The Dossier Center published material on the internal structure of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s business empire, which includes the “troll factory”, the Concord group of companies, Wagner PMC and other projects of the Kremlin chef, namely school meals, construction, hotel business, chocolate trade, media business, mining of gold, diamonds, oil and other minerals, international political consulting, a meat packing plant in the African jungle, a car wash, etc.
At the disposal of journalists were more than 1 million documents of Prigozhin’s structures, access to which was obtained by unknown hackers in early autumn 2022.
The material notes that all Prigozhin’s structures are connected with each other: the wounded Wagner fighters come to their senses at a recreation center in Gelendzhik, Defense Ministry officials receive discount cards to the Eliseevsky store, “trolls” sit in a building built by Prigozhin’s companies and promote PMC services from there Wagner to an international audience.
The same thing happens with elections: the same political technologists work out orders in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tula, Kyiv, Tripoli, Maputo and Cape Town. Employees are regularly transferred from project to project: those who yesterday chose furniture for Prigozhin’s daughter’s apartment are now buying tickets to Tehran or Portugal for Prigozhin’s mother Violetta (nee Khokhlova) through the Moscow travel agency Zelenski Corporate Travel Solutions, and tomorrow, perhaps, there will be carry out filtration procedures in the captured Ukrainian city.
It is precisely because of this structure that the sanctions against Prigozhin's projects, according to the investigation, do not work well.
Journalists studied the staff and payrolls of IT specialists working in Prigozhin's structures. On average, they earn about 110 thousand rubles a month.
Almost half of Prigozhin's IT specialists work without a work book, and officially registered employees receive 40–60% of their salary in envelopes, follows from accounting documents.
All potential employees, even if they work in restaurants, are allegedly subject to a mandatory two-hour interrogation on the Diana-07 polygraph. Its goal is to identify people who are potentially disloyal or dangerous to Prigozhin.
According to former employees, the so-called troll factory employs about 400 employees, of which more than 30 are engaged only in writing comments on media sites, and about 30 more people write comments on YouTube.
In addition to the “factory” itself, Prigozhin’s employees are also involved in other Internet projects, the so-called “special tasks”. For example, online campaigns against Alexander Beglov or the son-in-law of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
A project called "Sable Hunting" against Lyubov Sobol in 2019 was spent from 700 thousand to 1.7 million rubles a month. This also includes the payment of informants who provided Prigozhin's structures with information from opposition headquarters in Moscow and St. Petersburg, opposition media, the liberal environment and other public groups.
A source from the Dossier Center says that the curator of the "special tasks" is a former employee of RIA Novosti, Ilya Gorbunov. Since 2019, he has actually been in charge of the Patriot media group, since 2020 he has been in charge of the “troll factory” and all pseudo-opposition Telegram channels.
In the archive there are mentions of payment for publications, retweets and likes from thousands of bloggers and publics on Twitter, among which are “Literature”, “D///IHAD”, Mitrofan Belov, Alexander Dedurenko, Leonid Dyagterev, “Radio Stydoba”, “ Drunk Twitter” and “News. As it is".
In Telegram, the “factory” paid for posts in the channels “Mediatechnologist”, “Somehow like this” and “338” and reposts in the channel “Karaulny”.
In addition to the federal Telegram channels, Prigogine controls a small “opposition” network in St. Petersburg, which is busy criticizing Beglov: “Protest Petersburg”, “Ploshad Vosstaniya”, “Petersburg Asshole”, “Assembly”, 1703, “Peterskaya Bulka”, “Earlier than all St. Petersburg ”, “Mud Warehouse”, “Griboyedov Canal”.
In one of the documents, Prigozhin’s employees claim that in order to promote the YaRus project, they paid for posts in the channels How I Met Tetanus, Lentach, Only Nobody, Durov’s Code, Antigloss, Nebozhena, Yaplakal , FemaleMems, Chicken Coop, ebobo, and Gossip.
The approximate budget of the "troll factory" in 2022 amounted to 70-100 million rubles per month, excluding "special tasks".
In addition, even before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Prigozhin actively cooperated with the "military commanders". Its employees paid for publications in the Anti-Maidan, Syria|Military Chronicles publications and from one of the most famous "military bloggers" Yurasumy, aka Yuri Podolyak. “Military writer Vladlen Tatarsky”, aka Maxim Fomin, also received compensation for promoting the necessary theses back in 2021.
Another well-known military observer, Rybar, aka Mikhail Zvinchuk, came to work in the office of the “troll factory” a couple of years ago and actively promoted his channel at its expense, the investigation says. In one of the documents of that time, Zvinchuk was listed as the head of the "international direction", where, in addition to him, 49 other people were involved and received payments, including journalist Abbas Juma and military observer Boris Rozhin (Colonelcassad). Employees of the “international direction” of the “factory” wrote analytical materials for the FAN and promoted the theses of the “trolls” through their Telegram channels: “Wings of War”, “Lu Man: A Look to the East”, “Brussels Informer”, “India Today”, “ American Number”, “Center for Violations of Human Rights”, “The Fifth Republic”, “South Wind”, “Beekeeper”, “Tales from the Favelas” and others.