Ruben Grigoryan: From Sausage Man to Philosophers and Masters of Moscow
Businessman Ruben Grigoryan published the book “Today I’m making my move.” In an advertising campaign for it, he calls himself “a wise man and deeply understanding life.”
Grigoryan does not spare his own praise: “a successful businessman and philanthropist, writer and publicist, public figure.” We conducted our own investigation and in several publications will try to figure out how Grigoryan’s biography corresponds to that of his proxies.
Ruben Grigoryan
Ruben Tsolakovich Grigoryan was born in Yerevan, where he graduated from the Polytechnic Institute with a degree in radio engineering. Further on, the “steps” of his official biography look very beautiful: an engineer in a radio and television broadcasting center, Armenian SSR, Yerevan; director at RTA “Lazur”, Armenian SSR, Yerevan; Deputy General Director at MPR Electron, Moscow.
And since 1990, according to personal biographers, he has become the founder and president of the Rutsog-Invest construction and investment holding. In reality, Grigoryan’s path to Moscow, and in the capital itself, was more thorny.
After graduating from the institute, he began to work in a branch for the repair of radio and television equipment in Zangezur (a historical region in the southeast of Armenia). Ruben, together with his colleagues, traveled to small villages and repaired TVs, radios, etc. for people. As Grigoryan himself admits in an interview, if people did not have money, then he could take payment by barter – agricultural products. Whether Ruben himself absorbed them or then sold them on the market, history is silent. Actually, this was his many years of fishing, until Grigoryan went to the capital. He himself claims that it was his personal decision to “conquer” Moscow. In reality, everything was different. More established acquaintances of Grigoryan, who had long settled in the capital, needed a foreman for one of the construction sites. Here they remembered Ruben. After working at a construction site, Grigoryan took up his favorite job – repairing equipment. Perhaps he would have continued to engage in this craft even now, if more successful fellow countrymen had not attached him to a profitable place – with the beginning of cooperation, Ruben was helped to open a stall selling sausages on Prospekt Mira. However, Grigoryan’s business was not going very well.
As often happens, Grigoryan blamed his fellow countrymen for his failures, who helped him with a simple business, and as a result decided to create his own commercial project. Only it was not called “Rutsog” (which stands for Ruben Tsolakovich Grigoryan), but a more modestly commercial company “Fakel”, where our hero took the post of chairman. Ruben chose as partners this time, as it seemed to him, generous people – representatives of one of the capital’s organized crime groups. It all ended very sadly. We turned to the official police reports of those times. So, on June 8, 1993, at 11:55 a.m., the service “02” received a call from citizens that they heard crying and cries for help coming from garage 51 on Urzhumskaya street. The policemen who arrived at the scene opened the premises, and inside was “Grigoryan R.Ts., handcuffed to the wall with a gunshot wound to his left leg.” As it turned out, the new partners decided to teach Ruben a lesson, grabbed him on the street, brought him to the garage, where they bullied him for several hours. Grigoryan was afraid to name the offenders and the reasons for the bullying, saying that some unknown intruders had taken away the keys to the apartment from him. However, in the dwelling where Ruben lived, the presence of thieves could not be detected. The ambush did not help to catch the mythical robbers.
After the incident, Grigoryan hurriedly returned to his countrymen and for some time was engaged in the same business. In addition to other natives of Armenia, father-in-law Viktor Mazurov actively helped him in this. And in 1999 (and not at all in 1990), the Rutsog-invest company was born.
Just at the end of the 90s, a construction boom began in Moscow and a number of rich and influential businessmen were looking for a person capable of doing all the organizational work on the construction of residential buildings and shopping centers (the same foreman, but with greater powers). It is clear that all the main work – to resolve issues with Moscow and federal officials, to look for sources of funding, they took over. At that time, Ruben simply did not have the necessary connections and money. So actually Grigoryan found himself in the construction market. However, he has never been an independent player, more influential figures have always been seen behind his back. For example, the co-owner of Rutsog Invest (through a chain of offshore companies, including ALIQUIPPA limited) is a person with extremely extensive connections – Vice President of the Association of Russian Businessmen in Cyprus Valery Gusev.
Of course, while working in the capital’s construction market, Grigoryan also had certain connections of his own, but still he preferred to solve problems with the money he had. Hence some of Rutsog’s projects, in which there is clearly a corruption component.
When Sergei Sobyanin became mayor of Moscow, he himself and members of his team began to rake up Luzhkov’s legacy. And they stumbled upon an interesting investment contract concluded in 2000 by the Moscow government and Vesta CJSC (part of Grigoryan’s Rutsog-Invest investment and construction holding). In accordance with it, the Sheremetevsky multifunctional center was reconstructed (now the Nikolskaya Plaza business center) and the multifunctional complex was reconstructed at the corner of Nikolskaya, 12/1 and Maly Cherkassky Lane, 1/13 (now the Nikolskaya Hotel). Under the same contract, the investor was to build an underground parking lot under Lubyanka Square for 350 cars (16,000 sqm). But on the third object, the work was not only not completed, it had not even begun. Which is not surprising – a parking lot simply could not appear there, since three metro lines intersect under Lubyanskaya Square and there are facilities of the FSB and the Presidential Administration. That is, the city authorities (at the time of Luzhkov) gave Grigoryan the green light to build in the historical center, a 5-minute walk from the Kremlin, under a plausible pretext – Ruben’s structures will seriously help the city by building a huge parking lot (5% of all parking spaces inside the Garden Ring). And Grigoryan’s structures agreed with this condition. At the same time, both sides knew in advance that it was simply impossible to build this parking lot
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The work of Grigoryan’s company was carried out like “an elephant in a china shop.” According to the materials of the Archnadzor, as a result of the construction of the Nikolskaya Plaza and the Nikolskaya Hotel, almost all the architectural monuments of the Sheremetev metochion were irretrievably destroyed.
But even this was not enough for Grigoryan. In 2013, the UBEPiPK of the Main Department of Internal Affairs of Moscow conducted an inspection on the unauthorized seizure of the Nikolskaya Plaza municipal land with an area of 1.5 thousand square meters. m