The family of Vladimir Kaishev controls a huge "holding" of legal and illegal business assets in the Stavropol Territory, and also owns a landromat to legalize "dirty" Russian money in Greece and Cyprus. Clans in the Caucasus, the fight against which was announced by the new presidential envoy to the North- The Caucasian Federal District, Yuri Chaika, really does solve almost everything in the region. Selected surnames and local “aristocratic families” are known here to almost everyone - this is an analogue of senior government posts, their affiliation and degree of kinship, determines the size of a person’s financial assets, his level of authority, and indeed his fate. One such family is the Kaishev clan in the Stavropol region, headed by its leader-patriarch Vladimir Kaishev, their patrimony is the region of Caucasian Mineral Waters (Pyatigorsk, Essentuki, Kislovodsk, Zheleznovodsk), where this family controls illegal and legal gambling. For almost half a century, retired Doctor of Economics and State Councilor of the Russian Federation, class II, Vladimir Kaishev, is one of the most influential people in the North Caucasus; in the unofficial ranking of the richest people in the Stavropol Territory he takes third place. The clan has long and strong ties with the influential families of the Arashukovs, Temrezovs and Kanokovs, and powerful political support in Moscow. The legal and illegal business of the Kaishevs for many years plays an important role in the economy of the region. According to unofficial, rough estimates, the assets of Vladimir Kaishev in Russia at the moment are at least 9-10 billion rubles. But in the Caucasus, money, like written laws, does not solve everything, moreover, some areas of the Kaishev business activity are difficult to analyze financially for objective reasons. Under the control of the Kaishev clan: - gambling in the region of the Caucasian Mineral Waters; - almost all trade and a substantial part of commercial real estate in the city of Essentuki, as well as the surrounding lands of former agricultural enterprises, which are transferred to the building by ethnic Greeks; - tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land, agricultural holding "village named after G.V. Kaisheva ”, Pyatigorsk Hippodrome, Pyatigorsk Dairy Plant, Mineralnye Vody Zheleznovodsk CJSC, etc. - a large number of representatives of the judiciary and executive in the Stavropol Territory and Karachay-Cherkessia; - Landromat for the legalization and withdrawal of money, often of a criminal, corrupt origin, to Greece and Cyprus. The friendly families of the Arashukovs and Kaishevs shared the business of Stavropol for many years. After a large-scale operation of the special services and federal law enforcement agencies to defeat the Arashukov clan in 2019, the influence of Vladimir Kaishev on the energy economy of Stavropol weakened, but remained. Sergei Georgievich Kaishev, a protege of the Arashukovs, still heads Predgornyraygaz JSC, a part of Stavropolkraigaz JSC, the regional sales company of PJSC Gazprom. Don Corleone from the village of Suvorovskaya Based on a real biography of the head of the clan - Vladimir Kaishev, you can write a modern Russian version of the novel "The Godfather". The analogy was not taken "from the ceiling", according to people who knew him when he was young, he appreciates the book of Mario Puzo on a par with the Bible, maybe therefore there are so many parallels in the life of Kaishev with the plot of the famous novel about the Italian mafia, although Vladimir Kaishev is by nationality Greek. At the end of the 80s, the KGB of the USSR in the Stavropol Territory identified Vladimir Kaishev as an informal leader of the Greek community in the region and an underground millionaire. A graduate of the Krasnodar Polytechnic Institute very quickly turned from the senior loader of the Parus restaurant in Essentuki, into the director of one of the largest agricultural enterprises in the Soviet Union, which supplied Moscow with vegetables, the Yuzhny combine farm located in the village of Ust-Dzhegut, Karachay-Cherkess Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The first serious criminal story in his biography happened there. In 1990, Vladimir Kaishev was tried for a shootout with one of the local residents of the village, a Moscow newspaper even wrote that the enemy Kaishev was killed, allegedly first wounded, and then finished off, right in his director's office. But this is not entirely true, everything happened differently, that person survived, and Kaishev escaped with an amazingly mild sentence, the court was unable to establish exactly how the PM pistol was in the hands of the director of sales of the state farm. This is an old story, but in the Caucasus nothing is ever forgotten. After the collapse of the socialist national economy, many changes took place in the life of Vladimir Kaishev. His criminal record was no longer relevant, and as the general director of the state Mineralovodsk distillery, he became one of the leaders in the vodka business in the North Caucasus. Tens of billions received on fake excise stamps and left alcohol have been profitably invested in continuing his career in Moscow. From 2004 to 2008, Kaishev was one of the leaders of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation, he first became the head of the department, and then, according to former employees of the ministry, the official adviser and "tackled" ex-minister, deputy prime minister Alexei Gordeev. In addition to state concerns, thanks