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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
New Russian Question: Who Is Mr. Prigozhin?
2018-03-07
[TheJamestownFoundation] The past several weeks revealed new details about the inner workings of the shadowy side of Russian foreign and defense policymaking. The revelations—focusing mainly on the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the United States’ 2016 presidential election and the exposure of the recent debacle in Syria by the Russian private military company “Wagner Group” (see EDM, February 15, 20)—have brought to light a particularly sordid figure among the Russian elites (Moscow Echo, February 23). The political entrepreneur in question, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is not a household name in Russia and, until now, has been almost entirely unknown to many Western observers. So who is Mr. Prigozhin, and how is he connected to both Russian meddling in the US elections and the Syrian war?

The 56-year-old plutocrat has a more colorful past than many Russian tycoons. Notably, Prigozhin spent some eight years in prison for robbery and the induction of minors into prostitution—a page of his biography that he has taken great pains to try to erase (Meduza, June 9, 2016). He was in his element in St. Petersburg during the early 1990s, and at one of his restaurants there, he became acquainted with an influential and unscrupulous local official named Vladimir Putin (Svoboda.org, February 4). A decade later, this connection helped him gain lucrative contracts to supply ready-to-eat meals to the army and lunches to Moscow schools (Forbes.ru, March 18, 2013). Prigozhin channeled those profits into a variety of additional enterprises, including a luxurious real estate project on artificial islands that were to be built in St. Petersburg (Fontanka.ru, January 18). Yet, he is not in the same league of oligarchs as the likes of Gennady Timchenko or Arkady Rotenberg, who figure prominently on the US and European Union sanctions lists; Prigozhin sits “modestly” just below the first 100 in the Forbes list of Russian billionaires (Forbes.ru, accessed February 25). He is not rich enough even to purchase the Fontanka newspaper in St. Petersburg, which published the investigation into his sponsorship of the band of Russian mercenaries known as the Wagner Group, though he has certainly tried to shut the journalists down (Novaya Gazeta, October 31, 2017).

When investigative reporters first began looking into the Internet Research Agency—the so-called “troll factory” in St. Petersburg—and its role in influencing the US 2016 presidential election as well as the combat operations of the Wagner Group in Ukraine and Syria (see EDM, March 16, 22, 2017), Prigozhin denied any involvement. Indeed, the money trail linking him to both organizations had been carefully camouflaged. However, the February 2018 indictment produced by the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller has uncovered much more detail about the Internet Research Agency and its conspiracy to defraud the US government. Yet, this “troll farm’s” factually proven monthly budget of $1,250,000 is only a fraction of the total costs of employing hundreds of people and paying the rent for its prestigious head office (RBC, December 30, 2017). Prigozhin cannot run this non-profit business as a charity, but his non-transparent business Concord Catering makes for a perfect “roof” to channel money into the Internet Research Agency from sources about which no questions would be asked or answered (Vedomosti, May 19, 2017). Similarly, Prigozhin’s business, on its face, would not be able to unilaterally finance the activities of the Wagner Group, which has, according to latest estimates, grown to a private army of 3,600 mercenaries with an annual budget of about $350 million (Republic.ru, February 21). This, then, raises yet another question: Where does the money come from?
Posted by:3dc

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