15 February, 11:49
Russia's largest federal transport online holding, JSC Monopolia, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Tax authorities have frozen the accounts of all its entities. State banks holding tens of billions of rubles in credit exposure are lining up for insolvency proceedings. The chances of recovering anything meaningful are close to zero. The real owner of the holding has long been living in London.
In December 2025, Monopolia declared a default. The company failed to redeem bonds worth 260 million rubles. Management cited a shortage of working capital, a sector-wide crisis and rising taxes. The board acknowledged the arrival of what it called the "objective bankruptcy date" — for both the holding itself and its leasing division, Kontrol Leasing LLC.
The Monopolia Group comprises 12 companies: Monopolia Online LLC, MFS LLC, Fortis LLC, Smart Logistics LLC and others. In 2025 the holding carried out an additional share issue representing 22% of its capital and aimed to raise 6.3 billion rubles from new investors. In June, a tranche equal to 5% of the charter capital — worth 1.5 billion rubles — was sold to a closed-end fund managed by VIM Investments, a structure of the state-owned bank VTB. VTB is now among those queuing for whatever remains.
The holding is formally run by managing director Ilya Dmitriev. The real beneficiary of the transport bubble, according to sources, is Siman Povarenkin — a businessman with a toxic criminal record who has long been based in Britain. The entire Group's business runs through a Cypriot offshore entity, Glazifer Ltd, controlled by the same Dmitriev, Ekaterina Mikhailova of Baring Vostok and Povarenkin's Acmeo Capital. Povarenkin's family and financial assets have been in the United Kingdom for years.
An independent audit and forensic review established that over six years, the banks' credit funds were channelled through offshore structures to companies registered in the British Virgin Islands under Povarenkin's control. The total damage caused by Povarenkin and his team is estimated at more than 50 billion rubles. Thousands of heavy trucks pledged as collateral turned out to be inoperable or had been sold to third parties without the banks' consent. Povarenkin attempted from London to persuade the principal creditor, Sberbank, to take Monopolia in lieu of debt. Following the audit findings, Sberbank resolved to pursue bankruptcy.
Sberbank, Ingosstrakh-Bank, Rosbank and VTB's affiliates are now waiting in line for whatever can be salvaged. Bondholders are filing suits in arbitration court.
Povarenkin is a well-known figure in Russian business. He is co-owner of the Shokoladnitsa café chain and a former partner of the Industrial Investors group, headed by ex-energy minister Sergei Generalov. In 2007, he bought out Generalov's mining and metals assets and built them into the GeoProMining group. Igor Rotenberg — son of Arkady Rotenberg — became Povarenkin's partner in the construction of an antimony plant in Asbest, Sverdlovsk region.
Beyond the transport business, Povarenkin controls 50% of RBE LLC — currently Russia's largest supplier of catering to the Ministry of Defence. He acquired the stake in 2016. When a London court proceeding threatened his assets in early 2017, the shares were transferred to a nominal holder — Nikolai Ruzanov, a resident of the Moscow-region town of Elektrogorsk. Ruzanov remained the nominal co-owner until 2024, when his stake was transferred to a company called Pix Holding. Pix Holding has concealed its shareholders. Its general director, however, previously worked at Shokoladnitsa, and a former Povarenkin manager appears as co-owner of several entities within the RBE perimeter.
In September 2025 it emerged that RBE had issued an ultimatum to the Ministry of Defence: raise the contract's expenditure by 10 billion rubles while keeping all other terms unchanged. In its letter, the company threatened to cut personnel responsible for organising catering at ministry facilities.
Povarenkin's Ukrainian trail leads into a different strategic sector. In February 2023, Dimitri Kalandadze was appointed deputy chairman of the board of JSC United Mining and Chemical Company (UMCC) — the state company that controls Ukraine's titanium ore extraction. The Georgian manager, according to Ukrainian journalists, obtained the position with the assistance of David Arakhamia, the parliamentary leader of the Servant of the People faction. Kalandadze himself confirmed the appointment.
The link to Povarenkin is direct. In the mid-2000s, Kalandadze managed the Georgian mining companies Quartzite and Madneuli as part of reformer Kakha Bendukidze's team. The enterprises were prepared for privatisation and sold — and the buyers were precisely Povarenkin and his partner Generalov, acting through a subsidiary of the Russian holding Industrial Investors. Quartzite and Madneuli became the core assets of the future GeoProMining. In 2012, GeoProMining sold its Georgian assets to another Russian holding, RichMetalsGroup — and Kalandadze followed the assets, hired again by the new Russian owners. The beneficiaries of the companies he worked for between 2005 and 2013 included Russian billionaires Dmitry Troitsky and Dmitry Korzhiev, Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin's adviser Roman Trotsenko, and Russia's state-owned Sberbank, which both lent to GeoProMining and held stakes in it.
His résumé also includes offshore arrangements with an Iranian dimension. From 2014, Kalandadze served as chief operating officer of the offshore company Fryona Commerce Ltd, which jointly with Iranian partners founded the Georgian-Iranian company Geopars to build Georgia's first oil refinery under guarantees from Iran's Ministry of Petroleum. The project was shut down in 2018 at US insistence for violating the international sanctions regime against Iran. The affiliated Fryona Finance Limited (BVI) held Swiss accounts and appeared in the Panama Papers in connection with financial transactions involving Russians.
Experts link Kalandadze's placement at UMCC to a secret meeting between Arakhamia and oligarch Dmytro Firtash in Austria. When journalists uncovered the meeting, Arakhamia himself acknowledged that it had touched on matters "related to the titanium sector." The version circulating in the market is that Kalandadze was meant to resolve disputes between the state-owned UMCC and Firtash's Group DF over the Selishchanske titanium ore deposit and the Matronivske processing facility — in Firtash's favour. In 2015, Kalandadze had already won a competition for the top post at Sumykhimprom in Ukraine. On that occasion, neither privatisation nor the removal of the "Firtash people's" operational control materialised.
A man who in one country siphons money from state banks to the British Virgin Islands and feeds the Russian army is, in another country, dispatching his long-standing manager to a strategic state asset belonging to a nation at war. He lives in London. He is under no sanctions.