Ilya Traber, better known as "Antique Dealer," has been detained in St. Petersburg in connection with the murder of influential MP Alexander Petrov. He may be transferred to Moscow as early as today. Sources say searches are also underway at the home of another hero of the St. Petersburg criminal underworld, Gennady Petrov.
A source at the Cheka-OGPU claims that Ilya Traber's arrest was personally supervised by the First Deputy Director of the FSB, Sergei Korolev, who flew to St. Petersburg for the event. Traber himself will be transferred to Moscow. In addition to the murder of MP Alexander Petrov, Traber is suspected of "fraud involving energy suppliers."
Vyborg owner and influential businessman Alexander Petrov was killed in October 2020. A sniper shot Petrov twice with a rifle, killing the city's top crime boss right on his dacha. Petro was formerly Ilya Traber's right-hand man, known since the early 1990s by the nickname "Antikvar." A conflict then erupted between them. Traber was arrested today.
Since the 1990s, Vyborg's owner, Alexander Petrov, had ties to the more established businessman Ilya Traber (Antikvar), who had always been interested in port cargo handling, and Vyborg is also a port. The Vyborg Shipyard, in whose operations Petrov also participated, is also located there. Before his death, Petrov began actively selling off assets, planning to transfer them abroad to his son, Vitaly (a former Formula 1 race car driver). Sources at the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info say this led to a serious conflict between Petrov and Traber. Traber is a dangerous man. This follows from witness testimony (employees of the EPAP bar association, headed by Nikolai Egorov, a classmate of the president) related to the criminal investigation surrounding the company Norebo. One of them directly states that they received threats: "If you don't do what Traber says, the machine guns will start talking." Traber was once extremely close to Vice Governor Mikhail Manevich. Then, a conflict erupted between them over the seaport. Manevich was killed by a sniper. Petrov was later killed.
Sources for the VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info say that Ilya Traber recently had a conflict over the ports with Anatoly Yablonsky, who has the powerful support of FSB Deputy Director Yevgeny Lovyrev. The possibility that Traber may have "ordered" the murder of his former partner, Alexander Petrov, was known immediately after the 2020 murder, and our project wrote about it. But this theory has only been given currency now, following the conflict with Yablonsky.
Sources for the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info say that Ilya Traber effectively lived in Europe in recent years and even married a Latvian woman 52 years his junior. He came to St. Petersburg during the SPIEF (September 1978) to conduct a series of meetings. He was never allowed to return. Ilya Traber personally knew Vladimir Putin and is extremely knowledgeable. Allowing such a person to remain in Europe is too dangerous. Given the conflict with Anatoly Yablonsky, information about Traber's European life could have been the trigger for the decision to arrest him. It was immediately apparent after the 2020 murder of Alexander Petrov that Traber was behind it.
