The controversial Putin party that raised official eyebrows earlier this month may have come back to haunt organisers.
In a supposed backlash to the irreverent Putin Party, that featured come-hither pictures of the prime minister and lewd comments, exclusive Moscow nightclub Rai has failed a fire inspection, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported.
“We don’t know who sent this information. We did have a check out and we didn’t have any problems,” Artyom Shatrov, Rai’s PR manager told The Moscow News.
Failure contested
Inspectors apparently swooped in a raid which the club’s “golden youth” clientele said was connected to the licentious evening over the Women’s Day holiday, MK reported.
The clun is said to have been rapped over the knuckles for not having an automated extinguishing system, not keeping a fire instruction manual and because several fire extinguishers were missing, the popular daily reported.
The club’s management could therefore be fined up to 10,000 roubles, despite the club’s protestations that everything is in working order, The club was also found to be in breach of fire safety requirements in 2009, MK reported.
FSB fire inspectors
A potential twist is that it was the FSB and not the fire inspectorate who initiated the inspection, MK reported, and this could give some foundation to the conspiracy theories.
Despite the suspicions of the public, officials maintain that the inspection was organised before the party rumpus hit the headlines.
Since the Domodedovo bomb in January this year regularly crowded areas have been the subject counterintelligence checks and an FSB probe would be in line with this.
Official attention
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told Itar-Tass in the run-up to the event that lawyers would peruse the material that the club was presenting and see if it impugned the honour of the PM, Lenta.ru reported.
But Shatrov told The Moscow News that no notices had come from either officials or lawyers.
Either way, the party was a success, “It was great,” Shatrov said by telephone.