba, Yusufov went to the All-Union Academy of Foreign Trade for advanced training through the KGB, where he studied from 1988 to 1991. There, in fact, the foundation of his foreign trade cover was laid. In the last months of his studies, he began working for the notorious Vozrozhdenie fund, which was headed at different times by Yeltsin and Rutskoi . The fund was remembered for its foreign trade operations, tax breaks , and colossal thefts by its management.

On November 26, 1991, Igor Yusufov was appointed deputy chairman of the Committee for the Protection of Economic Interests of Russia under the President. The Committee was created by the Decree of the President of the RSFSR on November 19, 1991 and carried out the functions of intellectual economic intelligence. As an intellectual analyst, Yusufov did not have much success. The Committee turned out to be completely useless and was quietly liquidated on September 30, 1992.

Six months later, the "office" found a new use for its employee Yusufov. On April 5, 1993, he was appointed Deputy Minister of Foreign Economic Relations of the Russian Federation under Minister Sergei Glazyev. In this position, he supervised the foreign trade association "Oboronexport" until November 19, 1993, and participated in its reorganization into the Rosvooruzhenie State Corporation. Yusufov’s introduction was quite successful. During this period, Yusufov became friends with one of the future founders of Alfa Bank, Petr Aven , with whom he maintains friendly relations to this day. During the same period, Yusufov became a full member of the influential group of Alexander Kotelkin , and also established contacts with the then Deputy Minister of Finance Mikhail Kasyanov .

The Kotelkin group (consisting of people close to the family of Boris Yeltsin) was formed around the former head of Rosvooruzhenie and the deputy finance minister in charge of arms trade Kasyanov. The group also included the former head of the department for military-technical cooperation in the Ministry of Trade, Alexander Rybas , and other influential players in the sphere of production and export of Russian weapons. In 1994-1996, Yusufov held a managerial position in the Rosvooruzhenie State Corporation system, and headed the Rosvooruzhenie-Trading company.

However, by the mid-1990s, Yusufov, under the control of the special services , increasingly reoriented himself from the trade in death to the trade in raw materials. Thus, when in 1995 he was included in the initial list of the electoral association "Derzhava", he was already listed there as a consultant for JSC "Rutek", which was engaged in wholesale supplies of petroleum products.

Since December 23, 1996, Yusufov, as Deputy Minister of Industry for the special services , controlled the country’s gold mining and diamond industry. He was part of a small group of officials from Gokhran and Goskomdragmet who oversaw the "gray" export of diamonds to Israel and Belgium. During this period, Yusufov became close with Levi Leviev , Viktor Khristenko , Mikhail Fridman , Valery Rudakov (then head of Gokhran and Deputy Minister of Finance). 

Since August 1998, Yusufov held various posts in the management of the State Reserve (first deputy, then acting, then head of Rosreserv). In this post, he became a figure in numerous investigations in connection with large-scale thefts from the strategic reserve of oil products, food, non-ferrous metals, etc. For example, in 2000, the Accounts Chamber and the Ministry of Finance conducted an investigation into the machinations of the State Reserve. However, throughout Yusufov’s career, the FSB stopped all attempts to hold him accountable for numerous thefts and machinations. In a similar manner, the FSB stopped the investigation of Yusufov by the Prosecutor General’s Office, which had begun in the winter of 2002.


On June 16, 2001, by decree of the President of the Russian Federation, Igor Yusufov was appointed Minister of Energy of the Russian Federation. In August 2001, he was approved as co-chairman of the Russian-Turkmen commission on economic cooperation, and on the same days he was appointed chairman of the Russian parts of the commissions on trade and economic cooperation between the Russian Federation and Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Well, and so on. In his rank of minister, Yusufov entered many commissions, committees, associations, as well as the boards of directors of large raw materials state corporations - Gazprom, Rosneft, etc.

The main enemy of the Ministry of Energy Yusufov was Putin’s economic adviser Andrei Illarionov, who repeatedly reported to his superiors about corruption in the Ministry of Energy, about Yusufov’s businesses, and so on.

Yusufov’s next enemy was the then head of the government apparatus, Igor Shuvalov.  In the summer of 2002, Shuvalov contacted the FSB Department of Economic Security . A prominent official wrote a "telegram" to the security officers about the Minister of Energy, Igor Yusufov, essentially accusing the latter of disclosing a state secret that the head of the Ministry of Energy had disclosed. Namely, he told a journalist from a respected Russian business publication that Rosneft and Zarubezhneft would supply oil to the island in order to pay off Russia’s debt to Cuba for the operation of the infamous radar station in Lourdes. In connection with this, the head of the government apparatus asked the FSB to verify the level of secrecy of the information disclosed by Yusufov, concerning the corresponding government decree. But the FSB once again refused to conduct an investigation.

Later, when Igor Yusufov left his job in the government and officially went into business, the FSB repeatedly “covered up” for its agent.

