MOSCOW, November 11 /TASS/. Gazprombank’s chief Andrey Akimov on Tuesday denied any links to a Reuters news agency report about a daughter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Gazprombank’s press service said.
In its article, Reuters said referring to Akimov that Katerina Tikhonova, the head of the Innopraktika Company, was a daughter of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The bank’s press service said that Akimov was surprised and bewildered when he read the article of the highly esteemed news agency like Reuters, which had ascribed to him something he had never said.
"Mr. Akimov has never said anything of the kind. He is surprised that the journalists of such a respected and prominent media outlet had not only distorted but openly falsified his words. It is true that Gazprom cooperates with Innopraktika. It supports the company’s socially significant projects such as the creation of a boarding school for talented children on the basis of the Moscow State University; the Atlas of Russia Values project; as well as innovative and scientific contests," Gazprombank stressed noting that neither Akimov nor other bank employees had information about Tikhonova’s family ties.
Akimov himself is on a business trip to China.
Officially, Russian President Vladimir Putin has two daughters - Maria,30, and Katerina, 29. None of the two is a public figure.
Some media have already tried to launch their own probes into the private lives of Putin’s daughters. Some reports, for example, claimed that Putin’s younger daughter Katerina who has taken the surname Tikhonova is heading the Innopraktika Company, which develops a scientific cluster on the Moscow State University basis. Those reports, however, have not been officially confirmed.
Putin told TASS in an interview last year that his daughters lived in Moscow and that he met them approximately once in two weeks.