Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ Is the new "PMC Wagner Center" in St Petersburg more a case of Potemkin than Prigozhin, with questionable financial schemes lurking in the background? The independent SOTA news website has found some curious facts about the new building. Thread ⬇️

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1586952994456838145

2/ SOTA notes that the building was listed as being under construction for 9 years, from 9 July 2013 to 15 August 2022. It's not clear why it took so long to build.

3/ Google Street View images show that the building's shell was under construction in 2014 and was completed by June 2015, but it was not until July 2021 that work was visible to finish and fit out the building. It was reportedly completed in July 2022.

4/ The building, which can be found on a map at 59.9177672, 30.4261327, was originally called the Sea Capital business centre and had nothing to do with Wagner's founder Yevgeny Prigozhin. It passed through many owners during its construction.

5/ The complex was designed to resemble a ship with two glass buildings of 23 and 15 floors connected by a three-floors-high bridge. A third low-rise section of the complex was planned as the "prow of the ship".

6/ The constructors intended it to house a class B+ business centre, a four-star hotel, a health centre and offices of the Nevsky District Administration.

7/ The unfinished building, which was reportedly 70% completed at this point, was purchased in August 2019 by a joint stock company called Retail. At this point it was owned by a construction company called BaltInvestStroy, which had built it for RosStroyInvest.

8/ Retail was founded in 2019, just before it purchased the building. SOTA reports that Retail has only two employees and has reported no revenue, but somehow made a profit of more than 35 million rubles ($560,000) in 2021.

9/ At the time of the building's purchase, the company had 666 million rubles ($10.65 million) in capital and reserves, of which 665.8 million was cash. The asset figure jumped to more than 3 billion rubles ($48 million) after the building was acquired.

10/ However, as SOTA notes, the amount of capital and reserves did not change: "The money available to the company was not spent, and the asset in the form of a building appeared without the use of these funds." SOTA describes Retail as a "virtual company," i.e. a shell company.

11/ "Based on the company's financial statements, we can conclude that the building went to Prigozhin's structure almost for free, given the growth of assets without an increase in capital," SOTA says. It's not clear what kind of deal might have been done.

12/ The building is still not formally listed as being completed, but SOTA notes that "there is advertising of the facility from everywhere, and advertising of a fully completed business centre."

13/ SOTA suggests that the Wagner rebranding was merely a renaming of an existing asset, implying that it was done for publicity.

This is perhaps borne out by the way the building is now being advertised. Here's how the Cian.ru real estate website describes it:

14/ "PMC Wagner Center is a modern 24-storey class A premium business center located in the Nevsky district and is a complex of buildings that provides free accommodation for inventors, designers, IT specialists, experimental production and start-up spaces.

15/ The mission of PMC Wagner Center is to provide a comfortable environment for the generation of new ideas in order to increase the defence capability of Russia, including information."

16/ Until only a few days ago, the complex was advertised on real estate websites and its own corporate website as the "Morskaya Stolica [Sea Capital] Business Center".

17/ The website proclaimed it to be "the pearl of the Nevsky district ... which will become the main asset of this historical district of St. Petersburg."

18/ In the original advertising, there was no mention of "free accommodation" – it was advertised on real estate websites as a commercial venture with rental rates of 20,400 to 24,000 rubles ($328-$385) per m² per year.

19/ Its rebranding as the PMC Wagner Center has been so sudden that even Google hasn't caught up yet. So what's going on?

I suspect that the most likely scenario is that the building's original purpose was wrecked by the international sanctions against Russia.

20/ Thousands of IT specialists and other creative workers have fled the country, foreign companies have pulled out and the economy is in deep trouble. Prigozhin may have found that he had an expensive building on his hands with few or no likely tenants.

21/ Consequently, I think what's probably happened is that Prigozhin has decided to make the best of a bad deal, use the rebranded building for publicity, and perhaps aid (in some marginal ways) the work of Wagner, now that he's brought it out of the shadows. /end

22/ Sources:
🔹 sotaproject.com/investigation/…
🔹 photobuildings.com/object/14178/
🔹 web.archive.org/web/2022100708…
🔹 spb.cian.ru/biznes-centr-c…