How a socialite from Rublyovka owed hundreds of millions and went to live in Monaco

Marianna Belchanskaya – a lawyer for the luxury company Mercury, a businesswoman and a socialite – moved to Monaco, leaving large debts and broken government contracts in Russia. How does she live?

Luxurious living in Monte Carlo

At the Monte Carlo casino, the croupier recognized 46-year-old Marianna Belchanskaya from Russia among the players. She settled near the beaches of Larvotto on Place du Moulin in the residence “Europe”. This is a skyscraper for respectable gentlemen, offering a picturesque view of the Ligurian Sea. Buying an apartment there costs about five million euros, but there are no offers for sale or rent, everything is bought out or booked months in advance.

Belchanskaya belongs limousine fleet that caters to tourists in Nice. She also was liquidator with broad powers in the company for the import/export and sale of alcohol in Monaco.

Belchanskaya is in the reference books of the commune of La Turbie – this is the Alpes-Maritimes. Judging by it, it is registered in a historic mansion on the avenue de Gaulle, from where ancient Roman monuments and the Mediterranean Sea are within easy reach. The cost of apartments here is about one million euros. Belchanskaya can also own a butcher’s shop with a cafe on the ground floor. Most likely, she and her elderly mother, 76-year-old Tatyana Ilyinichna Belchanskaya, have French citizenship.

society lady

In the 2000s and 10s, Marianna Belchanskaya was considered one of the most famous socialites and businesswomen in Russia. Once she injured her leg at a ski resort in the Alps, and went on crutches to the Barvikha Luxury Village concert hall, where tenor Andrea Bocelli performed.

On the eve of the twenties, she went into the shadows, becoming a major government construction contractor.

As soon as Belchanskaya was not represented in glossy publications: a partner of the Moscow Bar Association, president of Stroynewtekhnologiya, co-owner of the Tretyakov Spa salon, a member of the presidium of the Russian Jewish Congress, and even “a woman who is considered by the entire business world of Russia.”

Her last public position in Russia is the chief lawyer of the Mercury group of companies, which owns the Moscow Central Department Store, boutiques in Tretyakovsky Proezd and Kutuzovsky Prospekt, Barvikha Luxury Village and the Leningrad Trade House in St. Petersburg, and also distributes premium brands. Total annual revenue is approx. 100 billion rubles.

Belchanskaya is still closely associated with both Mercury and its owners. In one of the companies of the group – the London auction house Phillips – her nephew and niece work (Phillips allocated 6.5 million pounds in support of Ukraine. — Approx. Life).

Recently, in the bankruptcy case of Belchanskaya, it was revealed that her property was pledged to Mercury co-owner Leonid Strunin. This turned out to be to her advantage and significantly complicated the sale of her property at auction.

How the Belchanskys went bankrupt in Russia

At home Marianna Belchanskaya and her mother Tatyana Ilyinichna declared bankrupt. For two, they owe creditors about a quarter of a billion rubles.

The construction companies of Belchanskaya Jr. (Stroynewtehnolodgy holding) won in 2011 a tender worth over 300 million rubles for the construction of offices for the regional treasury of Kamchatka. Investtorgbank became the guarantor. Eventually the contract was disrupted, the buildings were not built within the agreed time frame. Since then, the businesswoman owes the bank almost 107 million rubles.

In 2011-2018, Belchanskaya construction firms signed 180 contracts with domestic government agencies with a total value of almost three billion rubles. Of these, 24 contracts worth half a billion were terminated, penalties were paid on nine problem contracts, three contracts were terminated, and the contractors under them were entered into the register of unscrupulous suppliers. Some organizations are still active.

At the construction company Marianna Belchanskaya on the Internet there are a huge number of devastating reviews from former employees:

Belchanskaya’s mother went bankrupt when she built herself a mansion in Barvikha. Formally, she hired two companies: the first – for the erection of walls, the second – for communications and, as the court found, she did not pay. Now the mansion is pledged to Investtorgbank, which makes it problematic to put the building under the hammer.

The queue of creditors is diverse. Just nothing will go to the workers who were not paid wages in the construction companies of Belchanskaya. They failed to comply with the formalities: to select a representative and submit documents from him for the priority of creditors.

