Vladimir Putin's special adviser on the Internet, German (Herman) Klimenko appears to be the owner of a Russian torrent website, according to an investigation by TorrentFreak. The site is torrNADO.ru, a pun on the Russian phrase "torrenti nado?"—do you need torrents? It offers the usual range of films, music, games, software, and e-books, all for free, and so presumably pirated.

As TorrentFreak discovered, the domain name is registered to a company called ECO PC Solutions, and the owner of ECO PC Solutions is a certain Alevtina Jacobson. "In December, ECO PC Integrated Solutions (with Jacobson at the helm) was announced as the operator of a brand new TV channel for MediaMetrics.ru, a service which measures Internet traffic to news stories from social media. Completing the circle, MediaMetrics is owned by Herman Klimenko and he admits that Alevtina Jacobson was his employee."

This would seem to confirm information obtained by the Russian-language business newspaper Vedomosti that Klimenko owned the torrNADO.ru site.

TorrentFreak notes that Russian law forbids those in "state service" from running a business, and on Monday, Klimenko announced he was selling some of his assets, and giving others to his son, Yuri Klimenko, to manage. It's not clear where the torrent site will go.

As well as Putin's adviser, German Klimenko is head of Russia's Internet Development Institute. Ars reported last year that the thinktank initially proposed blocking UDP traffic on the Internet in order to stop BitTorrent being used for piracy, a policy that was quickly countermanded by Klimenko. Owning a torrent site himself may have had something to do with that.

Klimenko became Putin's special adviser on all things Internet earlier this month. In an article published by Meduza at the time the appointment was announced, he staunchly defended Putin's highly restrictive online policies and Putin himself: “Frankly, if they appointed someone else in Vladimir Putin's place, then everything would have been closed down a long time ago.”

Klimenko's loyalty to his boss probably explains how he manages to be the country's top Internet official while downplaying the urgency of dealing with piracy in Russia. As reported in another TorrentFreak post, Klimenko recently said: "consumption of copyright content increases with economic growth, and when the [economic] situation is very serious, I think people do not have to unnecessarily terrorize these [copyright and piracy] issues." Putin's support might also explain why Klimenko thinks running a torrent site full of copyright material is not a problem either.