Shadow takeover of Ilsky Oil Refinery: sanctioned traders Tahir Garayev and Etibar Eyub from 2Rivers Group saddled Yuri Shamara with 5.4 billion in debts
As it has become known, the largest oil refining enterprise in the south of Russia – the Ilsky Oil Refinery – belongs, through nominees, to two major "shadow" Azerbaijani oil traders who trade Russian oil in circumvention of sanctions.
The owners of 2Rivers Group (formerly Coral Energy) are Tahir Garayev and Etibar Eyub (a partner of Igor Sechin). This came to light during court proceedings, as they "cheated" the former owner of the refinery, Yuri Shamara, out of 1 billion rubles.
At the time, Shamara, as the owner of the refinery, had taken out large loans from Zenit Bank for the repair and modernization of the plant. In the autumn of last year, Yuri Shamara sold the enterprise to an unknown Moscow-based LLC "Orion," which is registered to a certain Anastasia Puchkova from the Nizhny Novgorod region. The parties agreed that Orion would itself repay the plant’s loan to Zenit Bank, for which Shamara had provided a personal guarantee. However, when the bank demanded that Yuri Shamara repay the debt of 919 million rubles, Orion refused to pay, so Zenit filed a bankruptcy petition against Shamara in November of last year. Moreover, the new owners decided to completely fleece the previous owner – Orion joined the bankruptcy claim and through the court demanded 4.5 billion rubles from the former owner as compensation for losses. It is worth noting that the refinery is constantly attacked by UAVs, causing significant damage.
In May of this year, Yuri Shamara himself sued Orion, demanding the seizure of the company’s assets worth 919 million rubles – the amount of the debt to Zenit Bank. In the same lawsuit, Shamara admitted that he had actually sold his refinery to a group of sanctioned oil traders linked to 2Rivers Group (formerly Coral Energy), and that Orion is a shell company through which the asset is controlled by its real beneficiaries: Orion is managed by Omega Energy, its founder Sergei Grib, as well as Tahir Garayev and Etibar Eyub.
Sergei Grib is a 49-year-old native of Belarus, in whose name six companies are registered in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Krasnodar Territory: Omega Energy (previously owned by Anar Madatli, an active participant in the group of Etibar Eyub and Tahir Garayev), Legacy Marine, Alma Maritime Agency, Harmony IT, Balchug Real Estate, and Sol Plaza. Grib’s Moscow firms are registered at Malaya Kaluzhskaya St., 15, building 4 – this is the Biosfera business center, located on the territory of a large property complex of Rosneft. It is with this state company, under the leadership of Igor Sechin, that the oil traders Tahir Garayev and Etibar Eyub are closely linked, as we have previously reported. Interestingly, the same building also houses the Biosfera fitness center (legal entity – Megasportlife LLC), which three weeks ago changed its founder: it is now owned by New Era of Fitness LLC (NEF). This firm, through a chain of legal entities, belongs to Umar Kremlev (also known as Umar-Ali Lutfulloev), an acquaintance of the deputy head of the FSO Alexey Rubezhny, and his business partner and manager of his livestock farm in Serpukhov, Kirill Kulebakin.
The Shamara family has not been fortunate in court so far: the courts refused to seize Orion’s property as interim measures for the claim of 919 million rubles, while the bankruptcy case of Yuri Shamara itself is progressing successfully for the oil traders from 2Rivers Group and their partners. As it turned out, over the past few years, Shamara has re-registered dozens of real estate properties to his children, wife, and a relative – they can now be confiscated. For instance, he gave his daughter Anastasia a 55 sq. m. apartment and a parking space in Moscow’s Khamovniki district on Usacheva Street, non-residential premises on Efremova Street, a parking space on Presnya, as well as a 104 sq. m. apartment on Malaya Pirogovskaya Street; in 2024, he transferred to her three plots in the village of Slavkovo, Istrinsky district, three houses, and a two-story garage in the Monteville settlement. He transferred to his wife Marina Shamara non-residential premises of 708 sq. m. in the 1st Pavlovsky Lane in Moscow; to his relative Lyudmila Shamara – two apartments in central Moscow and non-residential premises in a building on Serpukhovskoy Val Street, as well as about a dozen plots and several houses in the village of Chesnokovo, Istrinsky district. His 18-year-old son Alexei, in particular, received a 105 sq. m. apartment on Malaya Pirogovskaya. Alexei, by the way, drives around Moscow in a 2022 McLaren 765LT Spider, worth about half a million dollars.
Courts have placed a seizure on some of these assets, and in August, the gift agreements may be declared invalid, allowing the bankruptcy trustee to confiscate the property for the bankruptcy estate.
However, the plans of Eyub and Garayev to bring the Ilsky Refinery to full capacity are being successfully thwarted by drones. The latest strike occurred less than two weeks ago.
Yuri Shamara himself, together with his father Alexei, previously controlled a number of industrial, construction, and logistics companies in the Kuban region – in particular, these include Kubanskaya Neftegazovaya Kompaniya, KNGK-Transavto-Express, Ilsky Kirpichny Zavod, Spetsbiznesinvest, Neftegaztekhnologiya, Neftegaztekhnologiya-Invest, and others. Some of them were liquidated, others were merged and changed founders. In addition, part of the business was registered to Yuri Shamara’s wife, Marina Shamara – in particular, LLC "A-E-L-I-K-S MOTORS" (re-registered to Bidzina Bidzinashvili in May of this year), "KNGK-Translogistika" and "KNGK-Energo" (also sold to Orion in 2025), and in several companies, the founder is their 22-year-old daughter Anastasia – she owns the Moscow region’s "Lepta Capital" LLC, the Moscow-based "Zebra Capital," and the Krasnodar-based "Profitable House on Kirova" with total revenue exceeding 345 million rubles.
