Bohdan Lvov: apartment, code, two Russian passports

This graphomaniac Sherlockholmian text is the second part of the investigation into the mystery of whether Bogdan Lvov, the head of the Commercial Cassation Court of the Supreme Court of Ukraine, has a Russian citizenship.

In the first part, I solved this riddle on the basis of publicly available information and proved (as I think) that a person named Lvov Bohdan Yuriyovych, born on September 28, 1967, really has a passport of a Russian citizen. As well as found out his tax number.

But Bohdan Lvov denies the fact that this is his passport. So, I have three versions:

1. The passport does not belong to the head of the Commercial Cassation Court of the Supreme Ukraine but to another Bohdan Yuriyovich Lvov, who was born on the same day as the head of the Commercial Cassation Court (that is, there was a coincidence).
2. The passport is not genuine; it was created and entered into the register of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia by someone for some purpose (for example, to discredit a judge), and
3. Bogdan Lvov is wrong when he says that he does not know that he has a Russian passport.

I don’t have as much information as the Skhemy reporters, and here is their much more comprehensive first and second research [in Ukrainian]. I don’t want to repeat their investigation this time. I thought that if I went the other way and my results matched theirs, that would prove the conclusions are correct.

Here is the task I set: to find all possible information from the closed and open databases of Russia, knowing only the tax number that I found out earlier (774319527956) and publicly known information:

• Full name: Bohdan Yuriyovych Lvov,
• Born on September 28, 1967,
• Place of birth: Zaporizhzhia,
• He has a wife, and I know her name (from Mr. Lvov’s declarations),
• Mr. Lvov graduated from the Red Banner Military Institute of the USSR Ministry of Defense in 1989 (information from Slidstvo.Info).

I have already extracted everything that could be extracted from the available information in my previous research. So now, I need to dive into the magical world of Russia’s data market, where there were good people who agreed to help for the sake of Ukraine’s national security. I deliberately ordered the data from different sources from different providers and gave them different inputs because I thought it would increase the credibility of the data if they matched.

What can be learned about Mr. Lvov by his tax number

This is what I found out only by the code in the closed database of the tax service under tax number 774319527956:

I highlighted in bold the information that coincided with the information I already knew. This coincidence of information indicates that there is a certain Lvov Bohdan Yuriyovych in at least two Russian registers: the tax register and the passport register (because I learned the code based on the passport number in the previous research). Moreover, we now know that the very Russian Bohdan Lvov was also born in Zaporizhzhia.

And I also learned new information:

• Passport number and date of issue,
• The date of issue of the tax number, and
• Moscow residence address of the Russian Bohdan Lvov.

But this is not all the information from the tax register by tax number, the register also contains data about the apartment:

It turns out that the Russian Bohdan Lvov not only has a residence permit at 88 Leningradske Shosse, but he also owned one-fourth of this apartment until 2012.

What can be found out about Mr. Lvov from his passport

Based on the tax number, I found out the number and date of issue of the passport. Based on these two factors, as well as the name and date of birth, I received from the Russian Passport database the same file that you have already seen in Skhemy, but I do not follow their path, so here is my own screenshot:

Bogdan Lvov: apartment, code, two Russian passports

From here, I confirm the information I already know and also learn new details:

• Passport issue date: 17.10.2012
• Place of birth of the code holder: Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine
• Place of registration of the passport holder: 125565, Russia, Moscow, str. 88 Leningradskoe Shosse, apartment (the apartment number is important, but I will not publish it for ethical reasons)
• Grounds for issuing a passport: reaching the age of 45 years old
• Previous passport: 4598 589684 dated 22.07.1999
• Date of termination of the validity of the previous passport: 09.12.1998
• The document on the basis of which the passport 4598 589684 dated 22.07.1999: ВП 081959, issued by the military institute on June 30, 1989

Here’s the new ones:

• I now know that the currently valid passport was issued after reaching the age of 45 to replace the old passport 4598 589684 dated 22.07.1999,
• I also learned that even earlier than the previous passport, Mr. Lvov had a document numbered ВП 081959, which was issued to him by the military institute on June 30, 1989 (I did not know about the existence of this document, but I knew that Mr. Lvov graduated from the military institute in 1989).

But I also have the first inconsistency. Pay attention to the expiration date of the old passport — 09.12.1998. It turns out that the passport ceased to be valid before it was issued (and it was issued on 22.07.1999).

Bohdan Lvov, the head of the Commercial Cassation Court of the Supreme Court, was the first to draw attention to this in his Facebook post when he commented on the first investigation of Skhemy. In response, Skhemy explained that they knew about this discrepancy but thought that it was a technical error because the passports of the 90s were not digitized in Russia for a long time.

