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Who owns Ozon, Russia’s second-largest online marketplace? Team Navalny traced the money behind its biggest shareholder to Putin’s friend Gennady Timchenko.

Source: The Anti-Corruption Foundation

Alexander Chachava, an investor and Ozon’s largest shareholder, bought his stake in the company with money from entities controlled by Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire and friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to an investigation by the Anti-Corruption Foundation. The group was founded by the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny.

Ozon is Russia’s second-largest online marketplace. Ukrainian drones have targeted its logistics centers since mid-August, following earlier strikes on warehouses belonging to the market leader, Wildberries. The attacks are part of Ukraine’s effort to strike at Russia’s economy. Officially, Kyiv says it targets the marketplaces because they sell goods for the Russian military.

The investigation centers on the purchase of a 27.7% stake in Ozon that previously belonged to the investment company Baring Vostok. That stake, along with other assets, passed to Vostok Investments after a criminal case was opened against Baring Vostok’s founder, Michael Calvey, and after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Vostok Investments was created by former members of Baring Vostok’s Russian team.

The nearly 28% stake changed hands in 2024, according to the Russian business outlet RBC. The buyer was a company called O23, which was then sold to entities controlled by Chachava. By April 2026, those entities had increased their combined stake in Ozon to 34.95%. The sources of financing for the deal were not publicly disclosed. The independent Russian business outlet The Bell has reported that entities controlled by Yuri Kovalchuk, another friend of Putin, are behind the buyer.

Anti-Corruption Foundation staff examined the records and debts of Chachava’s companies and concluded that one of them, Stratosphere Investment Group, received a loan of 51.23 billion rubles from a company called Optima. Optima’s employees work or have worked at firms linked to Putin’s nephew Mikhail Shelomov, Kovalchuk, and Putin’s “close friend” Svetlana Krivonogikh. Optima, in turn, had received that same 51 billion rubles from Delta, a company owned by Timchenko, according to the foundation.

The investigation’s authors call Timchenko one of Putin’s closest “wallet friends” — the people who effectively hold his personal money. “[These are] the people he turned into oligarchs […],” the investigation says. “He illegally handed them enormous chunks of the Russian economy, gave them access to trillions of rubles, and now they use that money to pay for all of Putin’s wishes.”

Among the examples of these “wishes,” the foundation cites “Putin’s palace” in Gelendzhik, whose construction was paid for by Timchenko along with businessmen Ilgam Ragimov and Nikolai Yegorov. Investigators have previously found that other entities controlled by Timchenko pay the salaries of nannies and tutors for the alleged sons of Putin and Alina Kabaeva.

According to the foundation, Ozon was bought for Putin personally with money from a “slush fund,” using roughly the same scheme used to buy the Baltika brewery from Denmark’s Carlsberg Group. One of Timchenko’s companies was involved in that deal too, the foundation found.

The foundation called on the European Union to sanction the people and companies that, according to its findings, control the largest stake in Ozon on behalf of Putin and his inner circle.