Evgeny Prigozhin’s catering companies secured record $1.24 billion in 2022 government tenders

In a joint new investigation, the independent media projects Verstka and Mozhem Obyasnit (“We Can Explain”) have shown that Evgeny Prigozhin’s catering contracts with the government have expanded dramatically since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In 2022, Prigozhin’s various catering companies serving schools and hospitals in Russia won government tenders worth 91 billion rubles, or $1.24 billion. This is twice the amount secured by the same companies in contracts over the past 10 years, totaling 185 billion rubles ($2.5 billion) over the course of a decade.

All of Prigozhin’s new contracts came from Moscow and the Moscow region, where he has practically a monopoly on school meals, providing 94.8 percent of all the lunches served in Moscow’s public schools.

The 2019 dysentery outbreak among Moscow children, ultimately traced to Prigozhin’s catering, and other complaints about food quality seem not to have affected Prigozhin’s ability to secure new tenders.