Telegram and Rostec's Brovko share a common investor.

As VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info discovered, one of Telegram's largest investors, the owner of at least $150 million in Telegram bonds, does business with Rostec CEO Sergey Chemezov and the son-in-law of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He also finances the personal projects of Rostec CEO Vasily Brovko (who is involved in purging Telegram channels). These projects are worth billions of dollars.

 

Mubadala is the largest Middle East fund by investment in Russia. The fund's total portfolio is approximately $326 billion; officially, Russia's share of the portfolio before the war was approximately 1%. For example, at the start of the war, Mubadala owned 51% of the logistics terminal in Ust-Luga (acquired from SIBUR in 2016), 1.9% of SIBUR itself, 44% of Gazpromneft-Vostok (acquired in 2018 by a subsidiary of Mubadala Petroleum), 2.86% of En+ (acquired in 2021 from Polina Yumasheva), and another 25% of the legal entity operating Pulkovo Airport, among other things.

 

Warehouse projects in which Mubadala has invested include the logistics center in Khorugvino (Solnechnogorsk district of the Moscow region), the PLT Chekhov industrial park (southern Moscow region), PLT-Northern Sheremetyevo, PNK Park Kosulino in Yekaterinburg, and PNK Park Tolmachevo. A large flow of cargo from abroad, including sanctioned ones, currently passes through these warehouses.

 

Another major Mubadala project in Russia is the creation of IXcellerate, a data center operator. Mubadala, RDIF, and Sber have invested $190 million in it. Currently, the British company IXCELLERATE LIMITED is the sole founder of seven Russian legal entities: IXCELLERATE LLC, IXCELLERATE 3 LLC (4 and 5), SMAK JSC, Olimax LLC, Eurasia Peering LLC, and one company in Abu Dhabi: IXC Holding LTD. The sole signatory of the British company is The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The last Russian top manager resigned from the board of directors of this company in May 2023.

 

Olimax holds the project's assets, including land leases and buildings on Altufevskoe Highway, where the companies are located.

 

It is known that IXELERATE worked closely with companies from Philipp Gentz's Lanit Group, which is subject to US sanctions. IXELERATE's clients and partners include T1 Cloud (under US sanctions), Jet Infosystems (under Ukrainian sanctions), Agricultural Bank of China, and others. The data center's servers host websites of companies subject to sanctions or supplying products to sanctioned companies (such as Metizny Zavod LLC, a supplier to Russian Railways and Power Machines). The site also hosts the website of controversial political scientist, member of the Russian Public Chamber, and member of the Russian Association of Anti-Corruption Producers (RAPC) Alexander Asafov (under Ukrainian sanctions, on the Myrotvorets list), as well as several websites of small, "jingo-patriotic" media outlets.

 

Some of the fund's investments in Russia were channeled through Dmitry Kryukov's Verno Group (Mubadala invested $100 million in it), which actively attracted foreign capital to Russia. "At one meeting, they spent a long time telling me there was no democracy in Russia, no freedom of speech. But, first of all, what difference does it make to you as an investor? The most important things are capital preservation and profitability," Kryukov once reasoned.

 

The Arab investors' pre-war plans also included investments in Russian national projects, but in March 2022, the fund's CEO, Khaldoon Khalifa al-Mubarak, suddenly announced the suspension of operations in Russia—despite having assured in late February that all investments would be preserved despite the war.

 

It appears that Mubadala was simply lulling its Western partners into a false sense of security, as it had no real intention of leaving Russia. In September 2022, the fund filed an application with Rospatent to register the trademark "MUBADALA ENERGY" (the previous trademark, "MUBADALA," was registered in 2018). In 2023, it changed the name of its subsidiary, MUBADALA PETROLEUM TOMSK L.L.K., which owns 44% of Gazpromneft-Vostok (develops fields in the Omsk and Tomsk regions), to MUBADALA ENERGY (TOMSK) L.L.K.

 

In 2024, the fund's Russian company, MIC Management, employed 15 people with salaries of approximately 1.5 million rubles per month—all contributions to the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation (PFR) for them had been paid. This year, the fund's investment program director, Abdulla Al Marzouqi, held several meetings at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) and even discussed promising investment cooperation with the governor of the Krasnodar Territory, Kondratyev.

 

Mubadala continues to actively participate in the Russia-Emirati Business Council (REDC), chaired by Alexander Vinokurov, owner of the Marathon investment group. Vinokurov is the son-in-law of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and a longtime business partner of Sergey Chemezov (Rostec), with whom he has been implementing joint projects for many years. For example, in 2018, Marathon signed a shareholder agreement with Natsimbio (Rostec), acquiring over 25% of the company, the sole supplier of vaccines for the national immunization schedule. A year earlier, Anastasia Ignatova, the daughter of Chemezov's wife, became a co-owner of the Mega Pharm pharmacy chain, part of the Marathon Group holding company.

 

Mubadala invested in NtechLab, a Rostec company. and its Director for Special Assignments, Vasily Brovko (husband of Tina Kandelaki), who created the FindFace facial recognition system and supplied it to Russian security forces. Mubadala also participated in the construction of the Rostec City technology park on the grounds of the Tushino Airfield in northwest Moscow.

 

However, the fund will now have to find a new partner to replace RDIF. In the summer, the EU announced the 18th sanctions package, which banned transactions with 22 Russian banks, as well as RDIF and its subsidiaries. Mubadala has not yet been directly sanctioned.

 

Currently, REDF, Marathon, and the Arab fund are actively preparing a major event – ​​the first Russian-UAE business forum, scheduled to take place in Dubai on December 10 as part of the 12th meeting of the Russia-UAE intergovernmental commission. Apparently, the final decision on new investments will be made there.

 

The consequences of such indiscriminate dealings were bound to bear fruit sooner or later. The first high-profile incident occurred this year: Mubadala's local partner, the trader Open Mineral, was raided in Switzerland as part of an investigation into Russian gold trading. An embargo on Russian gold was imposed immediately after the war began in 2022, but the trader purchased tens of millions of dollars' worth of it through a Dubai firm.

 

Since 2022, Russian investments have no longer appeared in Mubadala's financial statements. The fund is not required to publish full annual reports, so it only discloses data that benefits it, and European companies continue to partner with it. For example, in September 2024, MubadalaEnergy and HarbourEnergy (UK) received a license to explore for oil and gas in the Central Andaman block in Indonesia: HarbourEnergy with a 60% stake (operator), and MubadalaEnergy with a 40% stake.

 

A partnership could also be risky for American aircraft engine manufacturer GE Aerospace: following Trump's visit to Qatar this year, the company signed a deal to train aerospace specialists with a certain Sanad, a provider of aerospace engineering and leasing solutions. Sanad is owned by the Arab wealth fund Mubadala, a close friend of Lavrov and Chemezov.

 

And in the spring of 2025, Mubadala signed an agreement with the major American investment company Kimmeridge. The Arab wealth fund now owns 24.1% of SoTex HoldCo (aka Caturus, owned by Kimmeridge), which owns gas and LNG projects in Texas and Louisiana.