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After our reporting on his family's ties to Moscow's corrupt funeral industry, teenage owner of nightclub empire suddenly sells off all his assets

Egor Mazaraki leads a blessed life. By the age of 19, he owned a whole slew of ritzy nightclubs and bars in downtown Moscow, and his parents just happen to be Lev and Anastasia Mazaraki, and his uncle is Valerian Mazaraki — all central figures in my June 1, 2019, investigative report about the capital’s corrupt funeral industry. We has now learned that Egor completely divested from his Moscow properties, shortly after the publication of our article. 

According to the Spark-Interfax database, Egor Mazaraki partly or fully owned eight companies, before we published investigative report. In five of these businesses, he was the sole proprietor.

On July 10, Egor Mazaraki sold off his 51-percent share of “TradeCom Ltd.” — a construction company registered in 2010 in the Mazaraki brothers’ hometown of Stavropol, and relocated to Moscow in 2017, soon after Valerian Mazaraki was appointed as Ritual’s deputy director. TradeCom’s business boomed after it moved to the capital, with revenue exploding from 49 million rubles ($777,570) to 304 million rubles ($4.8 million) in a single year. The company has state contracts with Rostelecom, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Federal Penitentiary Service. Egor Mazaraki wasn’t a co-owner of the business for very long — he joined the founders’ board only on April 24, 2019.

From April 11, 2019, to July 11, 2019, Egor Mazaraki was the sole owner of the “Three Mountain Baths” sauna complex, previously known as “Shaika-Leika” (Bad Company).

On July 15, Egor Mazaraki divested from the companies “Dzhubi” and “Dzhiefsi,” which lease 3,229 square meters (34,757 square feet) at the “Three Mountain Manufactory” for nightclubs that belong to the “Soho Family” holding group, as well as the “Friendship” cafe, the “Varka” restaurant, and the “Jagger Hall” banquet hall, according to a report by Daily Storm in December 2018. Egor Mazaraki became a restaurateur in September 2017. Before he bought the Soho Family holding company, it was owned by the designer Denis Simachev and the son of crooner Iosif Kobzon.

We  learned that these establishments are frequented by members of the Mazaraki family and their business partners and friends, including Moscow FSB deputy head Marat Medoev and members of his family, Ritual director Artyom Ekimov, and the son of Ritual’s transportation service director, Alexander Bolshakov. 

On July 10, Egor Mazaraki also divested from another company associated with the Three Mountain Manufactory: the firm “Jagger,” which owns the web domains jagger-hall.ru and jaggercity.ru, and the application to register the trademark “Zavarka-Gastrokvartal.” He’d owned this company since April 2018.

On July 19, Egor Mazaraki sold off two more assets tied to the nightclub and restaurant business: “Mercury” and “RestoGroup,” which he co-owned with the restaurateur Dmitry Braude and Vyacheslav Martynenko. Mercury is the property management company for several businesses inside the Soho Rooms complex, such as the “Na Volne” (On the Wave) restaurant at the Savvinskaya Embankment.

   Vyacheslav Martynenko

Our report established that Martynenko is acquainted with the Mazarakis. Having moved from Stavropol to Moscow at the same time as the Mazarakis, Martynenko was involved in the nightclub business, and later became an owner and co-owner of several enterprises in the construction (“Bridge” Ltd.) and restaurant and entertainment spheres. Today, Martynenko is the sole owner of the Friendship Ltd. company, which owns the “Secret Room” trademark — one of the Mazarakis’ nightclubs at the Three Mountain Manufactory. Moreover, until November 2016, Martynenko was a co-owner of the “First Ritual Company” Ltd., which provided transport services to the Ritual funeral service. Half of the shares in this business later went to Emilia Leshkevich, a relative of Anastasia Mazaraki (the wife of Lev Mazaraki, the brother of Ritual’s first deputy general director).

Martynenko got part of Egor Mazaraki’s businesses at Three Mountain Manufactory: the barbershop “20/15” (the trademark for which is owned by “Blacksmith” Ltd., which Egor Mazaraki owned from April 11, 2018, until July 10, 2019), 75 percent of Mercury and RestoGroup (25 percent of each of these businesses remains with restaurateur Dmitry Braude), and all of Three Mountain Baths.

Egor Mazaraki transferred his other nightclub-restaurant assets (Dzhubi, Jagger, and Dzhiefsi) to Igor Nelyubov, who manages the Mazarakis’ entertainment business, and previously headed the “Krasnaya Shapochka” (Little Red Riding Hood) strip club, before working as CEO of the mortuary “First Ritual Company.” Nelyubov also manages several companies owned by Vyacheslav Martynenko.

Nelyubov is also listed as the CEO for “KP 36” Ltd., which owns the trademark and Web domain for the concert hall “Arena by Soho Family,” which is itself owned solely by Rustam Mamedov, who bought TradeCom Ltd. from Egor Mazaraki, when the latter first started divesting from his Moscow assets. On July 20, 2019, incidentally, security guards at the “Arena” nightclub beat up three journalists at a concert, apparently because they came from a protest, carrying in a backpack a banner in support of the rejected independent candidates running for seats in the Moscow City Duma.