Russian cosmetics brand Mixit’s CEO faces fraud charges amid dispute with former employee who says she co-founded the brand

Oleg Pai, CEO of Mixit, one of Russia’s most recognizable and successful cosmetics brands, was detained in Moscow on September 19. He is accused of fraud, and a court placed him under house arrest. Mixit co-founder Yelena Nazarova linked his detention to a corporate dispute. “We don’t understand how a civil dispute with our former employee could have turned into a criminal investigation. We see this as pressure on our business, as an attempt to seize control of the company,” she said. Forbes reported on the dispute with the former employee and how it might have led to Pai’s detention. Meduza summarizes the Forbes report.

Mixit makes mass-market skincare and makeup products. It promoted itself through the television show “Oryol i reshka” (“Heads and Tails”), worked with popular bloggers such as Ksenia Sobchak, and amassed more than three million Instagram followers. Today, Mixit is one of the most recognizable and best-selling affordable cosmetics brands in Russia and other post-Soviet countries. It is among the top sellers on Wildberries and Ozon, as well as at the beauty retailer Golden Apple. In 2025, Mixit’s revenue exceeded 15 billion rubles, up 140% from the previous year.

Mixit has been in business since 2014. According to the official account of its founding, Nazarova and Pai met in 2011 and decided to launch a brand of customized organic cosmetics. Nazarova, a former hairdresser, took charge of product development and marketing, while Pai handled finances and strategy. He also provided 30 million rubles in startup capital from his own savings. Before Mixit, Pai had worked in the furniture business.

Galina Ryazanova, a chemist and Mixit’s former lead product developer, gave a different account of the company’s founding. She said she met Nazarova in 2013, when Nazarova attended her workshop on making cosmetics at home. The women decided to go into business together. A few months after they began, Ryazanova noticed that Oleg Pai’s company was paying some of the new business’s expenses. She described Pai as Nazarova’s live-in partner. They agreed that he would join them as a third partner “with equal ownership stakes.”

Ryazanova said the agreement was verbal. Pai promised to formalize her 30% stake in Mixit once he had set up a suitable legal structure for the business, but he never did. Although she never officially became a shareholder, she received payments that she considered dividends, both in cash and by bank transfer. The transfers were retroactively documented as interest-free loans: Pai persuaded Ryazanova to sign loan agreements, saying this would prevent questions from the tax authorities.

By 2019, Ryazanova’s relationship with Nazarova and Pai had soured. She said that, during the dispute, Pai first offered to make her Mixit’s director and then offered to buy her stake for 100 million rubles. She rejected both offers. Pai then said she owed the company more than eight million rubles under the interest-free loan agreements she had signed. In 2021, a court ordered Ryazanova to pay the money. She responded by filing a police complaint against her former partners. Mixit’s offices were searched in 2024 and 2025. It is unclear whether the searches were connected to her complaint.

A law enforcement source told Interfax that the criminal investigation into Pai involves forged documents. Nazarova effectively confirmed that it grew out of the dispute with Ryazanova. In a video statement, she said the conflict with a “former employee” had been going on since 2019. “The dispute has been resolved many times. We won those cases, and they were closed. But now the case has been reopened as a criminal investigation, which we don’t understand at all,” she said. The video is no longer available.

The alleged document forgery could “fundamentally change how the corporate dispute is viewed under the law,” Fyodor Trusov of the law firm Sokolov, Trusov and Partners told Forbes. Forging documents does not, in itself, constitute fraud: investigators would need to prove that the forged documents were used specifically to steal property.

Trusov also said investigators would need to establish the basis for Ryazanova’s claim to a stake in the company and prove that Pai intended to commit fraud. “In theory, investing money in a business and failing to receive a promised stake is not enough to bring a fraud charge. In practice, though, it happens,” Trusov said.