My aim is not to establish the reason for this discrepancy, so I will simply take it into account in my conclusions at the end.

I can only add that passport 4598 589684 was supposed to expire on the day Mr. Lvov turned 45 (that is, 28.09.2012), plus one more month was given to him to submit an application for a passport replacement. That is, he had to submit such an application by October 28, 2012.

What is known about the apartment

I found out about the apartment and its cadastral number from the tax register, so I ordered an extract from the real estate register. You have already seen a similar extract in Skhemy, but I will still make my screenshot because I have a different extract date:

Extract on the apartment

The extract allows me to confirm the information I already have and also gives me some new information:

• Date of deregistration: 18.06.2012
• Share size: 0.25
• Right registration number: 77–77–09/086/2009–309
• Cadastral number: 77:09:0001019:5060
• Co-owners of the apartment: Lvova Inna Oleksiivna
  (I have erased the name of the other co-owner because it (a) is not relevant to this study and (b) I do not have the right to disclose this personal data).
• Address: 125565, Russia, Moscow, Leningradske Shosse 88, apartment (the apartment number is important, but I will not publish it for ethical reasons).

So, Bohdan Lvov owned a share of the apartment, but in 2012 the share became the property of his wife.

I did not check whether a person who did not have a Russian passport had the right to privatize an apartment in the 90s because it is not important for this study. Supreme Court judge Viktor Prorok wrote in his recent post on Facebook that “… it is possible to acquire a share in an apartment in post-Soviet countries on the basis of a residence permit only through the privatization of the state housing fund, which can only be taken by citizens of the state in which the privatization is taking place”.

In their investigation, Skhemy published a more detailed reference to the apartment, which indicates the numbers of the documents certifying the persons of the parties to the transactions with the shares of the apartments. I could not get such an extract. Instead, I just looked that the apartment is 40 minutes away by metro from the center, and its value, judging by the real estate ads, is somewhere between 150 and 200 thousand dollars.

I checked Bohdan Lvov’s declarations for 2013–2020, and this apartment is not there. Although there are other apartments belonging to his wife in the declaration. He told Skhemy journalists that “everything is correct there (in the declarations)”. It seems to me that if this apartment had been included in the declarations, the passport issue would have surfaced much earlier. But this is no longer a question for me, as I understand it, the relevant authorities are already working.

Well, here we can draw intermediate conclusions.

• Three Russian registers contain information about Bohdan Yuriyovych Lvov: the Ministry of Internal Affairs register, the tax service register, and the real estate register.
• These data indicate it doesn’t look like that the head of the Commercial Cassation Court of the Supreme Court of Ukraine, Lvov Bohdan Yuriyovych, and that Russian Bohdan Yuriyovych Lvov are doppelgangers who were born on the same day. Therefore, I reject the coincidence version.
• There are two working versions: someone is trying to frame up the head of the Commercial Cassation Court of the Supreme Court, or Bohdan Lvov is wrong when he says that he does not have citizenship.

Technically, in order to exclude the option of a simple coincidence with a complete namesake with the same date of birth, it would be possible to follow a simpler but less accurate way, namely to calculate the mathematical probability of such a coincidence.

I did follow this path and asked Taras Pavlov, a mathematics teacher at the Kyiv School of Economics, to calculate the probability of coincidence, and he wrote me a whopping story. If you are not interested in mathematics, then skip the next paragraph and just read this conclusion of Taras: “Since it is difficult for a person without a mathematical education to work with such small numbers, I specify that approximately 3.3 Russians out of 10,000,000,000 would be born on this day, with such a name and surname”.

More about mathematical probability

If we consider events with a birthday and with a first and last name as independent, then you can simply take the probability of being born on a certain day, multiply by the probability of a certain name and multiply by the probability of the last name.

These probabilities are easily found from statistics since they are essentially the frequencies of the name/surname, and the probability of being born on a specific day can be fairly accurately described by the number 1/365.

But there are many problems.

First, a name and the probability of being born on a certain day are almost certainly connected. Of course, now the correlation is not as strong as it used to be when only children were named in honor of saints, and yet I assume that next to Saint Bohdan’s day, there will be more Bohdans. In addition, on days that are 9 months away from major holidays, more children are usually born than on others. But this is precisely the part that, actually, can be neglected.

It is worse with first and last names. Because it would be possible to simply take the statistical probability that a person is named Bohdan and multiply it by the probability that he is Lvov, but, almost certainly, the name and surname are strongly related. Well, that is, a person with the surname Lvov is almost certainly more likely to have the name Bohdan than a person with the surname Googe or Magomedgazhiev (I took these names from the channel of interrogation of prisoners, if you wonder).

