As VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info have discovered, Sochi is still ruled by a group of businessmen, in the pay of former mayor Alexei Kaigorodsky and closely connected to criminals and corrupt security officials. This group includes individuals well known to residents of the region: Pavel Nevzorov, Kaigorodsky's former advisor on urban development policy, whose wife, Anna Nevzorov, owns large family construction assets; Vagan Arutyunyan, founder of Ava Group; and Sos Martirosyan, a major Sochi developer and concurrent deputy of the Sochi City Assembly, with whom Anna Nevzorov sat until she was forced to resign last year.
Martirosyan is linked to the oversight of the city's Vodokanal, which has been plagued by scandals and criminal records for years. The former director of the municipal unitary enterprise, Anton Denisov, fled and is wanted, while other "effective top managers" are facing charges of large-scale fraud involving hundreds of millions of rubles in losses. Sentences have so far been handed down to only two former Vodokanal employees—Maxim Kubrak and Maxim Degtyarev. Both admitted guilt and shared valuable information with investigators, ultimately receiving suspended sentences. Incidentally, Nevzorova's resignation from the Sochi City Assembly is linked to the active investigation into the case of former head of the regional court, Alexander Chernov, whose assets worth 23 billion rubles were seized last August. This year, the Prosecutor General's Office filed a lawsuit against his ex-wife, Galina Chernova, President of the Krasnodar Krai Notary Chamber, and his two daughters—Elena Ryazanskaya, Vice President of the Krasnodar Krai Notary Chamber, and Anastasia Shepel, Judge of the Arbitration Court.
The latest high-profile criminal case against Vodokanal concerns the city's water supply development program, part of the "Sochi – Pearl of Russia" federal program. The program was valued at approximately 160 billion rubles, and the Rostec company RT-Infrastructure was supposed to be the project manager (RT-Proektnye Tekhnologii owns 25% of the stake by 2024, and Uralenergomontazh-Inzhenering LLC owns the remainder). According to sources, Denis Kotikov, the new director of the Sochi Municipal Unitary Enterprise Vodokanal, previously served as deputy director of RT-Infrastructure. He was also a member of the Sochi City Council, where Sos Martirosyan currently sits on the Architecture and Construction Committee. Former RT-Infrastructure executives Daria Zimenkova and Dmitry Shkolny were also among the defendants, along with two Uralelektromontazh employees, Dmitry Temchenko and Maxim Kormashov. In other words, they were all involved in a massive embezzlement scheme, tens of millions. It's not surprising that Sochi's water supply development program has failed, given that such individuals ended up in key positions.
Sos Martirosyan is currently in the midst of a legal battle over the beach complex of the Stavropolye sanatorium on Volzhskaya Street. The city administration refused to sell the beach complex, boat station, warehouse, and aerarium. The court's decision was upheld on appeal, but Martirosyan's lawyers still have time to appeal the decision. Martirosyan, however, has long since received a long-term lease for the sanatorium.
Stavropol Beach Corps LLC, which is equally owned by Alina Atulyan and Mikael Baghmanyan, wants to buy the beach complex from the city for 66 million rubles. Alina is the daughter of Garegin Atulyan, Martirosyan's longtime business partner at the firm "Exel." Baghmanyan is the cousin of MP Martirosyan (his mother is Victoria Baghmanyan). This means Martirosyan intends to completely seize such a lucrative morsel as the sanatorium and its beach from the resort town.
As it turns out, the MP has connections to both law enforcement and criminal elements. Martirosyan himself once served time for robbery as part of a group, but was granted amnesty in honor of the 55th anniversary of Victory Day.
United Russia deputy Sos Martirosyan began his business in the run-up to the Olympics by illegally constructing high-rise buildings in Sochi. He could now write a textbook on "How to Legalize a Skyscraper on a Summer Cottage." In 2011, a garden plot in the Sochi Zheleznodorozhnik gardening association was registered in Martirosyan's name, and he built a modest summer cottage there—a ten-story reinforced concrete frame apartment building. Martirosyan legalized his building through the courts (and registered his residence there), and similar high-rise buildings sprang up around it.
