Putin’s Playboy model goddaughter’s house raided by cops over ‘blackmail plot’

Former Playboy model and suspected goddaughter of Vladimir Putin has had her luxury mansion raided by Russian authorities over an alleged "blackmail plot".

Ksenia Sobchak, 40, is also a prominent opposition politician, and says that a previous charge of “spreading falsehoods about government agencies” on a media channel against her are designed to put pressure on her to be quiet.

The leading journalist and prominent TV personality is a previous presidential election candidate and runs her own independent media, whose staff "are being interrogated" as police search her house, reports said.

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Yesterday Kirill Sukhanov, described as her commercial director, was detained by armed police in the alleged extorition plot that saw her home raided, but not as a suspect, according to the authorities.

"[Sobchak's home] is being searched in an extortion case, in which her commercial director Kirill Sukhanov was detained. Sobchak herself has no procedural status," Russian news agency Tass cited law enforcement agencies as saying.

“Our commercial director Kirill Sukhanov is detained, as they said, for ‘blackmail’,” Sobchak posted late last night on Telegram.

“This is simply delirium, it is laughable, nonsense.”

Sobchak said: “Kirill is a businessman and our advertising person. Myself and our entire team see this as yet more oppression against the media in the country.

“They have got nothing to dig on us, which infuriates them. They constantly detain our journalists.

“Now they have got Kirill, and are making a case against him. The lawyer is in touch with him. We are following the case.”

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Putin has known her since her childhood and he attended her baptism, but that hasn't spared her from the cruel Russian leader's attentions, even though Sobchak’s late father Anatoly gave the ex-KGB spy his first political job as deputy mayor of St Petersburg.

Putin even smuggled her father out of Russia for medical treatment in the West at a time when his patron was wanted for alleged corruption.

Putin was later pictured at the former mayor’s funeral in 2000, alongside Ksenia.

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Three weeks ago she was hit with a separate criminal investigation that could see her jailed for three years allegedly over “spreading falsehoods about government agencies”.

Unlike many other opposition media and political figures, Sobchak has not fled abroad. “I am Russian, I am a citizen of Russia. I do not emigrate anywhere, I have no other citizenships," she previously said.

Sobchak, a popular reality TV host who also posed for Playboy, came fourth in the 2018 presidential election in Russia.

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