Robber and restauranteur Yevgeny Prigozhin’s unlikely rise to billionaire businessman and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s confidante began at a hot-dog stand. Sentenced to imprisonment by a Leningrad court in 1979 for offences including fraud, theft, assault and involving a minor in criminal activity, upon his release in 1990 Prigozhin embraced the new freedoms of the post-Communist era and became a hot-dog vendor.
Graduating to a chain of convenience stores, he then entered the high-end restaurant trade, most notably establishing the fashionable ‘New Island’ floating restaurant on the Neva River. The luxury eatery soon counted St Petersburg’s then-deputy mayor, Vladimir Putin, among its elite clientele. Upon his accession to the Russian Presidency in 2000, Putin continued to treat it as his preferred spot for entertaining visiting dignitaries, hosting Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush there. He even chose it as the site for his 2003 birthday celebrations.
Thanks to his burgeoning friendship with Putin, Prigozhin attracted the moniker of “Putin’s chef” and his company Concord Catering soon came into receipt of hefty government contracts to feed Russia’s schools, hospitals and army.
That was not the end of Prigozhin’s service to the Kremlin. In 2013, he founded the ‘Internet Research Agency’, the St Petersburg ‘troll farm’ accused by the US Justice Department of having waged “information warfare” to influence the 2016 US Presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour.
Just last month, a video posted online revealed Prigozhin visiting a Russian prison to compensate for dire personnel shortages in Ukraine by recruiting inmates to fight. Addressing assembled convicts, the entrepreneur announced that he represented the Wagner private military company and offered prisoners a pardon in return for six months on the front line, adding that deserters would face the firing squad.
His firm subsequently released a statement conceding that the speaker did indeed look “terribly similar” to Prigozhin and shared a “well-delivered manner of speech”. In a post online, Prigozhin admitted he had not only founded the paramilitary Wagner Group but had even personally “cleaned the old weapons” and “sorted out the bulletproof vests”.
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