Does Bohdan Lvov have a Russian passport?

Nerdy do-it-yourself text

Does Bohdan Lvov have a Russian passport?

In mid-September, the journalists of “Skhemy: Corruption in Details” published a video about the head of the Commercial Cassation Court of the Supreme Court of Ukraine, Bohdan Lvov, in which it is said, in particular, about four unpleasant circumstances for legal society:

1. In 1999 Bohdan Lvov received a passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation;
2. In 2012, he renewed his passport upon reaching 45 years of age,
3. He owned part of an apartment in Moscow and, in 2012, gifted it to his wife, and
4. His wife is a citizen of Russia.

On September 16, Bohdan Lvov published a rebuttal on his Facebook page, in which he stated that the published information “…does not correspond to reality and is a fake”. Later the same day, the judge published scans of letters to the State Bureau of Investigation of Ukraine and the Security Service of Ukraine regarding the reliable information published by journalists:

Screens of Bohdan Lvov’s posts, hand-made by the author

“Skhemy” published scans of several documents, of which these three are primarily interesting to me:

1. A statement allegedly by Bohdan Lvov about the issuance of a Russian passport in 1999;
2. The application of Bohdan Lvov, allegedly, for the issuance of a passport in 2012 (due to reaching the age of 45);
3. Extract from the “Russian Passport” database regarding the passport issued in 2012.

These documents state that a person named Bohdan Lvov received two passports:

• passport 4598 589684 dd. 22.07.1998, and
• renewed passport 4512 799636(8) dd. 17.10.2012

Last week, the judge of the Commercial Cassation court of the Supreme Court, Olena Kibenko, wrote on Facebook that she would convene a meeting of judges on this matter. On Tuesday, Bohdan Lvov published and then deleted another post on FB with a refutation. I didn’t have time to take a screenshot of it, but I managed to remember that it said that the passport of 1999, which will be attributed to him, became invalid in 1998, plus in the scan of the extract from the “Russian Passport” system (it is in the text below) there was a bottom line that, in Lvov’s opinion, were deliberately not shown by “Skhemy”.

The task is to find out on the basis of open data whether a person named Bohdan Lvov really has a passport of a Russian citizen.

To solve it, I will need a VPN and DuckDuckGo (well, I don’t like Google).

What is known for sure

I know the name and date of birth for sure: Bohdan Yuriyovych Lvov was born on September 28, 1967. Everything else is in doubt because (a) the judge says that the journalists published fake documents, and (b) I also found inconsistencies in the documents.

Are there any errors in the documents?

I have my doubts regarding the documents; there may indicate either a mistake or the invalidity of the documents.

Doubt 1 — a template of an application for the passport issue

Bohdan Lvov drew attention to one of the mistakes in a video he published on his Facebook page on September 26. He says that the passport application form was approved later than, in fact, it was supposedly signed by him.

I took these scans from Bohdan Lvov’s FB post

Attention should be paid to the placement of rectangles: in the document allegedly signed by Lvov, there are two rectangles, but, according to Mr. Lvov, this form came into force after he allegedly signed this document (before that, there were three such rectangles in the form).

I didn’t even try to check this statement of Bohdan Lvov, because I don’t understand why someone would falsify this document in view of what I wrote about next. If someone did check it, please write to me about it, and I will add it to the text.

Doubt 2 — series and number of the passport dd. 1999

The passport series consists of four digits. In this case, 4598 589684:

• the first two digits are the region code (45 is Moscow) and
• the third and fourth digits are the year of issue of the passport form. Ideally, the year of the passport form (98) and the year of the passport (99) should coincide. They do not coincide, and this leads to the idea that the document is not genuine or that there is an error in the document.

But, surprisingly, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia (http://сервисы.гувм.мвд.ру) issues information that this very passport did once exist, but its validity period has expired:

I found an article on Habr.com that there are cases when the series and year of passports do not match. In Russia, about 9% of passports have a series later or earlier than the year of actual passport issue.

But now, I only know that a passport with such a number really existed, and I still don’t know if it belonged to Bohdan Lvov.

Doubt 3 — inconsistency of passport numbers in documents

In the application for the issue of a new passport and in the printout from the “Russian passport” system, the passport number does not match by one digit:

Skhemy journalists got the screens, I cut their logo so that everything would fit. I hope they will forgive me. Because if not, then I will return the logo.

So my hypothesis again was that it was either a technical error or a fake document.

Searching for both passports in the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia did not help because, according to the system, both passports are not invalid:

Tax number

Another database came to the rescue — the database of tax numbers (https://service.nalog.ru/inn.do). This database allows you to find out the tax number of a Russian citizen, provided that four factors are known:

1. Passport number
2. Date of issue
3. Full name of a person
4. Date of birth of a person

I know two of these factors for sure: full name and date of birth. The date of issue of the passport in 2012 coincided with both sources, so I consider it correct. Next, I simply substituted both numbers into three known factors and got the following output:

It seems that passport series 4512 799636 actually belongs to a person with the name “Lvov Bohdan Yriyevych” and a date of birth of September 28, 1967. Because if any of the specified four factors did not coincide with the other factors, I would receive the answer “Information not found”. I don’t take screenshots, but I changed one letter and one number in each factor one by one, and every time I got “Information not found” in the output. And this is exactly what Skhemy journalists published.

It is more complicated with the passport number that ends with (…638) I know for sure that it is not invalid, and I also know that it does not belong to Bohdan Lvov because if it did, I would have received a tax number on the website of the tax service. This is not enough, so I asked a friend to buy information about the owner of this passport. It turned out to be a woman whose name is in no way related to Bohan Lvov (I will not publish the name because this name really does not tell you anything). The main thing is that I found out that the passport with this number belongs to a completely different person.

By the way, I also asked to buy the information on the tax number, which I found out in the way described above. And according to information from an information seller unknown to me, it belongs to Bohdan Yuriyovych Lvov.

I do not check the passport, which, according to journalists, Bohdan Lvov received in 1999, because I received information above that the passport lost its validity due to the expiration of its validity period. This information coincides with other information known to me: a person named Bohdan Lvov received a new passport in 2012 due to reaching the age of 45 (just in case: 1967 + 45 = 2012).

Therefore:

• I did not check the passport application form because it was checked by the Supreme Court judge; I believe him by default. This is a plus in favor of fake documents.
• The mismatch of the passport number in the two documents can be explained simply by a mechanical error of the passport officer. I think you can put half a plus for each of the versions.
• The passport of 1999 became invalid on the basis of obtaining a passport of 2012 — this has been established. So, a plus point in favor of the authenticity of the documents.
• The tax number is based on four unique factors (full name, date of birth of the judge, passport number, and date of issue). This is a plus in favor of the authenticity of the documents.
• My source confirmed that the tax code belongs to a person named Bohdan Yuriyovych Lvov, which is also a plus for authenticity.

I cannot claim that Bohdan Lvov is the owner of a Russian passport because I do not rule out that two people with the same name were born on the same day. And the task of this text is not to find out the truth. When I undertook this small research, I only wanted to understand whether I personally have grounds to believe that Bohdan Lvov has a Russian passport.

Thus I personally do have the grounds.

Repeat this little OSINT if you want, and make up your own inner conviction.

✍️ Dima Gadomsky