Businessman at center of Russian judicial power struggle charged with desertion, fled house arrest — Agentstvo
On Wednesday, the Federation Council appointed Igor Krasnov to the position of Russia’s chief justice, making him the president of the Supreme Court and the highest-ranking officer of the federal judiciary. A day earlier, while Krasnov still served as Russia’s prosecutor general, his agency filed a lawsuit against a top judge for alleged criminal business ties. Federal prosecutors allege that Viktor Momotov, the influential chairman of the Council of Judges and a Supreme Court judge himself, conducted an underground hotel business with Andrey Marchenko. Court filings describe the 54-year-old Marchenko as a “representative of organized crime in Krasnodar.”
Journalists at Agentstvo investigated Marchenko’s background using leaked documents and public records. They learned that he likely met Momotov at Kuban State University in the late 1980s, when Momotov taught in the law department and Marchenko was a student. Marchenko later went into business in saunas and hotels, and Momotov joined the enterprise in 2007. In 2010, however, he formally left the business before joining the Plenum of Russia’s Supreme Court.
Agentstvo notes that assessing the size of Marchenko’s business activities is difficult because he registered very little in his own name. In September 2022, he told reporters to refer to his tax filings, which valued his enterprises at 9 billion rubles (about $150 million at the time).
Agentstvo also discovered a history of criminal charges against Marchenko, but there’s little indication of ties to organized crime, as alleged by the General Prosecutor’s new lawsuit. For example, he was fined in 1995 for disobeying a police officer and suspected of insulting a state official in 1999. The leaked records reviewed by Agentstvo don’t mention Marchenko’s alleged business connections to the supposed mobsters Andrey Korovaiko and Arkady Chebanov. In May this year, federal prosecutors nationalized the agricultural conglomerate owned by Korovaiko and Chebanov, claiming that Korovaiko built the business using illicit proceeds from his work as a federal inspector. Today, both men are wanted for extortion.
In March 2023, Marchenko was accused of large-scale tax evasion, and officials seized three of his hotels. A month after those charges were filed, he announced that he would deploy to fight in Ukraine. In a video shared online, Marchenko appeared in a tracksuit and body armor, wielding a rifle and rocket launcher, urging Russians to “unite for victory.” That November, he claimed to have been injured in combat.
In January 2025, the media learned that Marchenko had been charged with desertion. After a court placed him under house arrest, he disappeared “on a business trip for entrepreneurial matters,” according to his attorney. Nevertheless, Andrey Marchenko’s name does not appear on Russia’s national wanted database, reports Agentstvo.