Dossier Center: A bathhouse donated by Putin to Xi Jinping was paid for by a company associated with Prigozhin and Wagner PMC
How Yevgeny Prigozhin gives gifts for Putin
The banya, which President Vladimir Putin presented to Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2018, was paid for by a company associated with businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner PMC. This was discovered by the Dossier Center, which posted a contract for the construction of a bathhouse.
In June 2018, during a visit to Tianjin, Putin showed Xi Jinping sketches of a bathhouse and sawed off the wood from which it was made. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that 200-year-old Altai cedars were chosen for the gift. Jinping at the meeting asked Putin to limit himself to just one piece of wood.
The contract for the construction of a bathhouse with the Pskov company Rubcon LLC was signed a few days after the meeting between Putin and Jinping. The buyer was the company "Petersburgskaya Guarantee". It cost 7.5 million rubles, and taking into account transportation and installation, the construction cost 10 million rubles. The Dossier Center found on the Rubkon website sketches of a bathhouse that Putin showed.
Payment for the bath "passed through the accounting department" of the Euro Polis company, associated with Prigozhin and Wagner PMC, the Dossier claims, citing the correspondence of the company's accounting department. The agreement on the construction of the bathhouse, published by the Dossier Center, contained a facsimile of Prigogine's "Agreed".
Fontanka wrote that Euro Polis signed a memorandum with the Syrian authorities in 2016, according to which it undertook to fight the opponents of Bashar al-Assad in exchange for a share of oil and gas production in the liberated territories. According to the publication, Wagner PMC fighters have been in Syria since the fall of 2015.
Novaya Gazeta claimed that in June 2017, Wagner PMC fighters beat a prisoner with a sledgehammer on camera, cut off his head, and hung it at the entrance to the Ash-Shaer field, which was under the protection of Euro Polis. The BBC published documents in which Wagner PMC representatives in Mozambique in 2019 asked Europolis to replace damaged equipment.
The United States imposed sanctions against Wagner PMCs in 2017. Companies associated with Prigozhin were subject to sanctions in 2020 and 2021. Prigozhin himself was included in the US sanctions list after the start of the war in Ukraine.