According to SPARK, information about the change of ownership was entered into the Unified State Register of Legal Entities on March 28, after the transaction, Sergei Medvedev’s share in the company’s management company increased to 87%.
The developer LLC Petro Mir owns three shopping complexes in St. Petersburg – PIK on Sennaya Square, Admiral on Malaya Morskaya Street (near the Admiralteyskaya metro station) and Ozerki on Engels Avenue.
According to SPARK, at the end of 2021, the net profit of the Petro Mir holding amounted to 236.5 million rubles.
Mikhail Mirilashvili is one of the largest businessmen in St. Petersburg in the 1990-2000s, in 2012, according to Forbes, his fortune was $ 750 million, which allowed him to take 133rd place in the list of 200 richest businessmen in Russia. At the end of 2020, the cost of its main assets — the Novaya Dubrovka eco-quarter, the Watergen startup, the Olympia Palace — was estimated by the DP at 229.3 billion rubles.
Mikhail Mirilashvili was born in 1960 in the Georgian village of Kulashi, where Georgian Jews historically lived. At the age of 17, he moved to Leningrad and entered the pediatric institute, but his passion was the card game. As Mirilashvili himself recalled this time: “I don’t know where I spent more time – at lectures at the pediatric institute or at the “school of life” at the card table.”
A trip to Las Vegas in 1991 inspired Mirilashvili to create a network of gambling houses “Conti”, “Olympia”, “Nevada”, “Indiana”, which grew into a powerful business empire. In parallel, another project was developing – “Russian Video”. The company, headquartered in a mansion on Kamenny Island, in the 1990s became a guide to the world of American erotic melodramas “9 1/2 weeks” and “Emmanuelle” for the inexperienced Soviet audience. The company also filmed its own movies and soon received a license for the 11th TV channel, which later turned into TNT as part of the Media-Most CJSC of the oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky.
The empire also included port facilities – JSC Port Lomonosov, several berths in the village of Lebyazhye and at the naval base in Kronstadt.
Mikhail Mirilashvili took over Petro Mir holding in 2000 as chairman of the board of directors. In early 2001, he founded the VAM Foundation for Medical and Pharmaceutical Programs, which included about 10 medical institutions and medical research institutes. And already on January 23, he was arrested and accused of kidnapping people who seized and stole a car in which his father, Mikhail Mirilashvili Sr., was. The businessman’s lawyers claimed that the case was fabricated, however, in 2003 he was sent to a strict regime colony for 12 years. The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation reduced the term to 8 years.
While Mikhail Mirilashvili was serving his sentence, in 2006, his son Yitzhak (Vyacheslav) borrowed 30 thousand dollars from him and invested in the project of his classmate Pavel Durov, the Vkontakte social network. According to the Vedomosti newspaper (now the article is in the archive – ed. note), 60% of the share in the enterprise belonged to Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, 20% to Pavel Durov, and another 10% each to Mikhail Mirilashvili and Vyacheslav’s university friend Lev Leviev. The businessman himself assessed his participation in the project as “zero”, and gave the laurels to his son.
The rapidly gaining popularity of the social network interested Mail.Ru Group, so much so that in August 2011 its share was 39.99%. A piece of the “pie” of the Mirilashvili family has decreased to 40%, Pavel Durov to 12% and Lev Leviev to 8%. Two years later, Mirilashvili and Leviev sold their shares to the investment fund United Capital Partners. According to Kommersant, the package was valued at $720 million, however, UCP President and Managing Partner Ilya Shcherbovich did not name the price of the deal.
The entrepreneur was released in January 2009, admitted that he had become “even more Jewish than before,” and soon left for Israel, until recently retaining the PIK, Admiral and Ozerki shopping malls.
The decision to get rid of the assets that anchored the businessman in Petro-Mir was called a long-standing one.
“Mikhail Mirilashvili has been permanently residing in Israel since 2009, and since then he has not been directly involved in managing this business in Russia. And this actual state of affairs was eventually formalized legally, ”the press service of the holding told Fontanka.
Nevertheless, Mirilashvili did not disappear from the news agenda. In 2015, the businessman said goodbye to the Conti empire. In the same year, he became vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and personally met ex-president of Israel Shimon Peres at the gangway in Pulkovo, who flew to St. Petersburg for an economic forum.
In 2016, Mirilashvili himself became a participant in SPIEF. His company Watergen from Rishon LeZion presented a device that allows you to create water from air, and the very next year, Petro Mir announced that it would start production based on the invention in Hanoi, Vietnam. The Jerusalem Post named the Watergen generator as one of the “Top Ten Outstanding Startups of the Decade”.
Losses in half with profit
A significant part of the assets of Mirilashvili’s business empire is now owned by Sergey Medvedev, a lawyer and a longtime partner of the entrepreneur, but it cannot be said that they bring record profits. Capital Development LLC, where Medvedev’s share is 93.91%, earned 1.5 million rubles in 2021 and closed the financial year with a loss of 298 million, Olympia Palace, controlled by Capital Development and owned by Medvedev throughout chain by 50%, ended 2021 with a loss of 8 million and revenue of only 10 million rubles. As well as Plastopolimer Logistics, controlled by Medvedev by 50% along the entire chain: revenue – zero, loss – 18 million for the same year.
Dubrava LLC has been fully acquired by Petro Mir and is holding on more confidently: net profit in 2021 amounted to 43.9 million rubles, revenue – 174 million. The Ibiza Society, which Petro Mir owns 75%, lags far behind in financial success: it earned 39.5 million rubles in the same year, showing a net profit of 5.1 million. Against this background, the Nevsky Laminat Plant, also completely controlled by Petro Mir, looks like a record holder – 3.2 billion rubles in revenue and 533 million net profit for 2021.
Three shopping complexes are not the only “chains” connecting Mikhail Mirilashvili with Russia in general and St. Petersburg in particular.
As a co-owner of a half share throughout the entire chain, the entrepreneur still owns: Baikal Nedra Geo LLC in Buryatia with a 69 million loss at the end of 2021, engaged in the extraction of mineral raw materials for the chemical industry and the production of mineral fertilizers, 70% of Petro Mir Invest ” with a loss of 3 million and another third of the financially more successful Petrogradets LLC, which in 2021 earned 65 million and showed 18 million net profit.
It is possible that the last two enterprises in the future have a chance to go to Sergei Medvedev – now the businessman’s partner owns a twentieth part in each. Petro Mir failed to clarify their intentions regarding the three remaining assets of Mirilashvili, limiting themselves to dry: “No comment.”