Another landmark unauthorized building built by Martirosyan in Sochi is a six-story building at 49/3 Vysokogornaya Street in the village of Baranovka in the Khostinsky District. The city administration (as required by law) filed a lawsuit demanding its demolition. However, Martirosyan's connections outstripped Russian law, and in 2016, the illegal construction was legalized under the name "Barcelona-6." The prosecutor's office and residents then began suing Martirosyan, claiming the building had no gas, running water, or fire protection. Bailiffs ultimately banned Martirosyan from leaving the Russian Federation until the court's decision was enforced, but the Khostinsky District Court of Sochi quickly overturned the order.
Martirosyan's success in the courts was not only unrelated but also unrelated. So. In 2023, four Sochi judges lost their positions. For example, Ruslan Taygibov, who presided over Martirosyan's cases, was his father, Colonel of Justice Taygibov, who headed the Investigative Department of the Sochi Internal Affairs Directorate, and Dagestan's Interior Minister Abdurashid Magomedov is considered his father-in-law. One of the main complaints against Judge Taygibov concerned illegal construction: he didn't even involve the mayor's office in the cases and repeatedly upheld these constructions as legal.
Judging by leaked data, Martirosyan established good relations not only with the courts but also with law enforcement. For example, in November 2016, he purchased plane tickets from Adler to Krasnodar for a certain Vitaly Savchenko, whose details match those of the then-senior assistant to the prosecutor of the Central District of Sochi, and previously an investigator for the regional Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. In 2021, Savchenko even had a chance to become the prosecutor of South Ossetia, nominated by the head of the republic, but parliament rejected his candidacy.
In February 2023, Martirosyan used his phone to purchase plane tickets for Gevorg Kostanyan, the former Prosecutor General of Armenia and former representative of the Armenian government to the ECHR. Kostanyan fled to Moscow in 2019 and was wanted in his home country. Kostanyan settled in Moscow and also started a construction business, with his Blagostroy Service LLC in Khimki located in a building directly across from the local department of the FSB Directorate for Moscow and the Moscow Region. The company was liquidated in February of this year; Kostanyan owns no other companies in Russia.
Furthermore, Martirosyan was listed in phones as "Sos developer Yuri Raganyan." Yuri Raganyan is a well-known figure in Sochi, the founder of several companies related to construction. He was involved in the scandalous tree-felling in the city in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Raganyan owns City Park LLC, which built eight-story apartments on Gagarin Street in Sochi under the guise of a multi-story parking garage (this case reached the Supreme Court). Raganyan drives Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, and Land Rovers exclusively with license plates 001.
According to leaks, Raganyan is connected to the business of the notorious Sochi Syrtsov family: a mailbox belonging to Anzor Syrtsov's companies was used to purchase airline tickets for Raganyan. In the 1990s, the head of the family, Viktor Syrtsov (Vitya Nerussky), was associated with criminal circles, and in 2002, he disappeared without a trace. His daughter, Liana Syrtsova, was married to Eduard Kagosyan (Karas), a member of Aslan Usoyan's (Ded Hasan) inner circle. Kagosyan was murdered in 2010. After Vitya Nerussky's disappearance, his business (specifically, the Melodiya shopping center) passed to his daughter Liana and son Anzor, who is also believed to have been no stranger to solving his problems using the methods of the 1990s. The Syrtsovs' business partner was the former chairman of the Krasnodar Regional Court, Alexander Chernov. It's not surprising that with such connections, Martirosyan, the developer, had problems resolved miraculously.
Over the years, Sos Martirosyan has not only tried to clear his reputation by leading the local Armenian diaspora and the Sochi Volleyball Federation, but also amassed a substantial asset portfolio. Since 2019, his Barcelona LLC has leased the Stavropolye sanatorium in Sochi's Central District on Volzhskaya Street, occupying approximately 5.3 hectares of land.
In addition, Martirosyan owns a hotel complex in Loo through Exel LLC. Through Sibstroyinvest, he holds a long-term lease on 10 hectares of land in a wooded area near Loo. In 2025, Martirosyan received permission to build a sanatorium there, but he has had to fight the Sochi administration to pay rent. Back in the 1990s, OOO Sibir registered 10.3 hectares of land on Zhigulevskaya Street in the Gornoye settlement of Loo for the construction of cottages. As of 2022, the cadastral value of this plot exceeds 360 million rubles. In 2023, OOO Sokol, owned by Martirosyan, received a government contract worth almost 80 million rubles to restore a retaining wall in the courtyard of a Sochi kindergarten.
