Russia’s Richest Woman Handed Over A Third Of Her Fortune. Then Things Turned Deadly.
by Jemima McEvoy · ForbesThe richest woman in Russia left her husband in April and quietly gave away a third of her company, Wildberries, in a surprising merger in July. Now two people are dead. Here’s the inside story of what may have led to the tragedy.
By Jemima McEvoy, Forbes Staff
One of Russia’s most compelling entrepreneurial tales has turned into a deadly nightmare.
On Wednesday, at least two people died and seven others were injured after a shooting at the Moscow headquarters of Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, according to media reports.
Tatyana Bakalchuk, the self-made billionaire who founded Wildberries, the $5.9 billion (sales) retailer comparable to Amazon in the U.S., blamed her estranged husband and cofounder, Vladislav Bakalchuk, who she said led a group of armed people into the e-commerce giant’s headquarters, which is just blocks away from the Kremlin, in an attempt to seize operations.
“This is a hostile takeover, or rather, an unsuccessful attempt,” Bakalchuk, the richest woman in Russia, said in a Telegram post in the hours after the shooting (Forbes translated the post into English). She added that she’s appealed to law enforcement “to take control of this situation.”
Both of the people killed were Wildberries security guards, according to Russia’s Interfax News Agency. On Thursday, Vladislav was arrested and charged with murder, the outlet reported, citing his defense team. Dozens of others were also arrested in connection with the shooting. Vladislav has maintained his innocence, arguing that Wildberries’ officers fired on him and his securty team unprovoked when he arrived for a pre-organized meeting, leaving some of those who joined him wounded.
The deadly shooting is the latest escalation in a months-long battle between the Bakalchuks, who have been married for at least 20 years, over the future of the e-commerce giant they long ran together. Tatyana left Vladislav in April and then said in July she’d filed for divorce. One month before filing the divorce petition, Wildberries announced its plan to merge with Russ Outdoor, a Russia-based billboard and outdoor advertising operator once owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. but sold multiple times before landing with little-known Russian businessman Grigory Sadoyan. The business’ day-to-day operations seem to be run by brothers Robert and Levan Mirzoyan.
While Tatyana endorsed the merger as a way to grow the Wildberries business, Vladislav came out publicly against the deal. Enlisting the help of Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin and Putin’s self-described “foot soldier,” Vladislav and Kadyrov released a video in which they accused Russ Outdoor of seizing Wildberries. In the same video, Kadyrov vowed to “return Tatyana to the family and protect a legitimate business.”
New reporting by Forbes, however, sheds more light on why these tensions may have bubbled over. In the months since the merger, publicly available documents reveal that Wildberries transferred all its valuable assets into a joint venture with Russ. Wildberries moved 27 of its 30 subsidiaries into the new company, RWB LLC, in July, according to SPARK-Interfax, a platform that shows the ownership of private companies in Russia. (The three remaining subsidiaries do not appear to contain any significant portion of the business.) Russ, meanwhile, transferred nothing, but gained a 35% stake in the new venture; Wildberries took 65%. Bakalchuk doesn’t appear to have gained a stake in Russ as part of the transaction.
The result: Russia’s richest woman effectively gave away a 35% stake in her company, worth an estimated $3.4 billion. Her net worth has dropped to $4.1 billion, from $7.4 billion in July, according to Forbes’ estimations. Her fortune is also down due to exchange rates.
In an interview before the shooting, Vladislav Bakalchuk raged against the deal, which he argued Tatyana had been tricked into. “There was no merger deal,” said Bakalchuk in an interview translated to English. He confirmed that Wildberries transferred all of its assets to RWB LLC and that in return Russ invested the equivalent of $77,000 into the new firm. “I am waiting for everyone to admit it. Now I am the only one shouting it, but only a few people support me, everyone else just turns a blind eye. Everyone is silent.”
Prior to the deal, Vladislav, who claims to have been closely involved in building and running the business, owned 1% of Wildberries; his wife, Tatyana, the company’s public face, owned 99%. He now owns 0.65% of RWB. He told Russian media that the couple did not sign a prenup and said to Forbes he believes he is entitled to half of the Wildberries business. According to a Telegram post from Vladislav, the first hearing in his and Tatyana’s divorce case was held on Thursday, September 12 in the Savyolovsky District Court of Moscow.
Representatives for Tatyana Bakalchuk did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Forbes about the transaction when contacted before the shooting. In a video published in July, she denied that she had been forced into any deal.
