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A Russian company owned by Gennady Timchenko has been serving as a “common fund” that is used to cover the expenses of Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, a new investigation from the late Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has revealed. The company in question is Ena Invest LLC. It was registered in St. Petersburg in November 2017 and is 100% owned by Timchenko, who has been a close associate of Putin’s since the latter’s tenure as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 1990s.
According to the FBK, Ena Invest financed the purchase of the Baltika brewery — a company that the Russian authorities effectively seized from Denmark’s Carlsberg after the start of the full-scale war, forcing the European company to sell the asset at a knockdown price. As previously reported, the deal was concluded in December 2024, with the buyer listed as VG Invest JSC, owned by Baltika’s Russian top managers.
VG Invest JSC was established in August 2024 and showed no significant financial activity. Yet in December, it paid 34 billion rubles ($426 million) to buy Baltika, using funds obtained via a loan from Rosselkhozbank. Just 22 days later, this small, little-known firm repaid the loan after receiving the necessary sum from AO Novaya Sistema. This St. Petersburg–based company has only one employee on its payroll and reports nothing but losses in its financial statements. Investigators found that Novaya Sistema had also received 34 billion rubles as an interest-free loan from the previously mentioned Ena Invest.
In effect, it turns out that the purchase of Baltika was financed by Putin’s close friend and longtime ally, Gennady Timchenko. The Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) believes that Timchenko did not acquire the brewery for himself, and the report recalls how Putin was once referred to as Baltika’s “godfather” thanks to his intervention in a previous matter. Back in the 1990s, while working at the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, Putin secured foreign investors for the company, which was then on the brink of closure.
According to the FBK, other spending by Ena Invest — whose assets exceeded one trillion rubles ($12.5 billion) in 2023 — corroborates the hypotheses that the company has been acting as Putin’s personal wallet. For instance, in 2023 it transferred 500 million rubles ($6.3 million) to the Alina Kabaeva Foundation — named in honor of the unofficial mother of two of Putin’s unofficial children. Another 450 million rubles ($5.6 million) went to MMC (My Medical Center), whose nominal owners are business partners of Putin’s daughter, Maria Vorontsova.
It also emerged that, out of the four people on Ena Invest’s payroll, two are foreign nationals — both German language teachers (the other two being the company’s director and accountant). One of the teachers is 33-year-old Sofia Božić, a citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina; the other is 36-year-old Irene Enss, a German national.
Sofia Božić and Irene Enss
The FBK claims that Enss and Božić are the personal tutors of Putin and Kabaeva’s sons — six-year-old Vladimir and ten-year-old Ivan. The teachers live in St. Petersburg and regularly take the train to the railway station closest to Putin’s residence in Valdai. This is believed to be where Kabaeva lives most of the time with the children. Each teacher earns 2.9 million rubles ($36k) per month — a sum three times larger than Putin’s official salary.