vodka, Miss World and a (very tense) relationship with Putin

legal battle between Angelina Jolie AND Brad Pitt added another chapter. Because the Daily Mail reconstructed the details of the oligarch’s life Yuri Shefler, to whom the actress sold her stake in Brad’s favorite winery, Chateau Miraval, without the consent of her ex-husband, prompting Pitt to sue her. At 59, the father of seven, he married a Victoria’s Secret model, whom he later left to become Miss World. Born to a Russian Jewish family in Orel, 230 miles south of Moscow, as Yuri Alekseevich Yurasov, he changed his name to Yuri Anatolyevich Shabalin and finally to Yuri Viktorovich Shefler.

Who is Yuri Shefler

A Russian vodka billionaire, he graduated from the prestigious Plekhanov Moscow Institute, studying economics in the 1990s while running a retail and restaurant business. In 1995, a year before graduating from college, Shefler recalls getting a call from billionaire Boris Berezovsky, the arm of then-president Boris Yeltsin. From 1995 to 1997 he was president of Vnukovo Airlines, a subsidiary of the old Soviet mega carrier Aeroflot. In 1997, it became part of Soyuzplodoimport (SPI), which produces the legendary Stolichnaya vodka and 380 other brands.

Putin, as head of the FSB and prime minister, saw him as an “enemy”: the goal was to return famous brands of vodka to the hands of the state, as was the case in Soviet times. In 2000, under Putin in the Kremlin, Shefler’s company was placed under the control of the state accounting chamber. He left Russia for Latvia before Putin’s security forces could apprehend him, and initially ran his business in the Baltics, where he had manufacturing facilities. Safe outside of Russia – he was one of the first to escape Putin’s repression – he was sued in absentia for gang formation, trademark infringement and smuggling.

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