The first swallows of a big restructuring in the Russian restaurant business have flown. P…

The first swallows of a big restructuring in the Russian restaurant business have flown. Above all others, it seems that the owners of cheap beer houses RestoGROUP (“Vasileostrovsky Breweries”) should be afraid, as more and more news is appearing about beer poisoning in St. Petersburg.

According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the company was founded back in 2004 by Alexey Ilyinsky and Alexey Artashayev (known in gangster St. Petersburg under the names “Lesha Mercedes”).

In 2009, the list of co-founders was supplemented by the Austrian company StPB Holdings GmbH, which owns the complex of buildings where the brewery is located: according to Ilyinsky, he registered his offshore company in Austria due to the Russian agreement with this country on mutual protection of investments.

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And in the same 2009, the main character appears in our story – Nikolai Mitchin, a famous St. Petersburg restaurateur and owner of Big Family RestoGROUP (he owns the projects “Jagger”, “Karlova Brewery”, “Chateau Vintage”, “Ivan da Marya” and others ). Since then, Mitchin has become a reliable partner of Artashaev and Ilyinsky in all their semi-legal schemes – and remains so to this day.

And in 2017, one of the Mercedes fled from criminal prosecution to Estonia – by a funny coincidence, just when the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, SOBR and the Investigative Committee were conducting searches in the business center “Birzha” in the case of laundering 300 million rubles by the Galant companies Impex” and “Galant Torg”. And, by another funny coincidence, another owner of the Vasileostrovsky breweries – Mikhail Krishyan – was extradited from the same Estonia a little later and convicted in his homeland for raider seizures and possession of weapons (by the way, he seized the building complex that belongs to the brewery today) . How the fate of the company will turn out today after recent changes in legislation is curious, but there is no doubt: Mercedes will have to work harder.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the “establishments” of RestoGROUP, which no St. Petersburger would dare call decent, began to poison visitors en masse with scorched beer: the owners, it seems, sensed that they smelled something fried and decided to “forget” the norms, maximizing the pumping out of profits.