And I don’t know actually what to do with this connection — it can give an error of a couple of orders of magnitude, and you can’t check it without a complete database of surnames and names unless you somehow try to extract it from the Bayes’ formula, but for it, you need at least some detailed data.

If you skip out both of these factors, then:

• P (Bohdan with the surname Lvov was born on a specific day in 1967) = P1 * P2 * P3 * P4, where:
• P1 is the probability that a person currently alive in the Russian Federation was born in 1967 (this can be extracted from the age structure of the population by dividing the number of people aged 55 by the entire population). Theoretically, taking into account the approximation of the measurement, you can take and simply divide 1 by the average life expectancy in the Russian Federation.
• P2 is the probability that the name is Bohdan (from 0.01 to 0.07)
• P3 is the probability that the surname is Lvov (P3 = P5*P6, where P5 is the probability of Ivanov, and P6 is the ratio of the Lvovs to the Ivanovs)
• P4 = 1/365 is the probability of coincidence of birthday

So, very roughly:

• P1=1/70=0.0143
• P2=0.04
• P3= 500000/128000000 * 0.0536 = 0.00021
• P4=1/365=0.00274
• P = 0.00000000033

Since it is difficult for a person without a mathematical education to work with such small numbers, I specify that approximately 3.3 Russians out of 10,000,000,000 would be born on this day, with such a name and surname.

So Bohdan Lviv was framed up?

It is quite difficult to answer this question because here I am alone with a strong opponent, who in 1993 registered a young lawyer in a Moscow apartment, in 1999 defiantly obtained a passport for the future head of the Commercial Cassation Court of the Supreme Court, then in 2009 formalized the ownership of one-fourth apartment, in 2010 received a tax code for the person, and carefully replaced the person’s passport in 2012.

This someone did all these actions so accurately that Bohdan Lvov did not know about them until the investigation of Skhemy came out. Perhaps he received some messages about the payment of utility services or calls from Russian state authorities to confirm some data. But they were so cleverly fabricated that Mr. Lvov did not take this information seriously enough to declare that his citizenship was falsified until these data were published by Skhemy.

Despite some sarcasm, I must admit that I really cannot prove that this is not all a forgery.

The falsification is indicated by the position of Bohdan Lviv himself, as well as two inaccuracies in the documents:

• Inconsistency of passport numbers in form 1P (8 instead of 6). Because of this, the 1П form got into another person’s archive file. Read about it in Bohdan Lvov’s post, as well as in the second investigation of Schemes.
• The strange expiration date of passport 4598 589684 dated 22.07.1999 that is earlier than the date of its issue. (I wrote above that I cannot verify the reason for this discrepancy and will take it into account in the conclusion, so here I take it into account).

Leaked databases

I gave two passport numbers that supposedly belong to Bohdan Lvov to one more good man and received a large file. I will not analyze this information in detail, I will only say that in various dumps of various Russian bases, the above data about Bohdan Yuriyovich Lvov and persons related to him have been found in various configurations since 2001.

Who and why wanted and could falsify information about the judge of the military court of the Central Region of Ukraine twenty years ago (Lvov worked there in 1998–2001), or who wanted to falsify it now and entered fake information into the databases of various information sellers, I can’t imagine and do not have an opportunity to find it.

In my opinion, such large-scale falsification is simply impossible. Imagine that Guy Ritchie, ten years after the release of the movie “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”, added another scene to it and tried to re-upload the new version of the film to all film archives, official online cinemas, and all pirate platforms and torrents.

There remains the third version remains — Bohdan Lviv is wrong when he says that he does not know that he has a Russian passport.

A couple of important caveats

• I am ready to hand over the data I have received to law enforcement authorities upon request.
• Mr. Bohdan Lvov’s wife is not a subject of this research, but her name appears in Bohdan Lvov’s declarations, so I have the right to publish her name.
• I am publishing the personal data of Bohdan Lvov in view of the significant public interest in this information (and even national security). But, for ethical reasons, I hid the apartment number and did not include the phone number that appears in the files I received.
• I have no reason to consider Bohdan Lviv an enemy of Ukraine, I am not aware of the facts of his knowingly making unjust decisions. I also do not believe that a Russian passport or real estate in Russia cast a shadow on the judge until 2014. After 2014, in my opinion, this is unacceptable for a Ukrainian judge.
• By chance, if someone wants to repeat this investigation, write to me, and I will tell you where and what to look for.

✍️ Dima Gadomsky