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the competing company Vera-Olympus. Moreover, the buyer was 5.5 times smaller than the seller in terms of business size.
Unequal partners
Wildberries, in all respects, is also many times larger than its newfound partner. In 2023, the marketplace's revenue amounted to 538.7 billion rubles, net profit - 18.9 billion rubles, and turnover exceeded 2.5 trillion rubles (this is more than 5% of the total retail turnover in Russia). Russ’s results are much more modest: Russ Outdoor’s revenue last year was 27.9 billion rubles, and net profit was 4.9 billion rubles.
If the companies have one thing in common, it’s debt. The main legal entities of the Russ group are pledged to VTB. Wildberries is credited to Sberbank and VTB, its warehouses are also pledged, says The Bell’s source close to the founder of the marketplace. But Russ may have one important quality: well-connected owners.
The Russ Group is a company with a long history and an intriguing shareholder structure. The largest outdoor advertising operator in Russia was founded in the early 1990s and was then called APR-City. In 2000, the company was bought by the holding of American media magnate Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. and renamed it News Outdoor. But in 2008, Murdoch said he wanted to sell his Russian business “before it gets stolen,” and in 2011 News Outdoor was sold to a consortium of Russian investors led by VTB Capital and renamed Russ Outdoor. And in 2019, a controlling stake in Russ Outdoor was bought by a junior competitor, the Vera-Olymp agency.
The owner of Vera-Olympus by that time was the Focus Media Group company, which belonged to entrepreneurs Robert and Levan Mirzoyan and former football player Guram Adzhoev, who played in the Soviet era for Dynamo Moscow and Metalist Kharkov. In the 2000s, the Mirzoyans were engaged in placing advertisements on MGTS payphones, and Adzhoev worked as the caretaker of the EMERCOM sports club on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where, as Sports.ru wrote, Sergei Shoigu, Sergei Lavrov, Gennady Timchenko “and other influential athletes” visited. Adzhoev himself calls Lavrov and Shoigu in an interview “his senior comrades.”
In 2012, Adzhoev, together with legendary Soviet hockey players, became one of the founders of the Night Hockey League, an amateur tournament in which Vladimir Putin played hockey, and in 2013, he became the sports director of FC Dynamo, which had just been purchased by businessmen and friends of Vladimir Putin Arkady and Boris Rotenberg. “Guram there [at the sports club of the Ministry of Emergency Situations] organized everything: the bathhouse, everything. And somehow Shoigu simply recommended him to Rotenberg,” a source told Sports.ru. Apparently, Adzhoev carried out other instructions from his senior comrades: for example, in 2018, he was listed as the director of a company owned by the foundation through which billionaires Gennady Timchenko and Maxim Vorobyov sponsored Putin’s presidential campaign.
While Rupert Murdoch was selling assets in Russian outdoor advertising, the Mirzoyans and Adzhoevs (or those whose interests they represented) were buying up. The first was in 2011 by the small Moscow operator Omis-92.
22 RUSSIA Country Report July 2024 www.intellinews.com