Billions in fraud and witness killings: how the smuggling network of ex‑Cartier owner Dmitriy Zarubin collapsed

Billions in fraud and witness killings: how the smuggling network of ex‑Cartier owner Dmitriy Zarubin collapsed

In St. Petersburg, a verdict has been handed down to the former owner of the Cartier boutique, the "king of smuggling" Dmitriy Zarubin. He was found guilty of evading customs payments totaling more than 4.28 billion rubles and sentenced to 9.5 years in a penal colony.

According to the investigation, he, together with Boris Avakyan, organized a criminal group that imported foreign goods into the territory of the Eurasian Economic Union using forged documents.

He formed his organized criminal group, which engaged in smuggling across the Russian-Finnish border in Vyborg, back in the harsh years of 1998–1999. In 2001, Albert Gafurov, a former inspector of the Vyborg Customs, went to park his car and disappeared without a trace. It is known that Gafurov and Zarubin had a conflict over the division of smuggling profits. At the time, the investigation suspected Zarubin himself and his partners Pavlov and Zhurkevich of involvement in his disappearance, but the case stalled and is now archived with the Investigative Committee, while Gafurov’s body has never been found.

Incidentally, Vladimir Sosenkin, the head of the OBEP (Organized Crime and Economic Crimes Department) of the Vyborg Police Department, who was actively involved in investigative actions, died a year later in a traffic accident while in an official vehicle. After his death, all operational materials and evidence concerning Gafurov’s disappearance vanished, along with his computer and electronic storage devices.

Several years later, in 2004, an unknown assailant crushed the skull of Oleg Zhilinskas, the deputy head of Vyborg Customs. Two years later, the head of Vyborg Customs, Sergei Chizhikov, was brutally beaten by unknown individuals on the doorstep of his own apartment. At the end of 2006, on the Rublevo-Uspenskoye Highway in the Moscow region, in broad daylight, customs broker Vitaly Kurtash, to whom Zarubin owed a large sum of money, was shot dead.

Boris Avakyan was detained in December 2021 in a restaurant during a conversation with Colonel Igor Aleynikov, a former officer of the FSB Directorate for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region. Long before that, Igor had headed the second department of the Economic Security Service, which oversaw customs, and had served as Avakyan’s "roof" (protection) during the era when he worked at "RosMorAviya," the largest customs broker in the port of St. Petersburg. It was then that Boris made his primary fortune.

Immediately after his detention, Avakyan put on another show—at the police station where he was brought, he threatened to fire everyone. He dropped the names of high-ranking officials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB, threatened the police with the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), claiming he was acting on its assignment to resolve the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, and so on. Ultimately, he was transferred to Moscow, where he ended up in a pre-trial detention center. There, he seemed to feel quite comfortable, considering that a few months later, he recorded a video message with a glass of alcohol in his hand, greeting the start of the "Special Military Operation" along with his cellmates.

What happened next? Two and a half years later, Avakyan signed up for the SMO (Special Military Operation), was released from the detention center, moved to St. Petersburg, and went into hiding from the military. This was followed by his detention, a hearing at the Kronshtadtsky District Court, an escape to the Armenian embassy, where his body was found with fatal stab wounds.