There has been much scrutiny over the reason for the merger in the first place. Despite a significant size difference – Russ recorded around $300 million in revenue last year, about 5% of Wildberries’ 2023 sales – the two companies touted the merger as part of a broader plan to build the nation’s largest and most high-tech digital marketplace focused on Russia, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
According to multiple reports, Tatyana Bakalchuk and Russ Outdoor head Robert Mirzoyan sent a letter to Putin in the lead-up to the merger asking for his sign-off on the deal. They reportedly outlined plans to build a strong global competitor to the likes of Amazon, China’s Alibaba or Japan’s Softbank. In May, Bakalchuk alluded to similarly ambitious goals. “We want to become the coolest company in the world,” she said in an interview (her statements have been translated to English). “Everyone knows Amazon and I want Wildberries to be inscribed in world history, too.”
Beyond just pooling resources, Wildberries and Russ said they wanted to build a rival to the international banking and payments network SWIFT. Numerous Russian banks were banned from the platform after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Putin gave his stamp of approval to the plan, according to reports, apparently instructing Maxim Oreshkin, Russia’s former minister of economic development, to approve the deal.
Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin who has been following the Wildberries-Russ merger closely, said the letter suggests another underlying motivation for the deal. “There is no law that requires such deals to be approved at the presidential level, but once they’re approved, it’s pretty hard to reverse them,” explains Prokopenko. She argues that the letter may have been intended as “security” to help push through an otherwise rocky deal. “The merger of such different companies looks strange,” she explains. But “no one will go against Putin’s will.”
She suggested that the merger may also be a way to solidify Wildberries’ standing with the Kremlin. Before the merger, Tatyana Bakalchuk did not have a “solid partner from Putin’s entourage,” explains Prokopenko. “I would see this as grafting such a partner onto Wildberries.” “In Russia,” she adds, “it is better to be big so that in case of a sudden change in conditions or regulation, your opinion is taken into account by the government and the Kremlin.”
Vladislav Bakalchuk argued that the Mirzoyan brothers, who he depicted as the driving force behind the deal, “frightened [Tatyana] by saying that oligarchs will take everything away from her, that large businesses like hers are now being transferred to the state.”
Russ’s origins date back to the ‘90s when the Moscow-based advertising firm APR Group spun off its Russian business. Murdoch’s News Corp became an investor in 2000 before buying a majority stake in the company in 2001 with hopes of boosting its overseas empire. After a decade, News Corp sold the company, then called News Outdoor, to an investor consortium led by VTB, a bank controlled by the Kremlin, for $360 million. In 2008, three years before the sale, Murdoch had mused to the Financial Times that he might one day lose control of the business. “The more successful we’d have been, the more vulnerable we’d be to having it stolen from us.”
Not much is known about Russ’ current shareholder Grigory Sadoyan or the Mirzoyan brothers. According to the SPARK database, Sadoyan, through his holding company Stinn, became Russ Outdoor’s sole shareholder in August 2022. Ownership of Stinn previously shifted between Robert Mirzoyan and Sadoyan. Robert Mirzoyan confirmed to Russian media outlet RBC that Stinn bought 75% of Russ outdoor in 2019; the remaining 25% owned by French advertising giant JCDecaux was taken over by Stinn in 2020. According to Vladislav Bakalchuk, Wildberries’ first interaction with the Mirzoyan brothers was when Wildberries bought advertising space from them in March 2023. He said he does not know Sadoyan.
A former English teacher, Bakalchuk famously started Wildberries in 2004 out of her Moscow apartment while on maternity leave. She was 28 years old at the time. Her husband, Vladislav, left his job as an I.T. technician to join her that same year. The mother of seven started out buying clothing in bulk from German e-commerce site Otto and then reselling them online. The relationship with Otto lasted four years before she pulled out and began working with brands directly. Her success made her a billionaire in 2019. She was the second woman in Russia to accumulate such a fortune.
Before Bakalchuk became Russia’s richest woman in 2021, the title belonged to Elena Baturina, a former factory worker who went on to build Moscow’s biggest construction group, Inteco. Baturina was married to Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who was ousted from his position in 2010 after falling out of favor with the Kremlin. Russian authorities also accused the former mayor of corruption, including allegations that helped enrich his wife through his position, though it doesn’t appear he was ever prosecuted on these charges. Luzhkov and Baturina denied these allegations at the time.
The year after Luhkov’s ouster, Baturina sold her business and left with her family to London, where she still lives. She later sued the Russian Finance Ministry for the equivalent of $1 billion, arguing that the government unfairly seized her land in western Moscow. She lost the court battle.
With additional reporting from Elena Berezanskaya.