The official representative of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zaharova, purchased a 151 square meter apartment in a historic building in central Moscow in December 2022. According to official documents, the transaction was registered at a sum of 100.45 million rubles (approximately 1.1 million dollars), writes the publication Explainer, citing extracts from the Russian real estate register (Rosreestr), as well as data from bank and tax information leaks.
According to the source, the apartment is located on the top floor of the Mortgage Loan House of the Moscow Society, a federal importance architectural monument building, located opposite the headquarters of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation. The market value of similar apartments in the same building is estimated at around 160 million rubles.
The publication emphasizes that the official incomes of the spokesperson would not be sufficient for such a purchase. According to information obtained from tax sources, Zaharova receives a monthly salary of 500,000-800,000 rubles, and the total income for the year 2024 would have amounted to approximately 6 million rubles.
In addition, in the same year, she would have obtained 1.3 million rubles from the Diplomatic Academy of the MFA, where she leads a department, and over 3 million rubles from the media agency “Rossiya Segodnia”. Since the beginning of 2025, she would have received another 1.6 million rubles from the structures of the same media group.
Explainer also mentions additional monthly incomes, of 100,000-300,000 rubles, from the Russian Authors’ Society, for copyrights on texts and poems used in songs by Russian performers.
At the same time, Maria Zaharova is not obliged to declare her wealth, being excluded from the list of officials subject to the declaration obligation by an order signed in June 2014 by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
The investigation also mentions the family’s assets: according to bank data leaks, Maria Zaharova’s father had over 70 million rubles in a Sberbank account in 2024. Her husband, Andrei Mahrov, is indicated as the deputy marketing director at the company “Severo-Zapad”, which in the last year would have received state contracts worth hundreds of millions of rubles.