Russian investor linked to Putin abandons Holy Loch distillery plan

He helped develop the geeky but violent game - a sort of cross between Fight Club and Knight Club - in his native Russia. 

Later he did so much for the controversial pastime in his adopted home of Monaco that he was given an award by the tax haven’s monarch, Prince Albert II.

However, René does not win all his battles, at least not in business.

He has, The Herald can reveal, abandoned a series of commercial ventures in Scotland, where he has owned an historic mansion for the last seven years. 

Liquidators earlier this month filed a final account for his former holding company in the country, Maison Eugène René Limited, and for one of its subsidiaries, Northern Seas Trading Limited.

This modest paperwork went unreported, unnoticed because very few people knew the real identity of Eugène René.

Read more from David Leask:

How a Lanarkshire house became the owner of a mysterious shell corporation

Whisky imports hit record high in Russia despite Ukraine invasion and Scotch 'ban'

How Scottish limited partnerships have created opportunities for the mafia

This HMB moniker belongs to Yevgeniy Strzhalkovskiy, son of Vladimir Strzhalkovskiy, multi-millionaire, Russian oligarch and bureaucrat and former KGB comrade of one Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.

Maison Eugène René Limited at one time - on paper at least - had grand plans, not least in the whisky business.

It appears to have intended to resurrect a distillery in a down-at-luck community on the Holy Loch, near Dunoon, Argyll.

Maison Eugène René owned a company called Sandbank Distillery Limited. It was dissolved last year, having never  produced so much as a single dram. 

It has been more than 200 years since anybody made whisky in this community. 

The Herald was unable to find anybody in Argyll who had ever heard of the proposed venture.

Yet Maison Eugène René Limited seems to have had a brand in mind: a related company has registered a trademark for a new Scotch.

It is called Lamont.

Knockdow House

Yevgeniy Strzhalkovskiy -whose ancestors are said to be Polish nobles from what is now western Ukraine -  has a connection of sorts to this name. 

Back in 2017, as first reported in this paper, he bought a mansion on the Cowal Peninsula’s “secret coast” for £4m.

Knockdow House was ancestral home of the chiefs of the Lamonts, the early 19th century structure built with the profits from the slave plantations in the sugar islands of the Caribbean.

Strzhalkovskiy’s purchase raised eyebrows at the time. Because of who is father was. And because the property is right next to the little-publicised but strategically important Loch Striven fuelling station for the British and US navies in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

Vladimir Strzhalkovskiy is close to Putin, 71. Very close. The pair served together the Soviet Union’s State Security Committee, or KGB, in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, in the 1980s. 

After retiring as a lieutenant colonel when the USSR collapsed, Strzhalkovskiy senior went in to the holiday business before - under his old friend Putin - entering government. 

He ran Russia’s Federal Tourism Agency from 2004 to 2008 and was appointed as counsellor to the president. Then he was put in charge of Russia’s giant Norilsk Nickel mining empire. He left that job with a $100m golden goodbye, the biggest ever awarded in Russia at the time.

Strzhalkovskiy Senior for some years chaired Dinamo, the football and sports club with strong ties to law enforcement and the secret police. He has had various other roles in and around the state. 

He also also forged a career at the Bank of Cyprus before being replaced in 2015 as vice-president by Wilbur Ross, the billionaire investor who subsequently became Donald Trump's Commerce Secretary.

Right now he is on the supervisory board of Rosselkhozbank, Russia’s state-owned farming financier. 

Thanks to these government and business roles, Strzhalkovskiy senior is under sanctions from Ukraine but not the UK. His son is not sanctioned. 

Both men - father and son - are, however, listed on RuPEP, an independent and exhaustive database of Russian politically exposed persons compiled by specialist journalists and analysts.

Scotland’s property register names Strzhalkovskiy Junior as the owner of Knockdow, which was a plush wedding venue before his purchase.

But Companies House, Britain’s corporate register, makes no formal link between Maison Eugène René Limited and the Strzhalkovskiys - other than using Yevgeniy’s pseudonym.

The entities are all officially owned by a société anonyme monégasque, or SAM, one of Monaco’s anonymous companies. 

Thesauro Praetor SAM is registered at a block of luxury apartments in Avenue Princess Grace, the long thoroughfare often named as Europe’s most expensive street. This is an A-list address, named after movie star, Grace Kelly, Albert II’s mother. 

Monaco

SAMs are pretty opaque structures. But a filing made for another firm called Maison Eugène René - this time in neighbouring France - reveals who owns Thesauro Praetor: Yevgeniy Strzhalkovskiy.

The Herald on Sunday tried to contact Thesauro Praetor SAM. Its UK trademark lawyers were unable to help. Last month we sent a signed-for letter to Avenue Princess Grace asking why Maison Eugène René and its affiliates had pulled out of Scotland. Our letter was delivered but there has been no response.

We wanted to ask if the Strzhalkovskiy’s Scottish businesses were closing as a result of war in Ukraine. 

The limited companies owned by the SAM and Strzhalkovskiy  - Maison Eugène René - did change address after Putin’s full-scale invasion. They were transferred from the Edinburgh HQ of a prestigious firm of accountants to an industrial facility near the airport. Then they were wound up.

War had already affected the Strzhalkovskiys.

Vladimir’s £59m yacht, the Ragnar, was seen docked at Greenock in 2021. 

This luxury nine-bedroom 68m vessel - its interior designed, like one of René’s mock battles, to look mediaeval -is a converted ice-breaking offshore supply vessel. 

The imposing grey hulk did not go unnoticed when it visited the Clyde.

In the spring of 2022 - after Putin’s tanks rolled towards Kyiv - the Ragnar got stuck in the Arctic Norwegian port of Narvik. Local workers refused to fuel a boat owned by a friend of Putin.  The Ragnar did eventually set sail. But Strzhalkovskiy senior ended up selling the yacht to the US billionaire Roy E Carroll, who renamed it Q.

Yevgeniy Strzhalkovsky - using yet another pseudonym, Evgeny Rene - has commented on the war. But only how it has affected the fake battles he organises. 

The promoter had little respect for those trying to stop Russians taking part in HMB fights. 

“I’d like to remind everyone that at the last session of the HMBIA, the issue of banning Russian participants was raised in the spirit of fashionable trends, but this didn't happen democratically after the voting,” he told a website focused on his sport.

“There are a number of activists who say daring things on the Internet, but I don't think we will ever see such loudmouths on the battlefield, which is why they show such impudence.”

He added: “I would say that I hold such individuals in disgust, as their behaviour has removed them from being worthy opponents, betraying the universal ideals of chivalry.”