Posted on September 16, 2009 - by Venik

Vladimir Putin hands over Swiss watch to astonished factory worker

Questions over Russian prime minister’s salary after spontaneous gift of £5,500 watch

He skis down volcanoes, strips off in Siberian rivers and even ventures to the bottom of lakes in mini-submarines. Hardly surprising then that Vladimir Putin – Russia’s action-man prime minister and judo black belt – is a fan of Swiss watches. Expensive ones.

Yesterday, Putin stunned workers at a factory in the town of Tula when he gave away his latest timepiece to a worker.

Dressed in blue overalls, factory employee Viktor Zagaevsky approached Russia’s tsar-like leader and asked him whether he might like to offer a memento. Apparently unable to think of an appropriate souvenir, Russia’s premier swiftly took off his £5,500 black Blancpain watch and handed it over to a gobsmacked Zagaevsky.

“My father wasn’t expecting such a generous present,” Zagaevsky’s son, Dmitry, said today. “He just wanted something to remember Putin by.”

He added: “I’ve got the watch. Neither I nor my father are planning to actually wear it. It’s now a family relic.

“The workers at the factory were divided over it. Some congratulated my dad and said: ‘Well done’. Others thought there was something indecent about asking him for a present.”

It’s not clear what prompted Putin’s generous gesture. Perhaps it was patriotic feeling. According to today’s Russian newspapers, Zagaevsky proudly informed Putin that he had two sons, both serving in the Russian army.

Today, Dmitry Zagaevsky admitted that the men in his family normally sported bargain-basement watches. “They don’t cost more than 1,000 roubles [£20],” he said. Under normal circumstances, it would take his father two years to scrape together enough cash to buy Putin’s watch.

It was not Putin’s first act of spontaneous generosity. Last month, in a moment captured by Kremlin photographers, Putin gave away another watch to the small son of a shepherd. He also handed over a penknife. The prime minister was on a back-to-nature break in Russia’s southern Siberian republic of Tyva, where he had been showing off his survival skills.

Putin’s penchant for expensive watches has raised questions about how he can afford them, given his relatively modest official salary. In 2007, Russia’s GQ magazine noted that the then president was sporting a yellow gold Patek Philippe watch, worth an estimated £51,000.

In a declaration this year, he listed his assets as an unassuming flat in St Petersburg, a bit of land in the Moscow region, a few shares in St Petersburg Bank, and two vintage 1960s Volga saloons. He did not mention the watches.

Cynics pointed out that, given Putin’s status as a world leader and his attachment to intellectual property rights, the Pastek Philippe was probably an original – rather than one of the cheap fakes you can buy in Moscow’s underpasses. If it wasn’t a fake, it cost more than Putin’s annual salary.

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