A shooting happened yesterday in the center of Moscow and near the main office of the largest online retailer Wildberries in the center of Moscow. It is noteworthy that yesterday the official state agencies reported on the incident in fragmented and small pieces of information, and this morning the topic was not present on the Internet pages, being pushed into the gossip columns.
Two security guards at the Wildberries office were reported killed in the shootout yesterday.
The head of the company, Tatiana Bakalchuk, stated that her husband tried to take over the company's offices.
"Today, a group of people led by Vladislav Bakalchuk, Sergey Anufriev and Vladimir Bakin tried to take over the offices of Wildberries in Moscow," said the company's founder and the country's richest woman, Tatiana Bakalchuk. Forbes estimates her fortune at $7.4 billion.
Russia's Investigative Committee later confirmed that two people were killed in the shooting and seven people were injured, including two law enforcement officers.
A criminal case has been opened under the articles of murder, attempted murder of two or more persons, attempt on the life of a law enforcement officer, illegal possession of a firearm and "arbitrary" (Part 2 of Article 330 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
According to Interfax, around 30 people were taken to the police after the shooting.
According to RBC, in addition to the shooting incident on the territory of the "Romanov Dvor" business center, a similar incident also occurred at the Wildberries office in "Iskra Park", near the "Dynamo" metro station. There is no information that there was any shooting there. In this second office, the group of 30-40 people in sports-military clothing, some wearing masks, was led by Wildberries co-founder and former sales director Sergey Anufriev, who left the company quietly before the changes announced in June.
However, in the second half of the day, after the incidents, the company's work was not affected.
The husband of Wildberries manager Vladislav Bakalchuk said that he arrived at the company's office with colleagues and "was attacked by the security service and people unknown to me who provoked an armed conflict". According to him, one of his colleagues was injured during the shooting.
According to Bakalchuk, he went "to a meeting with management" to discuss "the issue of building new warehouses". At the beginning of September, Vladislav Bakalchuk stated that the construction of new Wildberries warehouses throughout Russia and the CIS has been suspended, as the financing of the contractor - his company "VB Development" - has been cut off. A counter-indictment of default on more than 60 contracts followed.
"I knew that provocations were possible, that's why I turned to the Ministry of Internal Affairs to provide security [...] My people were not armed, we were guarded by policemen. The first shots were fired from inside the building, through the glass of the Wildberries office," Vladislav Bakalchuk says in a statement.
His wife, for her part, calls the incident a failed attempt to raid the company. "The statement about alleged negotiations, to which an armed group came, sounds absurd, since no one agreed to any negotiations," writes Tatyana Bakalchuk.
The conflict between the spouses Vladislav and Tatiana Bakalchuk became widely known in July by a publication of the head of Chechnya. Then Ramzan Kadyrov reported on his Telegram channel that the husband of the richest woman in Russia, the founder of Wildberries Tatyana Bakalchuk, came to him and complained about "serious problems both in the family and with the established family business" . According to Kadyrov, Vladislav Bakalchuk claimed that his wife "contacted an unknown company which, under the guise of a merger, is extorting the business".
The conflict is related to Wildberries' merger with advertising operator Russ Outdoor, which was officially announced on June 18. This deal, as Forbes wrote, "confused market participants: no one could understand how the deal was structured and what want to achieve the countries".
The agency writes that the merger can be explained by Tatyana Bakalchuk's affair with Russ Outdoor director Robert Mirzoyan. According to media reports, the deal between Wildberries and Russ Outdoor was approved by Putin personally, and the deputy head of the presidential administration, Maxim Oreshkin, was appointed curator of the project. RBC insists on this thesis even now.
After her husband's complaint to Ramzan Kadyrov, Tatyana Bakalchuk stated that this deal was agreed with Vladislav Bakalchuk and announced her divorce with him. According to her, Vladislav is fully aware of what is happening in the family business, and he was personally present at the presentation of the new structure of the united company - LLC "RVB".
The divorce case of the Bakalchuk family is currently being considered in a court in Moscow.
According to Forbes, all this was preceded by a letter that Mirzoyan and Bakalchuk sent to Vladimir Putin. They have presented the deal as creating the "strongest competitor" in Russia to companies such as Amazon and Alibaba, and will create "the largest digital banking network and payment system for ruble settlements worldwide, bypassing SWIFT".