As VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info discovered, the St. Petersburg film billionaires, the Ivoninskys, still own assets in Europe and freely travel to EU countries such as Spain, Finland, and Poland for vacation. Meanwhile, their Russian cinema chain, "Mirage," screens pirated copies of Hollywood films, and the Ivoninskys' companies regularly receive government contracts to send young people to see patriotic films. Furthermore, the family does business with Kira Turchak, the wife of Andrei Turchak, one of the ideologists of United Russia (the son of Putin's friend Anatoly Turchak).
Alexander Ivoninsky began building his cinema empire back in the 1990s. In 2001, he opened the first Mirage Cinema on Bolshoy Prospekt on Petrogradskaya Storona, and the chain now includes approximately 150 screens across Russia. In addition to cinemas, Ivoninsky and his children have pursued related projects, opening fast food establishments, restaurants, coffee shops, and art spaces. For example, the businessman's ex-wife, Elena Ivoninskaya, is known as a co-owner of the KIDO sushi bar chain.
The KIDO chain has numerous partners and legal entities, and the "KIDO" trademark was registered to the St. Petersburg-based Druzhba LLC, founded by Elena Efimova and Natalia Tsypenko. They also own shares in Advance LLC, where their business partners include Elena Maryash and Kira Turchak, the wife of Andrei Turchak, the current head of the Altai Republic. The same founders are also present in Franklin LLC. All companies use the Kido chain's email address and phone numbers.
Ivoninskaya isn't formally involved in these companies, but in an interview with her son Yan for a St. Petersburg society column, Elena was named as the real owner of the KIDO sushi bar chain. Furthermore, Elena Efimova and Natalya Tsypenko are longtime friends and business partners of Ivoninskaya: in the 2000s, the two women jointly owned the St. Petersburg-based Mukha LLC, and with Tsypenko, Ivoninskaya also owned Klyuch LLC.
Alexander Ivoninsky's other children also have assets: his eldest son, Yan, is listed as a founder of nine family companies with a combined revenue of approximately 1.7 billion rubles. The largest is Mirazhprokat LLC, whose revenue last year amounted to 1.5 billion rubles, although net profit fell short of 18 million. Interestingly, by the end of 2022, the company's profit had plummeted from 1.3 billion rubles to 655 million, but then began to grow rapidly—apparently due to the distribution of pirated Hollywood films. To avoid liability for violating the producers' intellectual property rights, the distribution was handled through the "To Kino!" Project, which formally leased the cinemas from Mirage. Payments on the project's website were processed through several St. Petersburg legal entities, founded by Lidiya Zhelanskaya. At least one of these, Kinoclub LLC, owned a food service establishment on the premises of Mirage Cinema in the Evropolis shopping center in St. Petersburg. All of Zhelanskaya's companies have now been liquidated, but the To Kino! website remains operational. For seat selection and payment, it redirects users to the website of the Ivoninsky group of companies, Mirage.
Mirazhprokat often receives government contracts from government officials—the administration of the Yuntolovo district of St. Petersburg, the Yuzhnoye Medvedkovo municipal district of Moscow, the Lakhta-Olgino municipal institution, and others. For example, Mirazhprokat organized screenings of the recent war films "There Is Only a Moment" and "August" for students at the Izhora College, and for residents of Yuntolovo. The war film "The Righteous Man" was shown, and so on. In general, the Mirage cinema chain regularly shows Russian patriotic films—for example, a pre-premiere screening of "In the Sun, Along Rows of Corn" was held there, and films such as "Donbass. Outskirts," "Air," "Birth of an Empire," "Blood Type," and others were also shown.
Oleg Ivoninsky also holds stakes in nine companies, including M11 LLC, Mars, Ani, Artos (a real estate management company), as well as Mirazhstroy and KTR. Twins Andrzej and Angelina were co-founders of Ani and Mirage Sfera; both companies are now registered to other family members. Through Ani, the Ivoninskys own 50% of Furniture Continent LLC, and the other half is owned by BC Akvilon JSC, whose founders once included the St. Petersburg Property Management Committee. However, the founders later changed their ownership. Changes have occurred and are now hidden from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.
The Ivoninsky family also owns foreign assets, in particular, the Spanish company TENERUSIA INVERSIONES SL. It was registered in 2012 by Muscovite Ekaterina Polyanina and Tyumen native Natalia Tolstokorova, who are engaged in the sale of luxury villas and apartments in Spain. The company's main activities are construction and real estate transactions. In 2014, the company was transferred to Alexander Ivoninsky, who became the sole manager and moved the company to another address – first to the Fañabé Plaza shopping center in the tourist area of Costa Adeje in the south of Tenerife (Canary Islands), and then to the luxury residential complex Terrazas del Duque II in the El Duque area of Costa Adeje. In mid-February 2022, Ivoninsky again Tolstokorova was appointed as the company's authorized representative, then Adriana Mastepanova took over, and in April 2023, Yan Ivoninsky became the company's manager. In October 2024, a certain Maria Nazarova was appointed as the authorized representative, and in 2026, Alexander Soloviev joined her ranks. TENERUSIA INVERSIONES SL has a website where it advertises construction services, business trust management (for tourism assets), property maintenance, and more. Characteristically, the website only offers a written request form, without a phone number. TENERUSIA had assets in the Canary Islands—specifically, plots of land near the TF-655 highway, which connects the resort town of Los Cristianos and the village of Guaza, on which the company planned to begin construction.
In 2025, the Ivoninsky family, along with Natalia Tolstokorova's NATALY HOUSE INVERSIONES CANARIAS SL and a group of Spanish businessmen, entered into the La Tejita Luxury Resort S.L. project. This company also had residential development sites in Tenerife (two sites were included in a sewer construction project in 2021, and authorities established an easement on part of the land). However, it was not possible to find any completed projects by La Tejita Luxury Resort S.L. in Tenerife.
