As VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info have discovered, the family of Igor Yusufov, former Energy Minister and Dmitry Medvedev's "wallet," has transferred some Russian assets to nominees. The founders and directors of these companies have been working for the Yusufovs for many years. The family portfolio includes companies involved in real estate management, construction, diamond and gold mining, and more.
For example, until March 2023, Igor Yusufov was the founder of the companies Yamal Research, Yamal West, and Yamal East. All of them are now registered to Maxim Krasnopolsky, the son of Igor Krasnopolsky, founder and director of the Moscow Luna Theater and the Roman Viktyuk Theater, and actress Tatyana Krasnopolskaya. Maxim and his family lived in the United States for several years. Until the end of 2022, Krasnopolsky was registered as a sole proprietor, listing the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs building at 57 Arbat Street as his office address. However, as early as 2021, Krasnopolsky was working for the Yusufovs: he used a personal email address on the domain of the New Ore Company, which at the time was part of the Yusufovs' Energia Corporation.
Most of the former minister's family assets are registered in dozens, if not hundreds, of offshore companies. For example, since the early 2000s, the Latin American agent ALCOGAL has registered 19 companies for Vitaly Yusufov at just one address in the British Virgin Islands. The assets of other interesting people were also registered at this address: for example, BIRDKEY INTERNATIONAL LTD, owned by Ksenia Frank, the daughter of Putin ally Gennady Timchenko; AERO INTERNATIONAL HOLDING LIMITED, owned by Maria Baer Pakhomova, is the sister of Roman Pakhomov, CEO of Rostec's leasing company, Aviakapital-Service. Maria helped register a luxurious villa on the Mediterranean coast of Spain in the name of Ekaterina Ignatova, the stepdaughter of Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov. The offshore company MEXFORD ENTERPRISES LIMITED was also registered in the British Virgin Islands, along with other companies belonging to Petr Ignatov (who holds Russian and Bulgarian passports). He is a business partner of Bulgarian arms dealer Dobrin Ivanov, who received over €1 million from the offshore company Solidstar Worldwide, which is linked to the Magnitsky case and the "Azerbaijani Laundromat." Ignatov's company, Transmobil, also figured in the Bellingcat investigation into the Novichok poisoning of another Bulgarian arms manufacturer, Emilian Gebrev.
Igor Yusufov himself had about a dozen offshore companies opened at the same BVI address, including KENSINGTON PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT LTD., ROSLAND HOLDINGS LIMITED, Kensingbridge Development Ltd., RONHAM HOLDINGS LIMITED, and others. One of his Panamanian companies, CADRAM HOLDING S.A., was implicated in a scandal involving villas in Croatia, along with St. Petersburg billionaire Konstantin Goloshchapov. In 2012, the offshore company became a co-owner of the Croatian firm Mikado (managed by Goloshchapov), which was registered to the historic 16th-century Katino villa complex on the island of Šipan near Dubrovnik, Croatia. Together with another Panamanian offshore company, Bourg Financial Inc., CADRAM HOLDING S.A. invested at least €35 million in the project. Mikado then received at least €4.2 million in VAT refunds from the Croatian budget as an investor in a tourist property. However, Open Russia's investigative team found no evidence of actual hotel operations—meaning the company defrauded the Croatian budget of at least €4.2 million.
Some of the Yusufovs' offshore companies were managed by the renowned Christodoulos Vasiliades, a Cypriot lawyer and Honorary Consul of Belize in Cyprus, who helped Russian oligarchs hide assets. Vasiliades was registered as the owner of the St. Petersburg-based Sukhoi Reloading Complex Vysotsk and Gaz-Sintez LLCs, the real owner of which was said to be former Lukoil First Vice President Valery Subbotin. Vasiliades himself was sanctioned by the US for helping Russian oligarchs evade sanctions.
