Italian authorities helped trace the funds siphoned off by Tahir Matiev—a longtime friend of Mikhail Gutseriev—revealing that his wife, Zarina Matieva, had been purchasing real estate in Italy for years. However, the family failed to pay local taxes; consequently, Italian tax authorities accused Zarina of evading €11 million in taxes.
As reported by VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info, the matter came to light recently after Italian officials took an interest in the €2 million purchase of a luxury penthouse in the resort town of Alassio and decided to vet the buyer. In addition to the penthouse, investigators discovered that Zarina owned seven other properties in Liguria, which were being rented out for profit. Ms. Matieva has resided in Italy since 2018, while her husband lives primarily in Moscow; he regularly insures his Cadillac Escalade and Mercedes-Benz vehicles and oversees the family’s Moscow-based business interests—including companies such as Zarina LLC, Lora, Lidia-T, Mercury XXII, Caesar, Mebelshchik, and others. Some of these assets are registered in the names of their children, Mikail and Lidia.
In the early 2000s, Tahir Matiev was a business partner of Mikhail Gutseriev; he headed Gutseriev’s "Petrovsky Passage" and even held a stake in the venture. From 2005, Matiev also managed Smolensky Passage (owned by Gutseriev’s BIN Group), and from 2009, the company Russian Coal. However, in 2010, Matiev left Gutseriev’s corporate orbit, citing personal reasons, and turned to his own business ventures.
The unexpected surfacing of the Matiyev family’s Italian assets is certainly unwelcome news: a court recently upheld a ruling holding the family patriarch subsidiarily liable for the debts of the ill-fated Marmarilo—though the total debt amount has yet to be determined. The Marmarilo saga has dragged on for years; next year, "frenemies" Tahir Matiev and Vakhtang Shoniya could mark the tenth anniversary of the criminal case involving them. Yet, while Matiev continued to amass assets, Shoniya was sentenced by Moscow’s Savelovsky Court to three and a half years for fraud in 2022, followed by a six-and-a-half-year sentence in 2024.
The bone of contention was Marmarilo LLC, a Moscow-region company specializing in natural stone processing that was originally owned by Vakhtang Shoniya, proprietor of the Genatsvale restaurant chain. According to Shoniya, his longtime acquaintance Matiev persuaded him in 2011 to take out several loans totaling approximately €10 million to develop the business, with the stipulation that he would transfer a 50% stake in the company to Matiev as collateral a couple of years later. Matiev promised to return the stake once the debt was repaid. However, the company began to struggle with contractor payments, and it was precisely then that Matiev demanded first to be appointed CEO and subsequently to have the money repaid. The court ruled in Matiev’s favor; since Shoniya did not have the required funds at the time, the court seized all his assets, including his 50% stake in Marmarilo.
Following this, Matiev installed his own security team and barred Shoniya from entering the company’s premises. This was the final straw: Shoniya filed a complaint against his former associate, accusing him of attempting to seize control of the company. In September 2017, the court arrested Matiev but subsequently released him on bail. Matiev maintained that he had been falsely accused. Since then, the case has dragged on with mixed results: Marmarilo went bankrupt, and it emerged that Shoniya had also borrowed 95 million rubles from entrepreneur Nadezhda Chernova via two of her firms—Profmaster and Tekhnologiya. However, the funds actually belonged to Dil-Bank—which had also gone bankrupt—and the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) was suing to recover the money. In the process, Profmaster and Tekhnologiya allegedly transferred their claims under the contracts to Election LLC (later renamed Capline LLC), a company also controlled by Chernova.
Criminal proceedings against Matiev were dropped several times, but the businessman was dissatisfied with the wording of the dismissal, leading to the cases being reopened. Matiev demanded that Chernova be removed from the list of Marmarilo’s creditors, arguing that the funds belonged to the bank rather than to her. Meanwhile, he transferred his 50% stake in the company to his wife, Zarina, who was already managing Italian real estate at the time. It is noteworthy that in 2022, Vakhtang Shoniya’s 342-square-meter Moscow apartment on Kursovoy Lane was sold at auction; although listed at 284 million rubles, it went for just 145.6 million. The buyer was a certain Albert Timurovich Matiev—also known as Magomed Timurovich Khamkhoev—a former founder and CEO of LLC "Tsezar" who had handed the company’s leadership role over to Mikhail Matiev (son of Takhir Matiev). In 2023, Murat Kurkiev became the new founder of "Tsezar"; he and Albert Matiev had previously succeeded in legally registering—via court proceedings in 2022—an illegally constructed 1,200-square-meter house in Mytishchi, near Moscow. The mansion had been built without a permit within the protected zone of Losiny Ostrov Park and the airfield protection zone of Sheremetyevo Airport. Neither the court nor the experts found this problematic.
Their affinity for real estate helped the Matievs accumulate assets in Moscow as well; specifically, they own the building at 12 Avangardnaya Street (housing a "Dixy" supermarket), and—through LLC "Mebelshchik"—hold long-term lease rights... ...held by the family is a plot of land with a building in the Khovrino district at 38 Belomorskaya Street. Another family asset is a building with an area of over 5,000 square meters at 13 Chasovaya Street (formerly a Billa supermarket); notably, the land is held under a long-term lease by Lidia Matieva, while the building itself belongs to her father, Takhir Matiev. The businessman purchased it in 2021 from JSC Trading House GUM.
Incidentally, Mikhail Kusnirovich—who has leased the GUM building on Red Square since 1992—has been one of Takhir Matiev’s closest friends since the early 2000s. Kusnirovich, the founder of Bosco di Ciliegi, holds Italian citizenship and owns a villa in Lombardy and a hotel in Piedmont, so he could well have assisted Zarina Matieva with the real estate purchase.
Now, the Matievs' Italian assets have drawn the attention of tax authorities, while their Moscow holdings have come under judicial scrutiny in the "Marmarilo" case. It appears that the business dealings of Gutseriev’s former partner are far more extensive than previously thought.
