Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin

Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin ( Russian Евгений Викторович Пригожин ), also known as Putin's cook or the cook of the Kremlin , (*  1961 in Leningrad ) is a Russian entrepreneur. In addition to his catering company Konkord , he runs the only private restaurant in the parliament building of the Russian Federation in Moscow. He has been accused by observers of being involved in covert propaganda activities by the Russian government and his economic success is linked to the protection of President Putin .

Life

Career

Yevgeny Prigozhin was sentenced to probation by a court in the Soviet Union for theft in 1979 and to a prison term two years later. After his pardon, he was released from prison in 1990. Prigozhin subsequently ran restaurants in Saint Petersburg and described in an interview that his contact with Vladimir Putin was the result of a meal at which he had entertained Putin and the French President Jacques Chirac in 2001 and that the Russian President had a positive response. However, journalists suspect that earlier, in the 1990s, when Prigozhin was involved in the Saint Petersburg gambling scene, he met Vladimir Putin, who headed a commission for regulating gambling there.

In the 2000s, Prigozhin began building a chain of fast food restaurants. The company failed and the last restaurant closed in 2011. With his company Concord , however, Prigozhin got numerous public contracts, including the delivery of food for schools in Saint Petersburg. When the investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta dealt with Prigozhin's orders, the newspaper was spied on by an intern who actually came from Concord's PR department. The newspaper recognized this and, by the end of the internship, provided vast amounts of useless information via this channel to the Concord restaurant company, which was not only a bourgeois business, but obviously also an investigative office with employed agents. A short time later, the woman's clients went over to "active operations", which Forbes and the writer Dmitri Bykov had as their goal; The popular moderator of a program critical of the government, Bykow, was supposed to be discredited by allegedly paid political advertising in a fake “artist talk”. Another target that was monitored was the journalist Julija Latynina . In 2012, a former business partner of Prigozhin was forced out of the market by hiring his company for a fake banquet in which guests acted "poisoning" and paid paramedics made false diagnoses.

In 2016, the corruption hunter Alexei Navalny presented a report in which he concluded that of the total orders from the Ministry of Defense worth 180 billion rubles, Prigozhin had received orders worth 23 billion rubles. According to Navalny, the vehicles for this were several sub-companies, which formed a monopoly or allegedly only apparently satisfied the public tenders.

Prigozhin brought various lawsuits against search engine operators because, in his opinion, they had promoted the dissemination of "false information" about him. He doesn't speak to journalists. Novaya Gazeta suspected that he wanted to buy the critical Saint Petersburg journalism portal fontanka.ru , which got into financial difficulties after critical publications.

Prigozhin is still considered the owner of a network of companies, which also includes the Evro Polis oil company . Evro Polis is said to have received rights to shares from the exploitation of oil wells in Syria during the civil war in Syria , which, according to press research, was tied to the condition that the sources were first conquered and secured by the IS terrorist militia with their own efforts . The fighters who were used for this belong to the Wagner group , a security company founded by Dmitri Utkin . From this in turn it was reported that he should have been appointed General Director of Konkord in 2017 , which according to the local website fontanka.ru could also be a - very strange - error.

Propaganda activities

Prigozhin is credited with responsible for a number of propaganda campaigns, all of which were aimed at portraying President Putin's government in a positive light. As the owner, Prigozhin is associated with the Troll Army known as the “ Internet Research Institute ” , an institution that is supposed to deal with the dissemination of Putin-friendly propaganda and the defamation of its enemies on the Internet. Furthermore, in 2013 Prigozhin sent a film team to the United States to look for Russian emigrants who were supposed to explain on camera that the emigration had been a mistake. Prigozhin is also accused of setting up a propaganda unit in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv , which in 2013 spread statements against the Euromaidan on the Internet in order to turn people against developments in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.

