Biography
Hristo Grozkov - Media Investment, Writer and Analyst Bulgarian Nationality. Investigating the activities of Russian special services in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, as well as their connections with Donald Trump.Childhood and youth
Hristo Grozkov was born on May 20, 1969 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Now lives in Vienna.
He studied at the American University in Bulgaria, the first private university in Eastern Europe. Graduates of the educational institution easily did a career in the United States, but Hristo decided to stay in his homeland.
Journalism and business
Bulgarian started his journalistic biography by the reporter on the radio in Native Plovdiv. In the early 1990s, without finishing the university, Christ opened the first radio station of Radio Aura in Bulgaria, which existed on advertising revenues. The equipment bought from a Dutch buddy for only $ 350.Having received an education in 1995, the young man settled in the Metromedia International Corporation. It was he who launched the Russian assets of the company "Radio Nika" in Sochi, "Canal Melody" and "Eldoradio" in St. Petersburg, "Radio on seven hills". He also worked with media projects in the Baltic States, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland. In 2000, Grozkov headed the corporation.
In the mid-2000s, Christ became a media investor, buying and reselling radio stations in different countries. He received funds to this activity from a business partner, the grandson of the last emperor Austria Karl Habsburg-Lotaringen. He also belonged to newspapers and television channels.
In 2011, Hristo Grozov joined the property dispute with the oligarchs of Fire Dong Donov and Lubomir Pavlov about the rights of ownership of the Bulgarian newspapers "Labor" and "24 hours". The case was considered in the Sofia Appeal Court.
In the end, the publication did not get anyone. Donov and Pavlov accused of laundering money, but also a sales contract in which Hristo participated was invalid.
In 2013, Media Ekspert read a lecture on the role of radio in the new information era, integration with social networks and business models that will help save this "sinking ship".
In 2015, Christ began to cooperate with the BELLINGCAT project, based on a British blogger and gamer Eliot Higgins. The organization positioned itself as an international team of researchers and civil journalists investigating cases of open data. Threads stated a variety of: from Mexican drug trains to crimes against humanity.
In Bellingcat, Christ was a leading researcher in Russia, specializing in security threats, extraterritorial underground operations and information war.
In September 2018, a journalist on his page in Twitter expressed concern about the hybrid war, which Russia led in Ukraine, including Maidan, Annexia of Crimea and an attempt at Arkady Babchenko, and recalled the need for a response strike on the Kremlin.
In October 2018, a joint investigation of BELLINGCAT and THE INSIDER was published on the Radio Liberty portal, which argued that Sergey and Julia Skripalei poisoned the military doctor and officer of Russian military intelligence Alexander Mishkin.
According to Grozkov, Mishkin graduated from the Military Medical Academy with a degree in hypobaric medicine and no later than 2003 became an officer of the GRU. For some reason related to Ukraine, he received award "Hero of Russia".
In November 2019, Grozkov said that he established the Personality of the Russians participating in a large-scale intelligence operation against Serbia. They, according to Bulgarian, turned out to be an agent Georgy Viktorovich Kleban, a former assistant attache of the Russian Embassy in Belgrade and Officer GRU. The man met with the Serbian military in the Book Sheep brewery in order to recruit him.
Journalist Bellingcat accused Russian authorities and interference with the presidential elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014. As if the militarized Cossack squad under the leadership of Nikolai Jaconov, who previously participated in the joining of Crimea appeared on the eve of the Balkan country.
Bulgarian also wrote that he opened the electronic correspondence of the employee of the State Department of Russia with Donald Trump from February 2016, which preddered the last future presidency.
Grozkov carefully followed a criminal case about money laundering, in which the American Prevezon Group appeared, belonged to Denis Katsyv, the son of Vice-President of Russian Railways. In 2007, the organization participated in the fraudulent scheme with the return of taxes in the amount of $ 230 million. The prosecution was the federal prosecutor Prover Bharara, dismissed by Donald Trump on March 9, 2017.
Personal life
Grozkov recognized that large-scale investigations require large cash investments and interfere with personal life. The wife scolds him, because journalism ruins the family budget.
It is taken for complex cases that ignore the prosecutor's office and official media, as he sees the challenge for himself. It is not afraid of life, because there is no sense to kill him - there are many young journalists who can conduct exactly the same investigations.
In an interview, Christ admitted that immediately after the university began working in Russia, lived in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi, and Russian people are even clearer to him more than compatriots.
"New Gazeta" posted a photo of Media Ekspert in "Instagram", calling it a "hero of the year" and "the best investigator 2020."
Hristo Grozkov now
On December 17, 2020, in an interview with Meduse, Grozkov said that the team of eight FSB officers constantly accompanied Alexei Navalny on all trips, waiting for a convenient occasion to poison him. According to him, on the eve of the attempt, people registered in the GETContAct attachment as special service staff were called up with the employees of the Signal Scientific Center, which developed the technologies for using this poison. And immediately after unsuccessful poisoning - with specialists in mass spectrometry (the method of detecting in the blood of chemicals).
Navalny himself published a video on his Youtyub-channel, in which revealed the names of the families and talked to one of them by telephone, introducing himself as an assistant Nikolai Patrushev.
On December 21, 2020 in the program "Echo Moscow", "Full Albac" Media Ekspert repeated his words and added that the poison was inflicted at the hotel when Navalny went to swim in the river, and the FSB Group could quietly enter his number.