The oil lair of the fugitive oligarch: how Viktor Medvedchuk’s "personal plant" in Kaluga became a feeding trough for killers from the Dzhako organized crime group and sons from the GRU

The oil lair of the fugitive oligarch: how Viktor Medvedchuk’s "personal plant" in Kaluga became a feeding trough for killers from the Dzhako organized crime group and sons from the GRU

Journalists continue to uncover how high-status fugitives from Ukraine have settled in Russia. The most prominent among them, of course, is Viktor Medvedchuk.

As our project has found out, he owns a personal oil refinery. Its revenue and profits seriously declined after the facility was hit several times by drones, but last year the plant purchased new production capacities. However, problems have arisen with them.

The other co-owners are also interesting. They include Putin’s former classmate, the right-hand man of the leader of a bloody organized criminal group, and a partner of the son of the first deputy head of the GRU.

LLC First Plant in the settlement of Polotnyany Zavod, Kaluga Region, processes commercial crude oil and gas condensate — before the conflict, modernization of the facility was planned to produce Euro-5 fuel. It is the largest enterprise in the region: based on results from the pre-war year 2021, its revenue amounted to 38.3 billion rubles.

The director and co-owner of the Kaluga oil refinery, Marina Bochareva, as our project has discovered, is no ordinary manager — behind her stands Viktor Medvedchuk. Bochareva previously worked for him under her former surname, Dukhovnikova. In 2018-2019, she was director of LLC Yug Energo in the Rostov Region. At that time, the company’s founders were two offshore entities — Ventolor Investments Limited and Tumillon Investments Ltd. Both belonged to Ukrainian TV presenter Oksana Marchenko, the wife of Viktor Medvedchuk.

Co-owners of the plant are also named as Putin’s former classmate and brother-in-law Viktor Khmartin, as well as Arkady Berkovich (Artur Khabibullin). He was the right-hand man of the leader of the bloodiest organized criminal group, Aslan Gagiev (Dzhako), and at the time was the common-law husband of then-prosecutor’s office employee, and now head of Rosprirodnadzor, Svetlana Radionova. In 2006, Berkovich managed to obtain a genuine death certificate in Dagestan and went deep underground. However, in 2015, he flew to Russia and was detained on charges of murdering three bankers. Through the efforts of his patrons, including Radionova, Berkovich was mysteriously transferred to house arrest. Meanwhile, he was constantly seen at restaurants on Rublyovka. Then he disappeared again. His patrons organized his departure abroad. However, he has now reappeared in Russia. How, despite being charged with three murders, and under what new name, remains a mystery.

There are no random people among the co-owners of the Kaluga plant. Among them is Tea Kobulashvili. Her share in the company once stood at 95% (2016-17), but gradually decreased — first to 90%, then to 50% (2022-2023), and in 2023 to 12%, and was pledged to VEB. Kobulashvili has no other business in Russia, but she has a rich background and a relative and compatriot, Koba Tskhadaia. According to leaked data, they previously used the same email address and traveled together from Moscow on vacation. Koba Tskhadaia ran a business in the 2000s together with the well-known criminal figure Jorge Portilla-Sumin (also known as Georgy Panish). In the late 1980s, Portilla-Sumin received 14 years in a penal colony for murdering his stepfather and housekeeper, serving his sentence in Georgia. There he became close with thief-in-law Jaba Ioseliani and his friend Tengiz Kitovani — very well-known figures in Georgia in the 1990s and 2000s. It is believed that after this, Portilla-Sumin represented the interests of Georgian criminal groups in the US and Russia. In Russia, Portilla-Sumin was sentenced in absentia last year to 15 years for embezzlement from CJSC Klimovsky Specialized Cartridge Plant — in absentia because, of course, they could not find him.

