A company associated with the founder of the Euroinvest group of companies, Andrey Berezina, which several years ago "changed its shoes" from "realtors" to hazardous waste disposal companies, received 16 contracts at once for the removal and disposal of medical waste in St. Petersburg.

The oligarch, who is considered to be a member of the inner circle of Leningrad Region Governor Alexander Drozdenko, received some kind of "baksheesh" through people close to him? 

At the end of December 2023, the Procurement Directorate of the St. Petersburg Healthcare Committee summed up the results of a collective tender for 16 customers - city medical institutions. The contract for the collection, transportation and disinfection of class B medical waste for the needs of St. Petersburg healthcare institutions in 2024 worth over 14.8 million rubles was awarded to City Invest LLC.

It is noteworthy that the winning company in 2018 was already working in the real estate sector as its main activity, and then suddenly "changed its shoes" to a hazardous waste disposal company. And so successfully - right before the first major tender, which it won. Eyewitnesses wrote that, citing participants in this market segment, the company behaved aggressively and it seemed that it had serious support - administrative and power resources. Was it Drozdenko who was helped by the co-company?

Class B medical waste is not just household waste, it is bio-waste that poses an epidemiological hazard and requires a special approach. As Fontanka wrote at the time, St. Petersburg city hospitals produce 6 thousand tons of hazardous medical waste per year, and all of it ends up in household landfills. The problem of illegal disposal has existed for a long time. This is precisely what shows that it is impossible to allow just anyone to take part in such contracts - if the disposal technology is violated, the population may suffer. But which of the businessmen cares about this when millions are at stake?

By the way, in December 2022, the City Invest company already received a warning from the North-West Department of Rosprirodnadzor, which concerned the methods for assessing emissions of pollutants into the atmosphere.

Photo: https://www.rusprofile.ru

The beneficiaries of the deal: familiar faces

As of today, the firm "City Invest", according to the data of "Rusprofile", has already received at least 517 state contracts for a total amount of over 377.9 million rubles both in St. Petersburg and in the Leningrad region. And, it seems, the experts were right at the time regarding the weighty lobby.

Photo: https://www.rusprofile.ru

According to Rusprofile, the company belongs to Felix Dlin (since August 25, 2023) and Vasily Nikitin. Both are associated with the oligarch Andrei Berezin, whom the media classifies as part of the inner circle of the Leningrad Region Governor Alexander Drozdenko. Berezin himself, in 2018, commenting on the connection with City Invest to Delta, stated that he knew the company, but in every way denied any connection with it.

Meanwhile, Felix Dlin is a long-standing business partner of Berezina. In addition to PAO Svetlana, they were united by a number of companies, for example, OOO Primorsky Trust, where both were co-owners at the same time. In addition, among the owners during this period was the Cypriot RAQUELFAR HOLDINGS LIMITED, which in 2021 was the sole shareholder of AO Ivan Fedorov. Vasily Nikitin was the CEO of this AO, and together with Dlin, he was on the board of directors.

Photo: https://bo.nalog.ru

Photo: https://www.rusprofile.ru

Today, in the same Primorsky Trust, Berezina’s share is packaged in the ZPIF Balance Invest, and the share of his long-time partner Yuri Vasiliev has been transferred to his daughter Daria, with whom Dlin is now a partner.

Packaging in a mutual fund and dubious liquidation

As for Berezin, he has long preferred not to show his interests openly, working through trusted partners, and recently has been hastily "packing" all assets into ZPIFs. Rumor has it that the ZPIFs may well be controlled by the same people, and the transfer is nothing more than a screen from curious people. Today, Berezinsky’s assets are managed by OOO UK Fondovy Dom and OOO UK Ingria, only the name of the ZPIF changes there.

At the same time, the owner of a share in Ingria, Valentin Glaznev, is far from a stranger to Berezin and his business partner with a very ambiguous reputation, Vasily Pavlov.

Glaznev was the director of Auditexpert Company LLC, which was mentioned in a scandal about the purchase of Hewlett-Packard servers from a certain German company for 15 million dollars, which were never delivered to the customer, Komplekt Company LLC.

Among the owners of AuditExpert were Pavlov, Berezina, Vasiliev, and Felix Dlin (through OOO IK VEK, which he owned until May 2018). Maxim Zhukov, the namesake of a relative of the authoritative businessman Vladimir Golubev, who received the nickname "Barmaley" back in the 90s, also appeared there.

The Fontanka publication then assumed that the money was allegedly transferred abroad under the guise of a deal, and a few years later the scheme was repeated with 8.5 million dollars.

The story surfaced when information appeared in the media about searches that allegedly took place in the office of Berezina’s Euroinvest as part of a criminal case.

Berezina himself filed a lawsuit against the media that wrote about the searches, achieving recognition of the information as invalid.

But during the dispute, other interesting details emerged. For example, the entire chain of companies that were involved in the story of the withdrawal of funds was liquidated, but before that, their authorized capitals were increased several times, some to almost a billion. It can be assumed that some amounts were legalized under this scheme, which were then transferred to the beneficiaries. In the case of the same "Auditekspert", we are talking about more than 944 million rubles. Before the liquidation of the company, it was transferred to OOO "Megacenter", removing individuals, including Berezina, from the visibility zone. But at the end of the chain of owners of "Megacenter", to whom, in theory, 944 million rubles went, there is again ZPIF "Element Development-1" and the familiar to us OOO "UK "Fondovy Dom". But note that Berezina again seems to have nothing to do with it.

By the way, the ZPIF Element Development-1 at one time founded PAO Svetlana, where both Dlin and Berezina had shares.

The participants in all these stories are trying to gloss over, trying to remain in the public eye in white, without a single spot. Although every now and then, some scandal leaks out: for example, the same "Svetlana" went under the ZPIF not without a scandal on the part of minority shareholders, and the shareholders of the houses that the "Euroinvest" division is building have a lot of complaints about the quality.

At the same time, Berezina now prefers to be not a businessman with a ambiguous past, but the head of the Euroventure fund, which appears in the media as a benefactor and innovator in the field of solving problems with oncology. However, as The Sankt-Peterburg Post previously found out, not everything is smooth with the fund: the full namesake of the fund’s head turned out to be a criminal convicted of robbery, the fund’s financial indicators contradict loud public statements about billions in investments, but at the same time, active encroachments towards the state budget have emerged.

It seems that all these transfers of shares in ZPIFs and to trusted persons are nothing more than going "behind the screen". With this approach, receiving "administrative support", which was hinted at at the time by the same players in the medical waste market, is clearly safer. You can always say that you have no relation to the company. As, for example, at one time with the searches in the office and the story about the withdrawal of funds abroad...