Sergei Skvortsov told Swedish investigators that he is "no James Bond." They would rather see him as Philip Jennings – one of the two main characters in the TV series The Americans, which tells the story of a couple of Russian spies who infiltrated the United States during the Cold War. The arrest of their colleague in the early hours of November 22, 2022, in an upscale neighborhood of Nacka, west of Stockholm, where he was living with his wife and son, seems straight out of a movie – with two Black Hawk helicopters and FBI agents lending a hand to the Swedish police.
After spending 10 months in pre-trial detention, Skvortsov will be tried from Monday, September 4, in the Swedish capital, where part of the trial will take place behind closed doors for national security reasons. Born in Russia and holding a Swedish passport since 2012, the accused is being prosecuted for "aggravated illegal intelligence activities" against Sweden and the United States, from 2013 until his arrest. The charges against him concern the "unauthorized acquisition of Western technologies" through two Stockholm-based companies, described as "platforms serving Russian military intelligence [GRU] and part of the Russian state system."
Skvortsov maintains his innocence. However, the 2,000-page indictment, which Le Monde was able to access, is very comprehensive. He revealed to investigators that his father worked for the KGB in the unit for the protection of political figures. He is said to have served as bodyguard to Nikolai Tikhonov, Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers from 1980 to 1985. Skvortsov was born on July 28, 1963. A graduate in electromechanical engineering, he worked for three years at the Voskhod Scientific Research Institute in Moscow, before going into business.
In 1994, he met his second wife, an economics graduate with a young daughter. He also had a child from his first marriage. Why did they move to Stockholm in 1998? Skvortsov claimed to have been convinced by two Swedes in Moscow, who helped him get out of trouble on several occasions: "I was a businessman and often had to deal with the mafia. I sold Marlboro cigarettes and was sometimes chased across Moscow with an AK-47 to my head." He feared that Russia would collapse: "I didn't want my children to go through that, so I decided to leave [for Sweden]."
On his arrival, he set up his first company, Building and Data Technologies Stockholm (BDT), specializing in the trade of industrial, marine and aviation machinery and equipment. Later, in 2005, he founded Instrument Electronics in Stockholm (IES), an import-export electronics company. The owners changed over the years, but they all had one thing in common: links with Russian military intelligence. For example, Vladimir Koulemekov, who has admitted to being a member of the GRU, was already among those suspected of espionage and expelled from France in November 1981, according to a document transmitted to the US Congress in 1983, during the incident involving the expulsion of 47 Soviet diplomats by Paris.
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