Tea Kobulashvili herself, according to leaked data, was simultaneously a founder of the First Plant in 2016 and was on the staff of LLC NEFTEGAZ LEASING (now called NGL), which belonged to the Luxembourg-based firm INTERNATIONAL HOLDING AND FINANCING S.A. At that time, the company generated revenue of 300-360 million rubles per year, but showed only losses to the Russian tax authorities. Since 2022, its revenue has suddenly multiplied — up to 3.4 billion rubles by the end of 2025.

The Luxembourg company INTERNATIONAL HOLDING AND FINANCING S.A. was managed by the British firm Global Equity Investment Ltd, whose controlling person was 52-year-old citizen of Georgia and Switzerland, Maka Asatiani. She is a well-known Georgian designer and also the mother of businessman Kakha Jordania, who runs an oil business in Russia with a very interesting business partner. Currently, Kakha owns 25% in the Russian oil trader SDO-Logistics, while 51% is owned by Sergey Alekseev, the son of First Deputy Head of the GRU, Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseev (who was shot at in February of this year). Asatiani’s first husband, the father of Kakha Jordania, is former footballer Merab Jordania. It was on his team that former footballer and current President of Georgia Mikheil Kavelashvili played. In Russia, the elder Jordania has many high-status acquaintances, one of whom is Roman Abramovich.

Meanwhile, the Georgian entrepreneur Maka Asatiani also has a second husband, Konstantin (Kote) Gogelia. He is a well-known businessman in Russia. Until spring 2024, he directly owned a stake in the First Plant’s subsidiary — LLC KMK. Recently, this subsidiary went bankrupt in a very strange way.

Gogelia, like Portilla-Sumin, also worked in the 1990s for thief-in-law Jaba Ioseliani and his paramilitary unit Mkhedrioni. It is believed that Gogelia oversaw a large oil depot in Georgia in those years, which eventually burned down, and the disappearance of large assets was written off to the fire. After moving to Russia, Gogelia entered the inner circle of then-Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and, with his help, acquired for his firm Kommandit Service (owned by him through the Swiss company Progetra) a naval refueling base for the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet — an oil transshipment terminal in the settlement of Mokhnatkina Pakhta, Murmansk Region. In the 2000s, Gogelia traded oil for Sibneft, and his Northern Shipping Company (SGK) had a direct contract with Gazpromtrans. Incidentally, Tea Kobulashvili was also employed at SGK in the 2000s.

As for the Kaluga international plant, it has been experiencing major troubles since 2022. The facility has been targeted several times by Ukrainian drones, resulting in production cuts and repairs so extensive that they reduced production indicators for the entire Kaluga Region in 2023. At the same time, the First Plant provides over 50% of the region’s shipped products. Khmartin-Medvedchuk-Gogelia had to forget about the agreement with the Russian Ministry of Energy on modernizing refining capacities and about the permission obtained through the courts to expand production (local residents opposed it — the plant is located 200 meters from a school).

Although the First Plant announced last spring that it was launching some kind of renewed production. According to a source, the equipment was supplied in circumvention of sanctions with the help of Berkovich, but it has not been possible to get it fully operational.

The plant’s subsidiary KMK (where Konstantin Gogelia was a founder) has been in bankruptcy since 2024 with debts exceeding 100 million rubles. Among its creditors were Igor Shuvalov’s VEB.RF and the military PSB Bank, but they transferred the debt claim rights to a shell company Azimut, after which in April of this year KMK and the First Plant entered into a settlement agreement with creditors.

The owner and director of Azimut, to which Khmartin-Medvedchuk-Gogelia’s company owes about 60 million rubles, turned out to be a worker at one of the Kaluga factories, 45-year-old native of Ukraine Viktor Afanasyev — a regular customer and debtor of microfinance institutions with a salary of 35-50 thousand rubles per month. On the same day, two more firms — Saturn and Energia — were registered under Afanasyev’s name, which have not yet appeared anywhere.

The First Plant has another subsidiary — LLC Arctic Bunker. Through it, the plant sells its products — in particular, shipping them by railcars to LLC Transbunker-Novorossiysk.