On the other hand, neighbors flooded with a socialite from below from the Dolores beauty salon, co-founded by Belchanskaya’s mother, claim the money. Despite this fact, the salon filed a claim for compensation and also joined the queue of creditors.

How the property of the Belchanskys is being sold

Luxurious Moscow apartments and country mansions of Belchanskaya, it seems, have been sold, but apparently not. It is not clear who they currently belong to. The first instance renders one decision, the appeal cancels it, another verdict is appealed by cassation, the case comes to the Supreme Court. Then it turns out that the valuation of the property is incorrect, that the interests of all heirs are not taken into account, that the antimonopoly law is violated. Then Belchanskaya’s mother is declared incompetent, Marianna becomes a guardian. And everything starts all over again.

One asset that went under the hammer (30 acres of forest on Rublyovka for timber extraction and the construction of a reservoir with a recreational area) was bought out for a penny by Denis Goldberg. He is an affiliate of Marianna Belchanskaya and in another case acts as her trusted legal representative. A few years ago Denis Goldberg changed his name and became Denis Grachev.

An indicative situation is with the five-room apartment of Marianna Belchanskaya in the Ostozhenka premium-class residential complex, which is a stone’s throw from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the monument to Peter I on the Moscow River. Considering that a square there costs up to 1.3 million rubles, the entire living space will cost 220 million rubles. But at an auction, it was bought by businessman Shahin Hikmat Vadi at half the price. All last year, he unsuccessfully tried to remove the ban on registration actions from this apartment in order to transfer it to himself. At the end of this March, another litigation will take place. At the same time, fines for Marianna still come to the Ostozhenka residential complex, where she is still registered.

Two of Belchanskaya’s mother’s most valuable assets are in a similar state of limbo. Formally, her fashionable cottage with an area of ​​600 square meters in the elite village of Barvikha XXI was sold for one hundred million. However, the litigation around him did not stop. Moreover, this lot recently laid out for sale on a specialized site for about the same amount.

The same thing happens with Tatyana Ilyinichna’s apartment with an area of ​​100 square meters in a brick house in Nashchokinsky Lane (this is also an elite property). It seems to have been bought by a Petersburger for almost 37 million rubles Marina Kuznetsova. However, as always with the Belchanskys, the deal was endlessly contested. The customer herself (Kuznetsova) does not seem to be a rich person. She has debts of half a million rubles and a modest life, judging by social networks.

Socialite family

Life found out that Marianna Belchanskaya is raising an eight-year-old son. She is said to have an adult daughter. There is no information about the men of Belchanskaya. In the French registers, she is listed as mademoiselle, that is, unmarried.

Marianna Belchanskaya may be associated with the beneficiaries of the Donstroy construction holding. If you believe the gloss, then she became a builder like that. On the eve of the 2000s, a certain family friend, who was not alien to the issues of urban planning, brought her to the foundation pit of Donstroy and persuaded her to invest there. It was about the construction of the residential complex “Ostozhenka”. A dozen years later, the fact surfaced in the arbitration court that Belchanskaya’s mother owns the promissory notes of the Donstroy subsidiary.

Belchanskaya’s mother is now 76 years old. An elderly woman has been living in Monaco for a long time. She is a former Soviet top model and used to frequent the Monte Carlo casinos with her Chihuahua Cleopatra. Back in the 90s, she opened a beauty salon in Moscow with Dolores Kondrashova, the legendary Soviet fashion designer (this salon was flooded. — Approx. Life). She has been friends with her for half a century. Tatyana Belchanskaya was her muse – her face adorned all the hairdressing salons of the USSR.

Belchanskaya’s father, Gennady Ilyich, worked as director of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Cybernetics of the Ministry of Agriculture. After perestroika, he moved to Alaska, where he lived and worked on the campus of the International Center for Arctic Research. Belchansky spent his last years in the cozy town of Rockville (Maryland), famous for its Jewish community and biotechnology companies. Gennady Ilyich occupied a cottage with an ideal lawn in the yard. The cost is over 700 thousand dollars.

49-year-old Belchanskaya’s sister, Anastasia Bilibina, moved with her family to London many years ago. Before moving, her husband, Andrey Bilibin, was a top manager of Khodorkovsky’s Yukos holdings and the Citicorp group of companies involved in oil and gas equipment. The eldest daughter of the Bilibins often posts selfies in front of the family townhouse in London’s Chelsea.