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A court in Russia has upheld a scandal-plagued merger involving the country’s largest online retailer, potentially ending a bitter feud between the separated couple who founded the business that had dragged in the Kremlin and a Chechen warlord.
The dispute was set off by Tatyana Kim’s decision last year to merge retailer Wildberries with billboard advertising group Russ Outdoor. Two people were killed and seven wounded in a shootout outside Wildberries’ headquarters in September in an apparent escalation of the tensions.
Kim’s co-founder Vladislav Bakalchuk had asked the court to annul the deal that would transfer Wildberries’ assets to RWB — the company created as a result of the merger — claiming this intended to cause harm to him and Wildberries.
Kim, who last summer said she had filed for divorce from Bakalchuk, was ranked by the local edition of Forbes as Russia’s richest woman with a fortune estimated at $7.4bn before the dispute.
The merger would give Russ Outdoor a 35 per cent stake in the joint venture even though its sales are a fraction of the size of Wildberries’.
The court ruled on Friday that “no evidence was presented that these transactions caused harm or were intended to cause harm to Wildberries and the plaintiff”, according to a court document cited by Russian news agency RIA.
Bakalchuk, who was left with a 1 per cent stake in Wildberries, said on his Telegram channel that the ruling was “outrageous, illegal and completely unsatisfactory”, adding that he planned to appeal.
The Kremlin said in July 2024 that the merger had won the approval of President Vladimir Putin, after Kim and Russ’s Robert Mirzoyan wrote to him claiming the deal could create the “largest digital banking network and payment system for rouble settlements worldwide”, with the potential to reach 5.8bn customers.
Bakalchuk then stunned the Russian public by calling on the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov to help him block the deal.
Kadyrov pledged his support after Bakalchuk, who he said was an old friend, addressed the Chechen leader in a video posted on social media, lamenting that Kim had attempted to squeeze him out of the company.
Weeks later, Bakalchuk and his associates were involved in a shootout at Wildberries’ head office, which led to the deaths of two security guards, according to media reports. Bakalchuk was subsequently arrested on multiple felony charges, including murder. He was later released and said he had not been charged.
Dozens of other people, including several mixed martial artists linked to Kadyrov and the deputy head of a Chechen national guard unit, were reported to have been jailed awaiting trial over the shootout.
Western sanctions have spurred a brutal tussle for assets among elites within Russia, not seen since the 1990s scramble for business that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Wildberries, which Kim and Bakalchuk founded in 2004, had grown over the past two decades from an online women’s clothing retailer to Russia’s second-largest tech company, selling everything from cars to western appliances brought into the country through parallel imports.
