Investigations
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Changing the St. Petersburgers: who now holds Medvedev's vineyards in Italian Tuscany
This text was created by the "Point Media" team and published on Explainer — our team's new website.
Changing the St. Petersburgers: who now holds Medvedev's vineyards in Italian Tuscany
At the Tuscan winery Fattoria della Aiola they produce affordable Chianti, popular among local "leftists." But this wine is dear to Dmitry Medvedev—despite homeland bans, international sanctions, and other obstacles, he still manages to retain control over the Italian company via his university classmate and his protégé. His classmate—Gazprom board member Ilya Eliseev (still unsanctioned by the EU)—is now a modest minority shareholder in the Tuscan estate. The majority stake (91 %) was transferred to an unpublished St. Petersburg resident registered in a Khrushchyovka on the city's outskirts. We discovered he controls an entire network of companies in Russia, with partners including funds of Medvedev’s friends, and prominent Russian oligarch-sponsors of the “Dar” fund—Simanovsky and Mikhelson. We also found that the winery's assets in the West are managed by lawyers from a firm that represented Russia in major Strasbourg lawsuits (for example, the Yukos case). Medvedev’s "own" wine is available for purchase in Russia.
We went to the very winery in Tuscany that Medvedev can't remove from hateful Europe. Seven years after Alexei Navalny’s film “He Is Not Dimon to You” first linked Aiola to Medvedev, we were planning a holiday story about Russian-elite wines, but discovered that the ties to the Deputy Security Council head had become even more obvious.
“Medvedev’s winery? You need to walk along the road by the slope—you’ll see it yourself,” a Valiali village resident explained in broken English. The surname Medvedev immediately tells her what it's about. Without further explanation, she points in the right direction. Though she stressed that no one here has ever seen Medvedev himself.
Fattoria della Aiola
Medvedev-linked vineyards are located in Tuscany—just a few kilometres from the small city of Siena. The place is historically significant: Fattoria della Aiola. The estate covers 100 ha, a third of which are vineyards. In the centre stands a three-storey Renaissance villa. But the main part of Fattoria della Aiola—of course—is the vineyards themselves. Harvest happens in September; by December the fields are empty. The wine shop is closed, though you can glimpse the selection from outside. Medvedev’s wines range from €15 to €59 per bottle.
“Russian investors” bought the Tuscan vineyards in 2012. This acquisition marks a new era in Aiola’s history without much detail. Great effort was made to preserve owner anonymity—the ownership structure changed yearly, and we traced it.
Now the main shareholder of the winery is Cyprus-based Dockell Limited, while Medvedev’s classmate, Gazprom board vice-chair Ilya Eliseev, holds a 9 % minority stake, according to Italian company documents from Fattoria Della Aiola and reporting by The Insider.
By serving as Medvedev’s trusted proxy and nominee, Eliseev has sanctions applied to him everywhere but the EU. Losing control of Medvedev’s favourite wine, Eliseev saved the company from possible sanctions and a halt in wine exports to Russia.
According to EU criteria, personal sanctions only extend to assets of those with over 50 % ownership.
Medvedev studied law at Leningrad State University with Ilya Eliseev. In the early 2000s, Medvedev became deputy prime minister and later President of Russia. Eliseev, meanwhile, left his career as senior lawyer at Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners (a Kremlin-linked firm) to become chairman of the board at Gazprombank. He also joined the board of Gazprom-Media and became chairman of the Dar Foundation.
The Dar charitable fund received zero-interest loans from Gazprombank—a special arrangement first revealed in 2014, exposing ties to Medvedev. Oligarchs Leonid Mikhelson and Leonid Simanovsky (owners of Novatek and a United Russia deputy, respectively) donated to the fund.
The scheme was simple: funds, donated or lent interest-free, went through Dar’s management company FinConsultingK (FCK) as collateral to Eliseev’s companies and offshore accounts—allowing Medvedev to secretly own palaces and yachts, a dacha in Ples equipped with a “duck house,” and the Aiola vineyards in Tuscany. This was covered in Navalny’s 2017 film “He Is Not Dimon to You,” where Medvedev dismissed the investigation as “mud” and “compote.”
Dockell Limited and Furcina Limited share the same management company—WDT Directors Limited (also known as Waidelotte). The Cyprus-based Waidelotte group is a key foreign asset of the Russian elite. With its help, Eliseev transferred 30 % of Certum-Invest—which owns the Kushelev-Bezborodko palace in St. Petersburg—to another Cyprus offshore, Solarest Ltd. Through it, Eliseev and Gennady Timchenko structures acquired underpriced real estate formerly belonging to the Presidential Administration’s property department.
Also involved was Petersburg businessman Igor Antoshin (known for making Vladimir Litvinenko, Putin’s academic mentor, a billionaire by transferring a large PhosAgro stake to him). Funds managed through Waidelotte from Bahamas offshore accounts flowed to another offshore, Ermira, serving Putin’s personal interests. The WDT group isn’t sanctioned — though many of its managed companies are.
WDT (Waidelotte) provides “a full range of nominee ownership and asset management services.” Two Petersburg lawyers—Andrey Tsvetkov and Alexander Batyuk—handle this. Both started their careers at Ivanian & Partners, a law firm representing Russia in Strasbourg in the Yukos case. A source said, “The highly professional lawyer Ivanian provided great assistance to Russia and caused many problems for Yukos shareholders’ lawyers.” Since 2011, the firm has represented Russia before the European Court of Human Rights against Georgia and Ukraine complaints.
