From Euromaiden Press: “Putin’s chef” Evgeny Prigozhin has been making more and more headlines recently. The Wagner mercenaries that he funds have made him so politically influential that Russia’s authorities reportedly blessed a new private military company to knock off his sway. But who is Evgeny Prigozhin? We track his rise from mafia, robbery, and jail to growing a catering empire on state orders and bankrolling projects such as Wagner and the infamous troll factory near St. Petersburg.
All countries have mafia — but the Russian mafia has a country, a joke goes.
Evgeny (Yevgeniy) Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s chef,” started his business career in the 80s, in a Soviet prison, serving a decade of hard labor for theft, fraud, and robbery. In the 90s, he got involved in organized crime in St. Petersburg and managed a gambling business supervised by Putin. In the early 2000s, he made millions of dollars receiving exclusive state orders for catering, maintenance, and construction from the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense.
Voice of Ukraine 