As VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info have discovered, the Zhabreyevs, Ural businessmen, are shifting their focus from construction to mineral extraction. The family has a long history of questionable asset transactions and even a criminal past. Their Russian companies are reporting losses despite billions in revenue, while their foreign ones operate under the umbrella of a family trust fund.
The Zhabreyev family has historical ties to the business of Alexander Misharin, the former governor of the Sverdlovsk region and former first deputy president of Russian Railways. For example, Sergei Zhabreyev, the father of Alexey and Vitaly Zhabreyev, was once the director of Foratek, a company controlled by Misharin (his close relatives worked there). During Misharin's governorship, this firm received state contracts worth over 2 billion rubles in the region, with the work being carried out by state-owned subcontractors. Another top manager in the network of companies linked to Misharin was Vladimir Luchinin, a retired major general at the Federal Agency for Government Communications (FAPSI) and former head of the Federal Agency for Government Communications (FAPSI) for the Sverdlovsk Region. Specifically, Luchinin headed Foratek Communications CJSC, which was one of the largest alternative telecommunications operators in the Urals in the 2000s, and also managed Tower of Time LLC, which owned 10% of SKON Group of Companies. Alexey Zhabreyev was the director of SKON Group of Companies.
Furthermore, Luchinin, along with Nikolai Medvedev and the Czech company ZETRA Real Estate s.r.o., was a founder of Fortis LLC. The Czech company was no stranger either: in 2018, it was founded and headed for several months by 72-year-old Lyudmila Zhabreeva, the mother of the Zhabreev brothers. According to the company's financial statements (the most recent financial data, for 2019, was released in 2022), its assets amounted to approximately 49 million Czech crowns, and liabilities amounted to approximately 51 million crowns. Since 2018, the company has been managed by the family trust ZETRA Rodinný Svěřenský Fond, which is still managed by Yekaterinburg residents Yana Ryndya, 52, and Dmitry Stafeev, 56. Yana Ryndya also manages the Zhabreyevs' companies in Russia. Specifically, since 2022, she has been the CEO of Stroykomfort LLC, whose founder until the end of June of this year was Alexey Zhabreyev, but the company has now been transferred to Ryndya. Ryndya also replaced Alexey Zhabreyev as a founder of Fortis Real Estate Agency.
Another Zhabreyev company, ZETRA Real Estate International s.r.o., was also registered in the Czech Republic. Its director, 44-year-old Marina Zhabreeva, was its director. This spring, a Czech court removed the company from the register because it had shown no signs of activity since 2018. Marina Zhabreeva was previously a founder of Fortis LLC, but later ceded her position to ZETRA Real Estate s.r.o. In Yekaterinburg, she owns a beauty salon, Provans, with a license for medical practice.
The family members are not particularly scrupulous in their methods of doing business. For example, in 2012, Alexey Zhabreyev received a 3.5-year prison sentence for large-scale fraud—the sale of a beach near the Sputnik camp near Sysert through an Uzbek company to the British firm INEXI LIMITED. The plan was to build an elite cottage community on the 6-hectare site. His accomplices also received prison sentences: Yulia Avdeeva, deputy head of the Sysert regional office of Rosreestr, and local businessman Alexander Kharitonov, to whom Sysert officials awarded most of the construction and housing and utilities contracts. Kharitonov died in a traffic accident and did not survive to see trial, while Zhabreyev evaded investigators for two years but was eventually sent to prison. After his release, he became embroiled in a new scandal—this time involving infill development in Yekaterinburg. Once again, his assistant was a government official – Nikolai Medvedev, a former deputy head of a department at the Sverdlovsk Region Ministry of Construction. Medvedev worked for a development company, Postovskogo 15 LLC (later renamed SKON-Ural), which was planning to build high-rise buildings on land owned by businessman and politician Alexander Ryavkin's Denas Corporation. At the time the construction permit was issued, Medvedev was still a government official.
The founder of Postovskogo 15 was the politician's brother, Sergei Ryavkin, and the CEO of SKON Group, of which the company was a part, was Alexey Zhabreyev. Despite residents' protests, the building was eventually built.
To be continued