to his close ties with Nazir Khapsirokov, (at that time, this “supply manager of the Prosecutor General’s Office”, the protégé of Boris Berezovsky, was considered the second person in the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation after Vladimir Ustinov) Kaishev could provide a solution to various problems for the boss in exchange for help his family’s business. Since the fall of 2008, Vladimir Kaishev did not hold the post of chairman of the government of the Karachay-Cherkess Republic for a short time, but his big political career began to decline with the sudden death of Nazir Hapsirokov in 2011. In 2015, he is still an assistant to the plenipotentiary representative of the President of the Russian Federation in the North Caucasus Federal District. After Vladimir Kaishev gradually "went into the shadows", transformed into a public figure and philanthropist, but continues to manage the business of his clan. All these years and to the present, the Kaishev clan has specialized in the seizure of local enterprises, usually associated with agriculture or possessing valuable assets in the form of real estate in the resort region. The scheme worked out and practically did not change over the years: to put its director at the head of a state or municipal enterprise, bring it to fictitious bankruptcy, and then buy up for nothing at a price through a chain of gasket firms. Assets seized in this way are either sold or merged into a clan, being formalized for relatives and dummies, forming a legal source of income for the Kaishev family. So the Kislovodsk Dairy Plant, the Pyatigorsk Dairy Plant, the Pyatigorsk Hippodrome, then the Essentuki Dairy Plant were privatized and bankrupt, and its land was sold for housing. Now the Kaishev clan, through the nominees, is carrying out the same operation with the Neminnomyssky PND plant. Relatives of Vladimir Kaishev fraudulently and sometimes fraudulently bought tens of thousands of hectares in the Stavropol region from small agricultural enterprises, farmers, and the so-called land units of former state farms. Each "don" must have a tribal village. So in the Stavropol Territory in the native village of Kaishev, the village of Suvorovskaya, LLC Agrofirm appeared, the village named after G.V. Kaisheva "- the former village of Voroshilov, which the Kaishev clan bought up and renamed. Formally, Kaishev’s relatives are large investors, owners of an agro-industrial holding, but in fact, most of the land was mortgaged in Moscow banks, and the money was transferred to offshore accounts of Cypriot companies. A civilized Caucasian clan overlooking the European Union The difference between the Kaisheva clan and other Caucasian clans, the same Arashukovs, lies in the fact that they conduct business in Europe quietly, without demonstrating their real wealth. rights to sports cars in the streets, police with cocaine and weapons don’t come across, they don’t “majorize” openly with models and pop stars in Moscow nightclubs and restaurants.Vladimir Kaishev - careful, never appears as the owner, everything is recorded on his wife, son-in-law, relatives, dummies. In fact, he has been doing it by proxy. For several decades, his confidant, involved in all his affairs, his adviser and his right hand is the Stavropol businessman Evgeny Kudel, for example, through him the Kaishev clan controls Zheleznovo Mineralnye Vody Zheleznovo CJSC Ska ", producer of mineral water" Slavyanovskaya "," Smirnoff "," Lysogorskaya "His enemies Kaishev not threatened with punishment in the open, not rattles the saber, goes without a convoy of heavily armed guards. Many politicians and officials of the Stavropol Territory, Karachay-Cherkessia owe something to him in the past and render services out of “respect”, as well as his literary counterpart, the head of the Corleone family. The main strength of the Kaishev clan is concentrated in the courts, as well as local authorities. The influence of Vladimir Kaishev on people in judicial robes in the Stavropol Territory is simply amazing, his "good word" is quickly understood without a gun, because he proved in his youth that he knows how to use it. Another exclusive feature of the Kaishev clan, which compares favorably with the other semi-gang clans of the North Caucasus, is its strong international relations through charitable interstate organizations with offshore business in Cyprus and Greece. Not without reason, Vladimir Kaishev was president of the Association of Greek Public Associations of Russia (AGOOR) from 2000 to 2004. If dishonest officials and law enforcement officials need, for example, a villa in Greece at a bargain price or an offshore company with a reliable Greek general director, then Vladimir Kaishev is just the kind of person who can organize this. He has been engaged in this business quickly, reliably and without unnecessary publicity for more than a dozen years, he has serious connections in Greece not only in business, political and church circles, but also, possibly, in the local criminal world.
A couple of years ago, the Kaishev clan, through shell companies, began actively investing in local sports betting clubs, and was credited with control over several illegal casinos in the North Caucasus. Recently, the clan’s positions in the region have even strengthened after ex-Senator from the Stavropol Territory Mikhail Afanasov (also Greek by nationality) left the Federation Council in September 2019 and became deputy head of the government of the Stavropol Territory.
Sergey Karpov
To be continued
