The Crimea-based PMC Convoy received 437.5 million rubles (€4.37 million) worth of donations in less than two months of late 2022, the investigative project Dossier Centre reported after looking into the PMC’s banking data.
Over 300 million rubles came from Russia’s VTB bank and AO Sanatorium Ai-Petri, a company affiliated with oligarch Arkady Rotenberg. The latter company belonged to the Republic of Crimea until 2018, when its ownership was transferred to Arkady Rotenberg, who now controls it through his managing business.
AO Sanatorium Ai-Petri donated 120 million rubles (€1.2 million) to PMC Convoy in October 2022 — a hefty sum for a company that only earned 25.8 million rubles (€258,000) in 2022, according to data from the SPARK analytical system.
In late September 2022, the PMC received 100 million rubles (€1 million) from VTB’s charity foundation VTB Strana and another 100 million rubles soon afterwards — this time directly from a VTB account.
Another 109 million rubles came from the Novosibirsk firm Promresurs, which trades in solid fuel. The Dossier Centre did not find any ties of Promresurs with Crimea. The project discovered, however, that the company had not received a single state contract in the last five years and was in the red in 2022 with a loss of 24.7 million rubles (€247,000). In a comment for the Dossier Centre, Vadim Prisyazhnyuk, one of Promresurs’ owners, did not disclose the reasons behind the donation, but assured that the money went “to a noble cause”.