Old scams have caught up with Wildberries co-owners.

As VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info have discovered, Levan and Robert Mirzoyan (owners of the Russ Group, key figures in the merger of their business with the Wildberries marketplace) have some difficult employees. Zarema Dolgiev, a 51-year-old native of Grozny, was listed as a member of their Omis 92 structure. She is the wife of State Duma deputy Bekkhan Barakhoev, who, before joining the lower house of parliament, also worked for the Mirzoyan brothers’ company: he was deputy general director of Omis 92 LLC and Visionart, executive director of STINN LLC, and vice president of Vera-Olymp CJSC. Moreover, according to a portal listing politically exposed persons, Daria Poluektova works as a lawyer at Russ Outdoor. Her brother, Konstantin Kazakov, was associated with military unit 68242, a classified division of the FSB. He now works at the Ministry of Finance. Poluektova’s husband’s sister works in the Presidential Property Management Department of the Russian Federation.

However, such connections haven’t saved Levan Mirzoyan from being caught up in his old scams. The bankruptcy of the Cypriot offshore company V.M.H.Y. Holdings Limited, through which the beneficiaries of the bankrupt M2M Private Bank owned its shares, is far from over—its creditors are currently battling in court. Although the court previously relieved Mirzoyan of subsidiary liability for the bank’s debts, and Mirzoyan himself has carefully distanced himself from the V.M.H.Y. scandal, the matter is not yet over. It turns out that V.M.H.Y.’s Russian subsidiary, the Moscow-based PPFIN REGION, is currently headed by someone very close to Mirzoyan. The company’s CEO is Oksana Kudryashova, a longtime friend of Levan Mirzoyan. Meanwhile, the Bank of Russia officially stated that V.M.H.Y. was used to siphon money from M2M Private Bank.

Until 2022, Kudryashova was the founder of Hermes LLC, which was transferred to Mirzoyan’s Olimp LLC in 2024, and last year merged with their own Omis92. Former Hermes director Igor Grachev currently heads 36 companies with activities ranging from advertising agencies to factoring and construction, some of which are part of the RVB structure (a joint venture between Russ Outdoor and Wildberries). Levan Mirzoyan has known Kudryashova for a very long time: according to leaks, back in 2013 he received money from her through one of the popular payment systems, she regularly - at least until 2021 - bought him plane tickets to Greece, Turkey and around Russia, a fan ID for the World Cup was registered to her mailing address for Mirzoyan, etc. If Mirzoyan Jr. is really not involved in the withdrawal of funds from the bank and the offshore company closely associated with it, then how did Kudryashova end up in the director’s chair of a company mired in court, and most importantly - for what purpose? Moreover, although the Mirzoyans do not appear directly in the Cypriot register of legal entities as managers or According to leaked data, Levan Mirzoyan, one of the founders, transferred a large sum to a certain Alexandros Ioakemidis, with an address in Cyprus.

Levan Mirzoyan, as is known, was a member of the board of directors of M2M Private Bank in 2016 and opened a credit line there for 58 million rubles. In December 2016, the bank’s license was revoked. Mirzoyan failed to repay the loan, and legal proceedings ensued. It’s clear he wasn’t the only one siphoning money from the bank—a hole of approximately 8 billion rubles was discovered at M2M, and a whole group of top managers and beneficiaries is implicated in the case. Recently, the chairman of the board, Oleg Safonov, board member Inna Ivanova, board member Roberts Idelsons, and the former head of the bank’s shareholder, Andrei Novikov, were banned from traveling abroad; the main beneficiary, Andrei Vdovin, left long ago and prudently does not enter Russia. Cyprus The offshore company V.M.H.Y. Holdings was actively involved in financial fraud—it owned 99.9% of PPFIN REGION LLC, which owned 59.17% of Asia-Pacific Bank, of which M2M Private Bank was a subsidiary.

V.M.H.Y. Holdings took out and issued large loans amounting to tens and hundreds of millions of rubles, borrowing money from investors and lending it to participants in its network. In 2018, V.M.H.Y. Holdings was declared bankrupt by a Cypriot court, and a year ago, the Russian Arbitration Court also declared it bankrupt. Currently, V.M.H.Y.’s creditors are arguing in court over the order of debt collection, with TRUST Bank being a major participant.

Last spring, the Presnensky Court of Moscow found a group guilty of embezzling $126 million from investors. V.M.H.Y. Kirill Yakubovsky, Maslovsky Sr., and businesswoman Svetlana Bezrukova were convicted. Yakubovsky received an eight-year sentence, Maslovsky received 13.5 years, and Bezrukov received five. Mirzoyan’s name was not mentioned in court in connection with V.M.H.Y.

As for Omis 92, which Kudryashova’s Hermes merged with, it is a unique firm. Its founder, back in the 1990s, was Igor Erastov, a well-known player in the advertising market during the Luzhkov era. He became famous for frequently suing the Moscow mayor’s office, avoiding rent payments for capital land, and winning. Erastov owned a number of advertising agencies and companies: ArtLand Media, Omis-Print, and SUSAN INT. ERASTNEL and others, which were part of his Panomedia group. He was also a co-founder of Promregionbank, which went bankrupt in 2016, and bankruptcy proceedings are still ongoing. It was apparently Erastov who introduced the Mirzoyan brothers to the exciting and enticing advertising business: according to leaked data, Levan Mirzoyan once used a landline number belonging to Erastov’s OMIS-Technologies as his contact information. A turning point for Erastov came in the mid-2010s, when the mayor’s office began demolishing the advertising structures on the roof—Panomedia had legally registered them, but these papers could no longer be used as a cover from Sobyanin. The demolition was carried out by OMS, a subsidiary of Erastov’s archrival, Russ Outdoor, which the Mirzoyans also acquired a few years later. Incidentally, after Yerastov was forced out of the business, the mayor’s office signed a contract for roofing structures with the new owners of Omis 92. It’s possible that under Yerastov, they secretly played along with their competitor and city officials.

Author: Maria Sharapova