Not Ecoprombank alone: ​​the “ring” is shrinking around Pyotr Kondrashev

Appointed in May 2022 to the position of General Director of the Solikamsk Magnesium Plant (SMZ), Artur Urtaev became a defendant in a criminal case. He is charged with issuing a loan in the amount of 250 million rubles to the company’s shareholder Igor Pestrikov, who was put on the wanted list.

The contract was secured by Pestrikov’s share in the supplier of raw materials for the SMZ – Fin-Project, which is managed by Lovozersky Mining and Processing Plant LLC. GOKA’s losses at that time reached almost 80 million rubles, so that in fact the return of the loan was not secured.

Why was a loan issued if they knew in advance that it was impossible to return it? More on this below.

Previously, SMZ was confiscated by the state from Petr Kondrashev, Igor Pestrikov, Sergei Kirpichev and Timur Starostin, since it was proved that the privatization of this enterprise in the 90s was illegal.

It is worth mentioning that in those years the enterprise worked with radioactive waste, and now it is the only industrial production of niobium and tantalum compounds in Russia. Which, of course, provides a huge demand for its products. Prior to the reverse privatization by the state, this strategically important enterprise was in the hands of individuals who are by no means the most suitable for this kind of occupation.

The former shareholder of the enterprise, Mikhail Dvorkovich, in an interview with The Moscow Post, described the situation at the SMZ in the following words: “It is necessary to shoot not a movie about the Solikamsk magnesium plant and its majority shareholders, but plots of a criminal chronicle on the country’s central television channels.” The correspondent of The Moscow Post in the Perm Territory understood the details of the story.

Motley biography

Pestrikov is called a shady businessman, whose name has appeared more than once in criminal reports related to the use of small arms. They even started a case against him under the article “Threat to kill.” Then Pestrikov, for some reason, had an argument with a man in the elite cottage village “Beresta” and decided to use a machine gun to resolve the situation.

Pestrikov was or is still listed as the founder of a good dozen firms. And some of them are offshore. For example, “Business Invest West” until 2018 was tied to “SANDERS PARTNERS LTD”. On the same day that the company withdrew from the founders, Pestrikov appeared in it. Or rather, did it show up? Billions are circulating in the company, and the shares of its founders are under the burden of Promsvyazbank (its former infamous founders, the Ananyev brothers, are defendants in a criminal case, Kommersant wrote). Can a company essentially be a cash-out shell?

According to the authors of the Banksta telegram channel, Pestrikov’s alleged “fun” was financed by ex-State Duma deputy Ashot Yeghiazaryan, “who is hiding in the United States from the secret services (of at least two states) and is in litigation with the US Migration Service, which accuses him in providing “bullshit tips” on the leaders of the Russian establishment in exchange for receiving political asylum back in 2011.”

In 2018, Yeghiazaryan was sentenced to seven years in prison. According to investigators, Yeghiazaryan fraudulently obtained the rights to a 20% stake in Centurion Alliance worth more than 1.5 billion rubles, which belonged to businessman Vitaly Smagin.

His name also appeared in a mass of hard-hitting stories. For example, about the bank “Unicom”, which was sold to the administration of the Moscow region, accumulated the budget of the region, and then theoretically had the opportunity to be plundered by Yeghiazaryan, who held the position of a top manager there. This is indirectly confirmed by the fact that the multimillion-dollar sums in bonds entrusted to the future politician lost weight in four months, and after that the missing funds were discovered by law enforcement agencies in one of the island’s banks.

A rather well-organized team of unfriendly “sinkers” emerges. But back to the story of the SMZ. According to Kommersant, Mr. Pestrikov, acquiring his block of shares, acted in the interests of Pyotr Kondrashev. At the same time, it is known that in 2019 a corporate conflict broke out between the two shareholders.

Loss of money, death of the manager and other stories around Kondrashev

Kondrashev filed a lawsuit against Pestrikov, stating that this package had actually been pledged to him since 2016, and Mr. Pestrikov transferred the papers as collateral to another creditor without his consent. What exactly did the entrepreneurs not share?

The answer may be very simple. According to informed sources, who decided to remain anonymous, the money issued on the possibly “fake” loan, which was mentioned at the very beginning, was nothing more than a “compensation” from Kondrashev to Pestrikov.

By the way, not so long ago, our publication sued Kondrashev for publishing materials where we covered the activities of the latter and his dispute with Pestrikov, and was forced to agree to an amicable agreement under pressure from the latter.

Kondrashev is called a Perm oligarch who currently lives in Austria. He managed to spoil his reputation long before the state turned its gaze towards the SMZ. He was also the secret owner of Andrey Tuev’s Ecoprombank, which has been declared bankrupt since 2014 – Versiya wrote about this.

By the way, at about the same time, SMZ fell into the hands of Kondrashev through a number of Cypriot offshore companies. Is it possible that the redemption of the shares of the plant was made with bank money? And would the money of the plant have flowed into offshore companies if the state had not taken up its beneficiaries?

Tuev was accused of embezzlement in 2016, shortly before that he tried to hide in Cyprus, but in 2021 he was extradited to his homeland – to answer to the fullest extent of the law, Kommersant reported. In this situation, the scenario according to which, according to law enforcement officers, the former chairman of the board of the bank acted, is interesting. In 2013, he helped Reis LLC get a loan in the amount of 250 million rubles (what a coincidence!). In fact, most of this money was intended for the development company Permgrazhdanstroy LLC. As a matter of fact, there was no security of the contract, as in the situation with the SMZ, and the money was not returned to the creditor. Do you feel the handwriting of master Kondrashev?

An even darker shadow is cast on this story by the unexpected death of one of the managers of Ecoprombank, Ivan Shatrov. In June 2016, after the arrest of the deputy chairman of the board of the bank, Vadim Manin, he flew to London and settled in an apartment owned by a member of the supervisory board, Alexander Gutin. And already on July 1, his body was found in this apartment. The investigation qualified the incident as “a consequence of mechanical asphyxia caused by the actions of Shatrov himself.” But who flies to London only to die?

The same question, apparently, asked the investigation. In 2017, a criminal case was initiated on the grounds of the murder of Shatrov, but due to the impossibility of identifying the culprit, it was soon terminated. According to one version, Shatrov brought to London a folder of documents about Kondrashev’s financial transactions. If this information is to be believed, there is reason to believe that the latter had a motive for committing the crime.

Now that Tuev is under investigation, who knows what they might remember Kondrashev? Judging by the way the people around him are arrested, the ring of security forces is quite tightly compressed around the throat of the oligarch. Not Ecoprombank alone…