On February 16, 2022, shortly before the start of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the state corporation Rosatom bought a 92% stake in the IT company AT Consulting. The Sistema investigative project alleges that the sellers were companies associated with the "Orthodox oligarch" and war sponsor Konstantin Malofeev.
We are talking about the companies "Project Investments" and "April Capital", which earned up to 19.8 billion rubles ($260 million) on the deal. As Sistema's investigation showed, later part of this money went to the accounts of people and companies associated with Malofeev's projects.
"Project investments", which received most of the amount (16.6 billion rubles), belonged to Leonid Gavrilov, who, as a television producer, participated in the launch of the Tsargrad TV channel, established by Malofeev. In addition, Gavrilov also owns several Cypriot offshore companies, through which the “Orthodox oligarch”, who has been under Western sanctions since 2014, conducts his business. Investigators also found a connection between Malofeev and co-owner of April Capital Anatoly Milyukov.
Gavrilov told Sistema that Malofeev had nothing to do with AT Consulting and refused to discuss the deal with Rosatom, citing non-disclosure documents. The rest of the parties declined to comment.
Investigators believe that Malofeev could have become interested in AT Consulting back in the early 2010s: the company was a contractor for Rostelecom, and the oligarch at that time was the largest minority shareholder of this state-owned company. Officially, the owner of AT Consulting was its founder Sergey Shilov. Sistema believes that, in reality, Malofeev could have gained control of the IT company even then. As Yevgeny Yurchenko, a former member of the board of directors of Rostelecom, said in 2010, Malofeev's structures received contractors' shares, threatening otherwise to deprive them of government orders.
In February 2018, Shilov was arrested on charges of embezzling budget money while developing an IT system for the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Shortly thereafter, AT Consulting was headed by Ivan Matyash, head of the legal department at Tsargrad Estates, and from the company's financial statements for 2019, it became known that the already mentioned Gavrilov is its beneficiary. By the time Shilov was cleared of charges, he was left with a 10% stake in AT Consulting.
Malofeev has been financing separatists in southeastern Ukraine since 2014. After the start of a full-scale invasion, the oligarch began to support the armed formations fighting on the Russian side.