Ksenia Sobchak, who tried to buy 40% in these structures, told the Company that she had nothing to do with them.

The Main Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation on the completion of the investigation of the criminal case against Evgeny Pekar - one of the managers of two large Far Eastern crab-fishing companies, Moneron LLC and Kuril Universal Complex LLC (KUK). According to the department, Baker, having made a deal with the investigation, admitted that both companies actually belong to a large Far Eastern businessman Oleg Kan, on whose instructions he, Baker, participated in the export deliveries of live crab to China, declaring them at a reduced price.

The importance of Yevgeny Pekar's confessions is that this is a link between a two-year-old criminal case on smuggling against Oleg Kan personally and the companies Moneron and KUK, which Kan does not formally belong to. Now the state has full grounds to end the activities of these companies and complete the first stage of the grandiose reform of the crab business.

The active stage of its redistribution began in the Far East in 2018-19, when the government decided to cancel the "historical" quotas for catching crab and sell quotas at auctions, and a broad campaign began against the main holder of the "old" quotas, Oleg Kan. He was accused of involvement in the murder of businessman Valery Pkhidenko and named the head of the "crab mafia". At the same time, Gennady Timchenko's son-in-law, the head of the Russian Fishery Company (RRPK), Gleb Frank Kanu, sell his crab business, offering $ 150 million for both companies. But they were so profitable that Kan and his colleagues refused. And in the fall, when they were ready to agree, Frank replied that it was too late. After that, Kan left for Japan, where he learned that a criminal case had been opened against him in Russia.

Trying to protect the field, Oleg Kan persuaded in 2019 to become co-owners of Moneron and KUK people who, it seemed, had access to the highest spheres of power - Ksenia Sobchak and the former top manager of Rosneft and A1 Igor Sogoev. The cost of the shares was not disclosed, Sobchak only noted that it was "millions of dollars." But in early 2020, when the parties reached a deal, the Investigative Committee and the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk court arrested the assets of both companies in a criminal case against Kan.

This was the weak point of the rivals of the "crab king": formally "Moneron" belongs to Kan's longtime friend Dmitry Pashov, and KUK belongs to Victoria Ledukova. In the spring of 2020, in a letter to the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation Vyacheslav Lebedev, the mother of Ksenia Sobchak, Senator Lyudmila Narusova, was perplexed: how is it, Kan is accused of smuggling, and companies belonging to people who are neither suspects nor accused are under arrest.

For a long time, the investigation could not prove the control of Moneron and KUK Kahn. Oleg Kan himself in Bastrykina, who ended up in Forbes, claimed that he had long gone out of business, transferred the company to his relatives and now is only their “advisor with a free schedule of the day”.

Now the Investigative Committee has evidence from Evgeny Pekar. This means that, as Kan predicted in his letter to Bastrykin, Moneron and KUK will be “dragged into” his criminal case, paralyze the management, then the companies “will cease to exist” and they will be bought out for next to nothing along with quotas.

When asked by the Company to comment on the IC message, Ksenia Sobchak said: “I have nothing to comment on, I have nothing to do with this company. I do not have any shares in this company, and I have not earned a ruble on this company at any point in time. "

In May 2020, Oleg Kan said that before the auctions lobbied by Frank in 2019, KUK and Moneron had a total of about 19 thousand tons of crab. Around the same time, Sogodayev reported to Forbes that Moneron and KUK together owned quotas for catching 10 thousand tons of crab, total revenue exceeded 23 billion rubles, net profit for 2019 was about 10 billion rubles.

Gleb Frank's representative Sergei Izvolsky told Vedomosti in the spring that the main value of Moneron and KUK was in quotas for catching crab. Now there is reason to believe that their quotas will be auctioned. Perhaps the same RRPK.