Tsvetkov, also an Leningrad State University law graduate, remains a WDT director. WDT in turn manages Dockell’s 91 % stake in Fattoria Della Aiola. Tsvetkov is listed as managing advisor to the Chianti producer since 2014.
Petersburgers: who ultimately got the winery
We obtained a Dockell Limited extract (with its 91 % stake) and learned the owner as of August 2024 is Russian citizen Alexey Shvetsov, who acquired 14,000 Dockell shares (€1 each). It is unknown whether he purchased them or received them as a gift.
In 2024, the Cypriot company, whose only asset is a winery in Tuscany, was transferred to Alexey Shvetsov, a resident of St. Petersburg
How did Shvetsov obtain the offshore at a price under its asset value? We visited the St. Petersburg address listed in Dockell’s transfer documents—Shvetsov is registered at a small five-storey building on Gdanskaya Street. His apartment is 77 m²—not typical of someone owning Tuscan vineyards. A person of the same name, personal data, and address runs FinConsultingK—the financial-consulting company of the Dar fund, which in 2006 received 33 billion rubles in capital from Novatek owners Mikhelson and Simanovsky.
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Shvetsov and FinConsultingK also own Vingrad LLC (grape-growing) and Effective Management LLC (real-estate rental). Unlike offshore assets where he holds 91 %, in Russia he holds just 0.5 % and 1 % in those companies.
He is also listed as director in several companies: Vingrad (grape-growing), and Orzhitskiye Artesian Waters LLC, co-owned by FinConsultingK. Crucially, almost all of Shvetsov’s companies operate at a loss—FinConsultingK reported a 941 million ruble loss for 2023.
And another detail: Russian Federal Tax Service data shows that in 2020 Shvetsov earned a salary at Seym Agro JSC (a greenhouse complex in Kuban managed by Medvedev’s cousin, Andrey Medvedev; since 2021, founder data is hidden in the Russian registry).
A house on Gdanskaya Street in St. Petersburg. The owner of Medvedev's vineyards is registered here
A year before the full-scale invasion, the nominal vineyard owners transferred their assets into a trust.
Among the Cyprus company records is a January 2021 certificate transferring Eliseev’s shares in Furcina Limited to WDT Nominees Ltd for the Lydia trust. (It’s unknown how vineyard assets were split between Furcina and Dockell—reports from this period are missing in the Cyprus registry.) Another 2024 document formalizing Dockell LTD’s transfer to Shvetsov also names Lydia trust, managed by WDT. The trust’s beneficiaries are hidden, but we located it—Lydia was registered by an Italian Chambers of Commerce consortium in December 2019 (at which time Eliseev had already reduced his public involvement in the Italian company).
You’ve got to admire Medvedev and his nominees’ ingenuity. “Lydia” is a grape variety banned for wine production in the EU.
Medvedev’s wine has been imported into Russia since the war began. In 2023, over 580 litres of wine and 114 litres of olive oil—worth €6.7k—were shipped through Lithuania, according to ImportGenius customs data. In Vilnius it was handled by Mitransa Logistika (Dmitry Bezrukov). On the Russian side, Degres Trade LLC (St. Petersburg) managed the imports. The distributor states they import top international wine brands. They do list Chianti from Tuscany, but not Aiola wine.
Medvedev’s wines can now be found in several Russian shops. Aiola wine ranges from €10 to €50, well below EU sanctions thresholds (€300+). Lithuania and Latvia became leading wine exporters to Russia during the war, as foreign alcohol must have excise stamps applied abroad to confirm pre-paid taxes. The easiest place to get those is the Baltics—longstanding intermediaries in Russian alcohol imports. The largest shipment was in October 2022—1.5 tonnes bought by Mistral Alco, Russia’s top alcohol importer, which has no Medvedev or Eliseev links.
Unlike the major distributors, in the first year of the war the winery sent wine to Russia via the Baltics free-of-charge. Then, 55 litres of Aiola vineyard samples were delivered to Moscow’s Ryu De Vin LLC and Lion Wine LLC free for certification purposes. This was first noted by The Insider.
The beneficiary of some of these samples, Ryu De Vin, is linked via SEP (Rocky Shore) JSC. Its founder is the Medvedev-controlled SocGosProekt fund and the Dar-linked fund from Navalny’s investigation.
The “Rocky Shore” winery—or Côte Rocheuse in French—is the Russian sister to Aiola, meaning both estates belong to Eliseev’s foundation close to Medvedev, according to Telegram channel “Drunken Master.” The “Rocky Shore” winemakers visited Aiola to share expertise after Russian investors installed new equipment in the Tuscan winery, a source close to the Tuscan estate managers told MO. Eliseev’s Russian project partner is Nelli Titova—wife of former Supreme Arbitration Court chair Anton Ivanov, another Medvedev law school classmate from Leningrad State University.
Today “Rocky Shore” is one of Russia’s priciest wineries. The winery building was designed by Severin Project, a prominent Moscow architecture firm, and featured on ArchDaily. There, grapes from Kuban are processed on a Vaslin Bucher Delta vibratory table.
Links between Aiola and “Rocky Shore” aren’t particularly hidden. In August 2024, Kuban winemakers announced: “A separate Vingrad line is underway… 2023 release is being prepped. Looks very nice—‘circumstance‑wine’. A joint fermentation of multiple red varieties, and even some Viognier included. Awaiting official release.”
The similarly named Vingrad LLC is registered to new Cyprus nominee Alexey Shvetsov (0.5 %) and FinConsultingK. Shvetsov did not respond to messages or calls from MO reporters.