In February 2018, Prigozhin was charged by a grand jury along with twelve other Russians with conspiracy to disrupt democratic processes in the United States, including the 2016 presidential election , following investigations by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the United States . Also the group "Konkord" founded by Prigozhin were assigned several front companies, which are attributed to the troll army.

Syria

Yevgeny Prigozhin is said to have had a contract with the Syrian government with his company Evro Polis since 2016, according to which 25% of the profits from oil or gas fields go to Evro Polis if Russian mercenaries have previously captured the facilities from the Islamic State .

After the Battle of Khasham on February 7, 2018, in which several Russian mercenaries and Syrian militias were killed in an attempt to conquer a gas field from the SDF, American intelligence services passed on findings from intercepted communications to the Washington Post , according to Prigozhin personally Syrian officials, including Minister Mansour Fadlallah Azzam, discuss the upcoming attack. Prigozhin informed his interlocutors on January 24, 2018 that he had obtained approval for an operation from the Russian government. On January 30th, following the report to Syria, he announced that he had a “great surprise” for Syrian President Assad, which will take place between February 6th and 9th. The official Russian military had denied any knowledge of the attack despite several warnings from the Americans, who had noticed the concentration of forces for the mercenary attack a week before the attack. According to the Kommersant newspaper, the Russian military later described the use of mercenaries as “dangerous lay work”.

Web links

• Alexandra Garmazhapova: "Yevgeny Prigozhin: сaterer to the Kremlin" , opendemocracy, July 31, 2014

Individual evidence

1. ↑ “Obama will burn in hell” , Süddeutsche Zeitung , June 13, 2014, accessed on June 15, 2015.
2. ^ ^{A b} "Russia Deploys a Potent Weapon in Syria: The Profit Motive" New York Times of July 5, 2017
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Alexandra Garmazhapova: "Yevgeny Prigozhin: сaterer to the Kremlin" , opendemocracy, July 31, 2014, accessed on June 20, 2015
4. ↑ Masha Hari. Who is spying on the Russian media? , Novaya Gazeta, June 28, 2013
5. ↑ Cook with his cockroaches , Novaya Gazeta, November 8, 2018
6. ↑ Lunch of Silence - In Russia, it is better not to speak to presidents at high-level receptions - note down waiters , Novaya Gazeta, November 26, 2019
7. ↑ FBK revealed and proved the largest cartel: The Cook of Putin and 23 billion , fbk, May 10, 2017
8. ↑ Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian Oligarch Indicted by US, Is Known as 'Putin's Cook' , New York Times, February 16, 2018; "Concluded in 2016 that significant government contracts were going to clusters of fake companies designed to circumvent federal rules on competitive bidding."
9. ↑ “We did not expect to be burned by napalm” , Novaya Gazeta, October 31, 2017
10. ↑ "The first and last battle of the 'Slavic Corps'" , Novaya Gazeta , October 5, 2017
11. ↑ "Wagner" -Söldnergruppe: Utkin is the chief killer of Chef Der Standard, 17 November 2017
12. ↑ Fontanka.ru, November 15, 2017
13. ↑ Tom Parfitt: “My life as a pro-Putin propagandist in Russia's secret 'troll factory'” , The Telegraph , June 24, 2015, accessed June 24, 2015.
14. ↑ FAZ.net February 16, 2018: Special investigator Mueller accuses 13 Russians of interfering with the election
15. ↑ The answer that could cause Trump the greatest problems. In: sueddeutsche.de. February 17, 2018, accessed August 2, 2018 . 
16. ^ Read the Special Counsel's Indictment Against the Internet Research Agency and Others. In: The New York Times , February 16, 2018. See also Grand Jury Indicts Thirteen Russian Individuals and Three Russian Companies for Scheme to Interfere in the United States Political System. In: Justice.gov (English).
17. ↑ ^{a b} Ellen Nakashima, Karen DeYoung, Liz Sly: Putin ally said to be in touch with Kremlin, Assad before his mercenaries attacked US troops. In: The Washington Post , February 23, 2018.