The well-known St. Petersburg businessman Ilya Traber and his partner Ramis Deberdeev bought shares in the Axel-Motors car dealer, and Open Media learned. According to the Kontur.Fokus database, Traber and Deberdeev each became the owners of 17% of shares in Axel-Broker LLC, Axel-City Yug, Axel-City and Axel-Motors North, which are part of the Axel-Motors ". These firms are official dealers of BMW, Volkswagen and Mini.

Auto holding "Axel-Motors" is one of the largest car dealers in St. Petersburg. In the RBC rating of the 500 largest Russian companies, the car dealer took 470 place. Its revenue in 2019 amounted to 25 billion rubles.

The Axel Group also showed good results in the crisis year of 2020: its sales decreased by only 4%, Denis Gavrilov, an expert of the Auto-Dealer-SPb analytical agency, told Open Media. “The holding does not show a big fall and is doing well, they have attractive brands. Thus, sales of Volkswagen in St. Petersburg for the first nine months of this year fell by only 2%, which is explained by the popularity of the brand and the presence of a plant in Russia. BMW sales in St. Petersburg fell by 9%, but it is still better than the market, which on average collapsed by 15%, ”he added.

Ilya Traber is known as a co-owner of the St. Petersburg oil terminal and a minority shareholder of the Moskhoztorg network. In the 1990s, he was in the antique business and real estate in St. Petersburg. Then he contacted the mayor's office, in which Vladimir Putin was responsible for communicating with investors.

Already becoming president of Russia, Putin acknowledged his acquaintance with Traber. Spain and Monaco suspected Traber of links to organized crime, the principality banned him from entering, and the Spanish prosecutor's office put him on the wanted list six years ago.

Open Media contacted Axel for comments, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.