To whom did Vladimir Putin give Wildberries?

In the conflict over the merger of online retailer Wildberries with outdoor advertising operator group Russ Outdoor, the key question is: who is Ramzan Kadyrov (and rapper Timati, who joined him this week) fighting against?

Important Stories studied the Russ Outdoor group to understand who is behind it and who could have convinced Putin to approve the deal, which Kadyrov called a “raider takeover” and promised to cancel.

Unemployed millionaire

The formal owner of the Russ Outdoor group is Grigory Sadoyan. Important Stories managed to find out that in the mid-2000s he was registered in the village of Prilepy in the Kursk region and was officially listed as unemployed. By 2011, Sadoyan got a job as a driver for the Mirzoyan brothers, Robert and Levan.

They call themselves the real owners of Russ Outdoor, although, as business media reported, Mirzoyanov was financed by another person - Senator Suleiman Kerimov. According to Dozhd, he also brought Wildberries founder Tatyana Bakalchuk to the head of the Russian presidential administration Anton Vaino.

However, other people close to Putin were also connected with the owners of the Russ Outdoor group.

Trainer

Since 2004, Robert and Levan Mirzoyan owned the advertising company Focus Media Group, which placed advertisements on telephone booths in Moscow. In 2007, 30% of the company went to the former sports director of the Dynamo football club, Guram Adzhoyev. The following year, 2008, the Mirzoyans created the advertising company Oil Media together with Adzhoyev's son, Mamuka.

A few years later, Adzhoev became one of the founders and vice-president of the Night Hockey League, created on Putin's initiative. He coached Putin's team and met many influential officials and businessmen: Sergei Shoigu, Minister Sergei Lavrov, Putin's closest friends, the Rotenberg brothers, and Gennady Timchenko.

Press Secretary of the President

In 2019, the Russ Outdoor group acquired the Laysa company, which in 2006 received an unprecedented 15-year contract from Russian Railways and became the advertising operator on all railway facilities. Years later, it turned out that Vitaly Krivenko from the famous PR agency Mikhailov and Partners had a share in Laysa. Krivenko managed to work for some time as deputy head of the corporate communications department of Russian Railways. But Laysa's connections were not limited to this.

Important Stories sources close to the Russian government say that Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov had a personal interest in Laysa.

One of the company's co-owners was Peskov's friend Sergei Kolushev. As reported by Sobesednik, he was an honorary guest at Peskov and Tatyana Navka's wedding. In addition, Kolushev's company organized the figure skater's ice shows.

Chairman of the state corporation

In 2022, a share in the company that owned Russ Outdoor ended up in a closed-end mutual investment fund of KSP Capital Asset Management of Sergei Kotlyarenko, who managed the property of Igor Shuvalov, chairman of the state corporation VEB.RF. The following year, the mutual fund got rid of this share, and it went to the company of the former driver of the Mirzoyans - Sadoyan.

Now the company of the once unemployed resident of the village of Prilepy owns 35% in the joint venture Russ Outdoor and Wildberries (the marketplace has 65%). The unfairness of such a distribution of shares was pointed out by Vladislav Bakalchuk in Kadyrov's video. The head of Chechnya promised to cancel the deal approved by Putin and return the founder of Wildberries Tatyana Bakalchuk to her husband. In response, she said that she is not a "prisoner of the Caucasus", there is no need to save her - she is just getting a divorce.

"A purely Russian business model. The state does not work. And in order to solve their problems, the parties turn to those who have access to the top person," this is how a Russian businessman from the Forbes list assesses the situation in a conversation with "Important Stories".