This is one of the most remarkable success stories of Putin’s Russia.
A twice-convicted criminal became a billionaire and one of Russia’s largest government contractors.
He profits from everything: from schoolchildren in Moscow and St. Petersburg to soldiers and Emergency Situations Ministry personnel.
He gets paid to maintain military housing complexes and to carry out new military construction.
He owns the infamous St. Petersburg “troll factories,” and his paid commenters post thousands of pro-Putin messages every day across all social media platforms in several languages.
He has luxurious real estate, a yacht, and a private jet.
And the reason for his success is simple: he is Putin’s chef. Back in 2001, he personally waited on him in a restaurant and made a good impression. Later he became, as the media wrote about him, something like a court jester. Then he started organizing Putin’s birthday celebrations.
That is the key difference between a movie-style success story and a Russian one. The man invented nothing, found no treasure, won no Olympic medal. He was rewarded, as a tip, for serving the president well. He was told: now you can engage in corruption freely and with impunity. Here you go—140 million people, go make money off them, and we’ll sign whatever needs signing. And from that moment on, government contracts poured down on him like from a cornucopia (a link to all the contracts is in this table):
The ACF has done extensive work and established the links between Prigozhin’s companies.
ACF lawyer Lyubov Sobol has published a detailed chart here showing how “Putin’s chef” criminal group is organized.
We are proving in legal terms that he organizes cartels to extract illegal windfall profits from government procurement. Among other things, Prigozhin is simply robbing the Russian army.
It is a criminal group, plain and simple, and today we are submitting a complaint to the FSB of the Russian Federation demanding that an investigation be opened against this individual.
If you know something important and secret about how Prigozhin and the Prigozhin mafia operate, write to Sobol or to the ACF Black Box (completely anonymously).
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