The business that beat out ‘Putin's chef’ for a Kremlin banquet contract is apparently a front company for ‘Putin's chef’

For a fleeting moment, it seemed that something Kremlin-related had actually not gone Evgeny Prigozhin’s way. On December 27, the magazine RBC reported that his catering company, “Concord M,” had failed for the first time in five years to win the contract to host the annual New Year’s banquet at the Kremlin. Instead, the business went to some new, unknown company called “MSK” that had been registered just seven months earlier.

Hours after this story broke, however, journalists at the BBC’s Russian-language service unearthed evidence that MSK appears to be a front company for Concord. The reporters tried to reset the password on the Mail.ru email address listed on MSK’s Kremlin contract, only to learn that the account’s recovery email has a concord-moscow.ru domain, which belongs of course to Prigozhin’s catering company. The BBC’s journalists also discovered that the phone number linked to the Mail.ru account is the same as the contact number for Concord Catering. A man who answered the telephone line confirmed that the number belongs to both companies.

Who is Evgeny Prigozhin? Known commonly as “Putin’s chef” (because of close business ties with the Kremlin), Prigozhin is a St.-Petersburg-based catering mogul whose enterprises have lucrative contracts with Russia’s army, Moscow’s school system, and more. Journalists have also linked him to the so-called “troll factory” (blamed for meddling in American politics and sanctioned by the U.S. government) and the “Wagner” private military company, whose combatants have allegedly operated in Ukraine, Syria, and several African countries (despite Russia’s constitutional ban on mercenary activity). Several men also say they have carried out attacks and staged provocations against Prigozhin’s rivals on his orders.