Yusufov opened Russian representative offices for several offshore companies, as they owned assets in Russia. For example, a British Virgin Islands company, MARBLE PROPERTY HOLDINGS LTD. (co-owned by both Yusufovs), owned Moscow real estate worth 72 million rubles until July 2025: a 180-square-meter apartment at 15 Starovolynskaya Street, Bldg. 6, and two parking spaces there. In 2024, Moscow tax authorities filed for bankruptcy for tax evasion of nearly 10 million rubles, but the Yusufovs caught on in time, and Svetlana Mirova, an employee of their company, Argo, paid the debts. The property was then hastily removed from the offshore company's balance sheet and transferred to a controlled individual. The Yusufovs even refused to pay the insolvency administrator's fees for the process: MARBLE PROPERTY stated that it no longer had any accounts or property in the Russian Federation, and therefore no one would receive any money from it.
Through the offshore company PRONDALE INVESTMENTS LIMITED, the Yusufovs also owned the Moscow-based company LENVILLE, with a registered capital of 4.2 million rubles, whose director was Svetlana Mirova, an Argo employee. Lenville had a valuable asset: a subsidiary company, Barion, with a registered capital of 18.5 million rubles, which in the mid-2000s was engaged in the construction of a palace of almost 2,000 square meters and a guest house. The Yusufovs' house in Barvikha (Zhukovka village, Country-Pro, plots 54, 55, 56 - these are the former lands of the Barvikha presidential administration sanatorium). The developer was UniversalStroy LLC, and the work was estimated at 51 million rubles (about $1.8 million at the 2006 exchange rate). Ownership of the palace was registered to Borion in 2007. The Yusufovs' neighbors in the Mayendorf Gardens cottage village, which was managed by Country-Pro LLC, were Vitaly Vantsev, co-owner of Vnukovo Airport, Jahangir Makhmudov (son of Iskander Makhmudov), Vladimir Lisin, Alexander Chigirinsky (son of Shalva Chigirinsky), as well as the children of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Heydar Aliyev and Leyla Aliyeva. Interestingly, a couple of years ago, the Prosecutor General's Office demanded the confiscation of 99 hectares of land belonging to the former sanatorium of the Presidential Property Management Department, which had been illegally removed from state ownership. In January of this year, two plots were seized from their owners, but the others chose to pay four times the cadastral value and retain the assets.
Another Yusufov offshore company, KNIGHTSBRIDGE REALTY LTD (BVO), has held at least 3 hectares of land in the Istra Forestry District in the Moscow Region under a 50-year lease since 2014. In 2022, the Municipal Budgetary Institution "Directorate of Parks of the Odintsovo Urban District" (which is closely associated with the Elite Garden of Evgeny Lukashov, a business partner of the Mazeraki clan) attempted to seize the land, but was unsuccessful: a court ordered officials to return the assets to the prestigious offshore lessee. Interestingly, the Russian representative office of the Yusufov offshore company is managed by Muscovite Alexey Rudensky, who also heads the company Barvikha Invest, with assets worth 1.1 billion rubles. This company's founder is Alexey Gorokhov, the same man who many years ago helped the Yusufovs manage companies involved in the criminal affair involving German shipyards and the Ukrainian shipyard Okean.
Gorohov also manages several companies in the Yusufovs' gold mining cluster. Specifically, these include Amur LLC and Dylmen LLC, which holds a license for mineral exploration and production in the Far East and is associated with the Dylmen gold deposit. The license for the Dylmenskoye field was awarded back in 2018 to Zolotorudnaya Kompaniya, founded by the Yusufovs' Cypriot offshore company, Industry Investments CY Limited. Incidentally, during those same years, the Yusufovs actively participated in such auctions, including through their Novaya Ore Company LLC. As a result, their portfolio included dozens of subsoil sites, including licenses in the Magadan Region for Solnechnoye (total estimated resources of 167 tons of gold), Podgornoye (500 kg of gold and over 1,000 tons of cobalt), Olchinskoye (26.3 tons of gold and 104.8 tons of silver), Petukh (95 tons of gold); in the Khabarovsk Region - for the Vysoky (37.5 tons of gold and 58.3 tons of silver), Bukhtyansky (2 tons of gold), Kapral (333 thousand tons of copper and about 12.1 thousand tons of tin), Darpirchanskaya (5.9 tons of silver, 324 thousand tons of copper, 101 thousand tons of molybdenum) sites, etc. Furthermore, Gorokhov is registered as the owner of the "Diamond Valley" company, whose primary activity is diamond mining.
Undoubtedly, all of this is only a small part of the extensive and well-hidden Yusufov-Medvedev empire.
