The new engineering company Wildberries was headed by a businessman close to the Mirzoyan brothers.

Under the direction of the advertiser, the organization originally created to help VB Development of Tatyana Bakalchuk’s husband Vladislav can begin building warehouses in its place.

Before joining VB Engineering, Kulikov was involved in the advertising business. The top manager is listed in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities as the director and founder of Didzhiko LLC. His business partner is the general director of Russ Media LLC, Igor Grachev. Russ Media, in turn, works within the Russ Group of brothers Robert and Levan Mirzoyan, with whom Wildberries founder Tatyana Bakalchuk merged the business into RVB LLC (Wildberries&Russ) in June.

• Before Kulikov, VB Engineering was headed by Zaurbek Gadaborshev for less than a month and Vasily Marchuk for another two months – these are the only mentions of them in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities. The company was headed by IT entrepreneur Vladislav Chernov for a long time – from February to June 2024.

On July 11, Tatyana Bakalchuk transferred VB Engineering to a joint venture with the Mirzoyan brothers, RVB LLC, where 27 more Wildberries structures were also relocated. The Mirzoyan brothers’ share in the merged company is 35%, and Wildberries’ – 65%. Before the merger, almost all of the market’s business belonged to Tatyana Bakalchuk, and about 1% was owned by her husband Vladislav, whom she decided to divorce. After the merger, Bakalchuk’s share in RVB decreased to about 0.65%, according to Kontur.Focus data. At the same time, she remained 100% in VB Development, which is engaged in the construction of warehouses for the market.

• Bakalchuk believes that in the event of a divorce, she can claim half of Wildberries. Forbes valued the company at $7.2 billion in February 2024.
  

On September 12, RVB announced that it would transfer the construction of logistics projects from Bakalchuk’s husband VB Development to a subsidiary in order to maintain the pace of construction due to the previous contractor’s failure to fulfill its obligations. The merged company declined to disclose the name of the new engineering company and also did not comment on whether it was VB Engineering. Wildberries co-founder Vladislav Bakalchuk confirmed to RB.RU through a representative that VB Engineering might try to come to VB Development’s premises.

According to Bakalchuk, “last week there was information that 8 construction companies are ready to cooperate with VB Engineering, they are contractors who have huge debts to VB Development.” The businessman added that he has “a lot of complaints about the quality and timeliness of work.” The businessman is sure that in order to gain access to the existing facilities of VB Development, contractors will have to completely terminate contracts with his company and close all debts to Wildberries, which, according to the businessman’s calculations, had accumulated 15 billion rubles by September 24. Otherwise, VB Engineering will not be allowed to access the construction sites.

Vladislav Bakalchuk considers the Mirzoyan brothers to be his main opponents and accuses them of disrupting the construction of the facilities. According to Bakalchuk, the construction of new warehouses was suspended on the instructions of Robert Mirzoyan. On September 6, Bakalchuk stated that “at the behest of the Mirzoyan brothers, the World Bank stopped transferring funds to contractors totaling 1 billion rubles.”

• According to NF Group data from September 12, the combined company Wildberries&Russ will become the largest owner of warehouses in Russia in the coming months. The volume of space in this segment may more than double – up to 3.5 million square meters.

According to the businessmen, VB Engineering was created as an alternative and backup for VB Development LLC to relieve it in times of increased workload. It was planned to hand over some of the assets to this company, but in reality, practically nothing was transferred to them.

“According to my information, but this is not certain, they do not yet have a construction SRO. The only facility they are currently building is located in Yurga (Kemerovo region). The facility was handed over to them last winter and now, as far as I know, everything is at the foundation and pile driving stage. Although they had enough time for active work – the whole season,” Bakalchuk said.

The businessman added that the change of the fourth general manager indicates that people who are incompetent in construction matters are being placed in the company’s management and who are simply not capable of managing an organization “with such a plan and such volumes as VB El Desarrollo has done.”

In turn, Wildberries reported that it was preparing a lawsuit against Vladislav Bakalchuk’s company for 27 billion rubles.

• On the morning of September 24, Vladislav Bakalchuk published an open letter in which he claims that by early September the amount of frozen payments to Wildberries had exceeded 15 billion rubles. The construction of the warehouses is being carried out by contractors, whose debt for completed works amounts to 8.5 billion rubles. 300 contractors are planning to suspend their activities.
• On September 18, a businessman arrived at his wife’s office, apparently to negotiate the construction of warehouses, and a shootout broke out at the entrance, as a result of which two security guards were killed.
• Vladislav Bakalchuk was arrested and charged with murder, including manslaughter, but the businessman was released 48 hours later.