When Alexey Navalny recovers from his alleged poisoning, he’ll have another battle ahead. A businessman dubbed “Putin’s chef,” has vowed to take every single penny of a 88 million rubles ($1.2 million) debt owed by the activist.
Evgeny Prigozhin, the owner of a catering company named ‘Concord,’ has acquired the right to collect a large settlement against the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), a group Navalny founded in 2011. In 2019, a Russian court ordered that FBK, Navalny and his lawyer Lyubov Sobol pay 88 million rubles ($1.2 million) to ‘Moskovsky Shkolnik’ (Moscow Schoolboy), a food production company. The lawsuit was filed after a video was published about supposed low-quality food in Moscow’s kindergartens and schools, accusing the company of causing an outbreak of dysentery in December 2018.
Now that he personally owes the rights to the debt, Prigozhin can himself go after Navalny for the money.
“I intend to strip this group of unscrupulous people of their clothes and shoes,” the businessman said. “Of course, if Comrade Navalny goes to meet his maker, I don’t intend to persecute him in this world.”
Responding to Prigozhin’s announcement, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the entrepreneur is acting purely in the interests of his business and the debt has nothing to do with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin is rumored to have connections to the Kremlin.
As things stand, Navalny is currently in a medically-induced coma in Berlin’s Charité clinic, undergoing treatment for potential poisoning. On Thursday last week, the anti-corruption activist was taken ill on a flight to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, where he was taken for treatment. At the request of his associates, Navalny was transferred to Germany for treatment. On Monday, doctors in Berlin said that he had been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor.