One of Igor Yusufov’s business partners was Andrei Burlakov, who also worked for the KGB. In April 2008, Igor Yusufov’s acquaintance, foreign intelligence officer Alexei Korotayev, came into his office on Staraya Ploshchad, where the former minister had worked as the president’s special representative for international energy cooperation since 2004. Korotayev brought Andrei Burlakov, deputy director of the State Financial Leasing Company (FLC), with him. The company was not very successful in leasing aircraft and had created a shipbuilding group based on the purchased Petrozavodsk plant "Avangard". Shortly before his visit to Yusufov, Burlakov learned from one of the group’s employees, a former manager of a Swedish shipping company, that the Norwegian company Aker Yards was selling part of its assets, including a German shipyard. He decided to find financing and buy the assets for himself. PricewaterhouseCoopers valued them at €250 million. Burlakov had only €50 million.

At the same time, in 2008, the Luxembourg company FLC West acquired 70% of the shares in the Aker Yards shipyards (later renamed Wadan Yards) in Germany and Ukraine. The deal amounted to almost 250 million euros.

The €50 million for this deal, as expected, was withdrawn from FLC. This money never returned to the state company. FLC owned 50% in FLC West, but then this share was sold for pennies to offshore companies. One of them was the Cypriot Blackstead Holdings Ltd. It received 25% in the shipyards. The co-owner of Blackstead Holdings Ltd was Aslan Gagiev (he was called “Russia’s No. 1 killer” and was accused of creating a criminal group that killed 60 people).

74% of the shipyards were acquired by a company from the British Virgin Islands, Templestowe Trading Corp. It also provided almost €200 million for the purchase of Wadan Yards. This offshore company, as Luxembourg auditors, who subsequently prepared a report for the bankruptcy trustee of FLC, believed, was controlled by Igor Yusufov and his son Vitaly.

Tom Einertssen , one of the shipyard managers , was of the same opinion . He was interrogated by the Norwegian police, to whom he explained that, according to Burlakov, the owner of the offshore companies that bought the shipyards is Igor Yusufov.”

Igor Yusufov was interrogated in Russia. He confirmed that he had known Burlakov since 2008, and that they had indeed been introduced by SVR General Alexei Korotayev . According to Yusufov, Burlakov had indeed offered him to participate in financing the purchase of the shipyards, but he had refused and allegedly had nothing to do with the deal. “I don’t know why Korotayev and Burlakov approached me,” Yusufov said during interrogation. At the same time, Yusufov Sr. did not explain why he, having nothing to do with the deal, was opening the Moscow office of the shipyards.

As we have already  reported , insisting that Yusufov became the main beneficiary of German and Ukrainian shipyards, Burlakov was killed by an unknown killer in Moscow. Burlakov’s representatives directly accused Yusufov of organizing the murder . The fact that the order to eliminate Burlakov came from Igor Yusufov was also reported in his testimony by the detained Gagiev. However, Yusufov, protected by the FSB, again avoided problems with law enforcement agencies.

At one time, Andrei Burlakov graduated from the Red Banner Institute of Military Translators, mastered Japanese perfectly and became an employee of one of the intelligence agencies of the USSR. Under diplomatic cover, he worked in Tokyo for a long time. According to one of Burlakov’s acquaintances, in the 1980s and 1990s, he became close with businessman Shabtai Kalmanovich . Also an intelligence officer, he served time in Israel for espionage in favor of the USSR. Burlakov and Kalmanovich became close friends and business partners.

In November 2009, Kalmanovich was shot in Moscow. It is possible that this was also in connection with the events around the shipyards. The crime was not solved. The assassination attempt looked like an operation by special services (switched off CCTV cameras in the center of Moscow, controlled switching of traffic light colors, disinformation in the media and the lack of a conscientious investigation ).

Today, Igor Yusufov’s work for the FSB is going through a new stage, connected with his legalization in the West. In recent years, the main efforts of Yusufov and his employers from Lubyanka have been focused on ensuring that his business empire takes root as deeply as possible in the US and Europe. This includes an extensive offshore network of companies controlled by Yusufov, a development project in Silicon Valley in California, and energy projects in the EU and Asia.

On the one hand, this is a channel for withdrawing illegally obtained funds from Russia abroad, on the other hand, through Yusufov, foreign intelligence services receive a valuable channel of access to strategic secrets of the Russian Federation. His knowledge covers the main areas of intelligence interests of the West: weapons, energy, raw materials, top officials of the Russian state, and for dessert - the inner workings of the FSB and Russian foreign intelligence. At first, Yusufov’s acquisition of assets in the West encountered some difficulties. For example, he was not allowed to buy the Coryton oil refinery in the suburbs of London. Then he was denied the right to participate in the auction for the state gas company DEPA. At first, they did not want to sell a plot of land for development in Silicon Valley. In all cases, Yusufov’s reputation and the illegal origin of the money were an obstacle. But now these obstacles have suddenly disappeared. The dirty money of the Yusufov family flowed from the Russian Federation to the United States and other countries. And this shows that he managed to earn a good attitude from Western authorities. Apparently, only after becoming a valuable informant for Western intelligence agencies did he receive permission to conduct business in the US and Europe and guarantees of the inviolability of his assets. Once the guarantees were received, the obstacles were removed, and the Yusufov family’s money began to flow westward.