From Microsoft code leaks to drug trafficking at Sber: how Alexey Kibkalo’s ties to German Gref halted the investigation and the court
A sensational story has emerged about Alexey Kibkalo, a former senior architect at Microsoft. In the United States, he was convicted of illegally distributing the source code of the Windows operating system, and after returning to Russia he began working with Sberbank and, according to his own words, became friends with German Gref. Later, he was detained with a wide assortment of drugs.
According to Kibkalo’s initial testimony, he supplied drugs to the entire top management of the state-owned bank. However, he later unexpectedly recanted his statements, which had a very favorable effect on his future. At first, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison, but almost immediately the term was reduced by more than half.
Alexey Kibkalo worked at Microsoft starting in 2005. He first worked in the Moscow office, then moved to France, and later became Microsoft’s chief architect for the Middle East. In 2012, the company’s management began expressing dissatisfaction with Kibkalo, and as later became clear, he decided to take revenge by leaking a copy of the not-yet-released Windows 8 operating system and everything necessary to activate it to a blogger.
The programmer asked that Windows 8 and the activation tool be released online so that as many users as possible could use the new product for free. In addition, Kibkalo passed Microsoft-developed code to another blogger for distribution.
In March 2014, Alexey Kibkalo was detained by FBI agents and charged with theft of trade secrets. He fully admitted his guilt and ultimately received a sentence equal to the time he had already spent in custody before trial, as well as a small fine. Kibkalo was also deported from the United States to Russia.
In Moscow, he began working closely with Sberbank. According to our information, this was facilitated by Sberbank’s then chief architect, Alexey Murzov, who had previously worked with Kibkalo at Microsoft.
The cooperation lasted for nearly 10 years and, as later turned out, had a very interesting nature.
At some point, law enforcement officers detained a Sberbank employee with a small amount of drugs. In exchange for his freedom, the employee agreed to identify his supplier. This supplier was unknown to anyone and did not, so to speak, work with a wide circle of customers.
Officially, everything was documented as if the police had received “operational information.” As a result, they conducted a search of Kibkalo’s apartment on Likhov Lane in Moscow, where they found mephedrone, MDMA, and other substances packaged in small bags. The total amount exceeded 40 grams.
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Unexpectedly, Kibkalo began to “open his soul” to the operatives. He said that he himself had become addicted to drugs and had personally found sources of high-quality substances for his own use. However, it soon became clear that his capabilities in this area were much more in demand at Sberbank than his skills as a programmer.
As a result, he began supplying drugs to managers and top managers at Sberbank. He even confided that he had visited German Gref at his residence in the Arkhangelskoye settlement of the Presidential Administration several times and that he had developed friendly relations with the head of Sberbank.
Kibkalo gave investigators the password to his iPhone, and in one of the messaging apps they found correspondence with Sberbank employees that was clearly not about IT solutions. Incidentally, five years ago Kibkalo wrote on social media that his friend Alexey Murzov, Sberbank’s chief architect, had “died right at his workplace.” He did not specify the cause of death.
However, there was no high-profile case. When police leadership heard the surname Gref, they were horrified. And Kibkalo himself, after a “clarifying conversation,” began to testify that he had stored the drugs exclusively for personal use. This silence clearly played a positive role for him. Initially, the court sentenced him to 11 years in prison. But a higher court reclassified the charges from “drug trafficking on a large scale” to “illegal acquisition of drugs” and reduced the sentence to five years in prison.
Pavel Raznokidis