In St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, FSB officers came to search several addresses linked to businessman Ilya Traber.
“Fontanka” He writesThat security forces searched Traber’s mansion in the Leningrad region, his office on Staroroskaya Street, and several companies. According to the sources “Fontanka” and Red blood cellsTraber, along with his long-time business partner Vladimir Danilenko, is suspected of organizing the murder of St. Petersburg businessman and municipal deputy Alexander Petrov. “The case has been on hold for several years, but investigators have recently received new information,” one of RBC’s interlocutors said. According to him, Traber will be transferred to Moscow, to the Main Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee.
Alexander Petrov was murdered in 2020. He was shot while leaving the bathroom on his property in the village of Velikoy, Vyborg Region. The killers were not found. Alexander Petrov’s son is former Formula 1 driver Vitaly Petrov. he He said Fontanka, which so far knows nothing about the investigation and does not comment.
Ilya Traber is a famous St. Petersburg businessman, who built his career at the time when Vladimir Putin worked in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office. The main details of Traber’s biography are known from journalistic investigations – in particular from the documentary Series Titled “Petersburg,” which was launched by the Dozhd TV channel in 2017. In one of the episodes, Dozhd’s editor-in-chief, Roman Badanin, spoke with Ilya Traber’s son, Dmitry.
Traber began his entrepreneurial activity in the 1980s through the antiques trade – and, as Dozd journalists put it, “he made a dizzying career in the shadow sector,” creating a network of antique shops. The businessman was known at the time as “Al-Atiq.”
In the 1990s, Traber took control of the seaport of Saint Petersburg, one of the most important transportation centers in northwestern Russia. Traber’s actions, in particular, became known from investigations initiated in Monaco and Spain, as well as from data received from the tax authorities, whose report was received in 2002 by published L’Express Magazine. In this report, Traber was named as a friend of Vladimir Putin, who is linked to the Tambov criminal group that controls the activities of the port of St. Petersburg.
In 2008, an investigation began in Spain into the “Russian Mafia” case, which included alleged participants of the Tambov-Malyshev organized crime group. They were accused of laundering money through shell companies. In 2016, the Spanish Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office requested international arrest warrants for a number of individuals, including Traber. But in 2018, a court in Spain acquitted all defendants in the “Russian Mafia” case, without finding evidence of their links to the Tambov-Malyshev organized crime group or evidence of laundering of criminal proceeds.
In her investigation, Dozhd claimed that in northwestern Russia “there is no port in which the Traber people do not have interests.” Among Traber’s associates are journalists Nikolai Shamalov – his son Kirill was married to Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova.
In addition, Ilya Traber is connected to the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal (PNT), which is the largest oil products transportation terminal in the Baltic region. It was founded in 1996. Traber structures controlled the PNT along with the structures of Gennady Petrov, the leader of the Malyshevskaya organized crime group. Another shareholder of PNT was a company owned by businessman Dmitry Skigin. Skigin died in 2003. Then his heirs filed a lawsuit against the new co-owners of PNT, and in April 2025, the court confiscated 55% of the shares of the St. Petersburg oil terminal for state income.
Ilya Traber is a businessman close to Vladimir Putin. He described Dogd Trapper as “the only living crime boss that Putin has admitted to knowing.” Press Secretary of Russian President Dmitry Peskov to talk Novaya Gazeta reported that Skigin and Traber “simultaneously worked on a project to build an oil terminal,” and therefore “repeatedly formally turned to the leadership of the St. Petersburg Mayor’s Office,” where Putin then worked.
After the documentary series “Rain” was shown, Traber filed a defamation report. A criminal case was opened, but the identity of the accused was not reported. The witness in this case was the editor-in-chief of Dogd magazine, Roman Badanin. In June 2021, he and his colleagues Mikhail Rubin and Maria Golubova were searched. The journalists themselves linked the investigation procedures to the investigation they published on the same day about the then head of the Ministry of Interior, Vladimir Kolokoltsev.