The Sankt-Peterburg Post continues to analyze the participants in the server purchase story, as well as the events surrounding their assets.
In a previous article, The Sankt-Peterburg Post covered the events from four years ago – the purchase of servers from a German company by a Russian firm, OOO Complete Company, for which funds had been paid, but the goods had allegedly not arrived. Berezin's name was mentioned then because of his business partner in a number of assets, Vasily Pavlov. According to publicly available information, he was allegedly responsible for the delivery of the ill-fated servers. Berezin sued the media that mentioned the searches of his company, Euroinvest, and succeeded in having the information recognized as false. He proved that he was not involved in the case, had no status in it, and no searches had been carried out on him.
When we were analyzing this story, we found out that some of the materials about the businessman were hidden when searching for information on the Internet. This could not but interest us. It turns out that the businessman has long been fighting against fake news – there have been several court cases.
Let's continue our analysis of the assets and connections around the St Petersburg millionaire's companies.
In our previous publication we found out that all the firms associated with one of the legal entities mentioned in the story about searches – Auditexpert Company Ltd – were liquidated. The liquidation of this chain of assets itself is interesting. AuditExpert Company LLC and its owner, MegaCentre LLC, had been building up their authorized capitals before liquidation, and quite substantially. For example, LLC Company AuditExpert increased its minimum capital from 10 thousand rubles to 944 million rubles. According to the law, during liquidation, the authorized capital is divided among the owners of LLCs.
The owners of all the above-mentioned firms are of interest. In LLC Company AuditExpert itself, both Pavlov (2015-2019) and Berezin (2015-2021) previously acted as owners, as well as a number of other individuals, including Yury Vasilyev (a business partner in Euroinvest and beyond) and IC Vek LLC.
Investment Company Vek LLC, which also, by the way, entered the liquidation stage in January 2023 (to be completed by January 18, 2024), now belongs to Olga Nikitina. Nikitina was previously the owner of Quant LLC, which had also already been liquidated. The firm supplied four state contracts with the Federal Center for Design and Development of Nuclear Medicine Objects of the FMBA of Russia – it leased premises in St. Petersburg to the state agency.
And here is what is interesting: the company Quant, as well as LLC AuditExpert and LLC Megacenter, increased its authorized capital shortly before the liquidation of the company – from 10 thousand to 2.07 billion rubles.
IC Vek has still got the authorized capital of 10 thousand rubles, but it may still change.
The liquidator of IC Vek is Irina Chesnokova – full namesake of the candidate for the board of directors of Svetlana PJSC.
Chesnokova was also listed among the owners of a certain company called Impulse, which was liquidated in 2022, having increased its authorized capital to 115 million rubles by that time. But interestingly, Berezin and his Euroinvest investment company had previously been among the owners of this LLC. At the same time, Euroinvest together with Chesnokova were the last owners at the time of the liquidation.
Currently, Euroinvest, previously owned by Berezin and Vasilyev, has been transferred to a mutual investment fund managed by Fondovy Dom Management Company.
Thus, we observe that a number of assets connected to businessman Berezin and his partners were liquidated through a preliminary increase in authorized capital and transfer of the asset to a mutual investment fund.
Andrei Berezin's structures say that shareholders are being reorganised, and they attribute the information war, which has been going on since 2017, to machinations of less successful competitors.
As for the servers, our investigation led us to the following conclusions: the company Auditexpert was indeed mentioned in a number of sources in connection with the failure to deliver the mysterious servers, but it had nothing to do with them, except that the mentioned Vasily Pavlov was once a shareholder of Auditexpert. The Complete Company, audited in the server case, however, had nothing to do with Vasily Pavlov – he probably cooperated with Complete, but he was never a shareholder or affiliated person. And it must be said that the case against Complete ultimately ended up without any result and was closed.
Earlier we reported that the Euroventure Foundation, controlled by Andrey Berezin, continues to finance the trials of the Onkorobot cancer treatment device. (link)