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A billionaire built Russia’s mayonnaise empire, then bankrolled its battlefield drones. Now Valery Kustov is under arrest on major fraud charges.
Source: Meduza
Valery Kustov, chairman of the board of directors of the EFKO group of companies, on July 2, 2025.
Dmitry Astakhov / TASS / Profimedia
- Valery Kustov, the billionaire chairman of EFKO’s board of directors and the group’s main shareholder — he holds a 42 percent stake — was detained in Moscow on suspicion of large-scale fraud. EFKO general director Yevgeny Lyashenko was detained alongside him. Kustov has already been placed under arrest until September 29, according to the Russian business outlet RBC. A court is expected to rule on a pretrial restriction for Lyashenko soon.
- Kustov founded EFKO with partners in 1994. The company has since grown into one of Russia’s largest food producers, making products including cooking oil and mayonnaise; its brands include Sloboda, Altero, DeOlio, and Fresh. In 2025, EFKO acquired assets previously owned by the American company Bunge, a deal that included the brands Oleyna and Ideal, among others. Kustov’s fortune is estimated at $1.1 billion, placing him 144th on Forbes’s 2026 list of Russian billionaires.
- The same criminal case led to the arrest of two other EFKO executives a day earlier, on July 29. Yekaterina Kustova, the company’s deputy director for development, whose relationship to the billionaire has not been specified, was among them. So was Vladislav Romantsev, director for strategic development at the group’s management company. Alla Polovchenya, deputy head of the Industry and Trade Ministry’s unmanned systems and robotics department, was also placed in a pretrial detention center on suspicion of large-scale embezzlement.
- Sources told RBC that the investigation is tied to “Transport of the Future,” a project to develop unmanned aircraft systems. The same case led to the arrest of Yuri Kozarenko, Transport of the Future’s former general director and a former adviser to the governor of the Samara region, in early May 2026. Kozarenko’s testimony led to the arrest of the other suspects, according to the Russian business daily Kommersant.
Yuri Kozarenko, front row right, during Vladimir Putin’s visit to the Research and Production Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the Samara region
Transport of the Future
- Members of EFKO’s board of directors launched “Transport of the Future” as a project in 2021 to develop agricultural and delivery drones — or so the company’s official website says. The company split off from EFKO in 2023 and has since operated on private investment and borrowed funds, according to Kozarenko.
- The company’s S-80 agricultural drone — also known as “product 80” — is being used extensively at the front, the independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo said. The state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported on the drone’s frontline use in June 2025, and the Russian television channel NTV covered it as well.
- Pro-war Russian bloggers known as “Z bloggers” have often dismissed the S-80 as “junk” that doesn’t work in combat conditions. “For them to fly under ’special military operation’ conditions, you have to redo everything completely: all the internals, the boards, the controls. There are also problems with the batteries. That’s why they sit in warehouses in most units,” wrote Vladimir Romanov, author of the Telegram channel Romanov Layt (“Romanov Light”).
- “Transport of the Future” opened a second drone factory in Tolyatti in December 2023 — the first is in the Belgorod region — with total investment in the project estimated at seven billion rubles. A year later, the company announced it was ready to produce up to 100 drones a month at the two facilities, with plans to raise that number to 250 over time.
- Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov criticized the S-80 drones in mid-June 2026, after Kozarenko’s arrest, at a meeting with military personnel that Vladimir Putin attended. Responding to a question from one of the meeting’s participants about drone production, Belousov said: “The lineup has grown significantly. Last year there was practically only one type: the famous ‘product 80.’ It wasn’t very high quality. Now it’s being improved.”
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