RBE Group received Prigozhin’s Concorde contracts for food for the Ministry of Defense structures

RBE Group, which ten years ago ceded contracts for food for the structures of the Ministry of Defense to the Concord Group of the deceased founder of the Wagner PMC Evgeniy Prigozhin, is returning to the segment. The operator, who also manages restaurants on long-distance trains and Sapsan, previously received more than half of its total revenue from working with the military. Experts believe that RBE’s current production capacity may not be enough, so the company will have to negotiate the use of Concorde’s already established infrastructure.

RBE Group, owned by Andrei Shokin, instead of the Concord Group of Companies of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in a plane crash, will provide power to the structures of the Russian Ministry of Defense. This was reported to Kommersant by a source close to RBE. He did not specify the details of the contracts or their total amount. The company itself did not comment on this topic. The Ministry of Defense and Concord did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

To fulfill contracts with structures of the Ministry of Defense, RBE has already begun to increase the number of employees, including management personnel, Kommersant’s interlocutor says. Expanding staff required the group to rent a new office, he said.

As three sources told Kommersant in the real estate market, RBE rented 4.5 thousand square meters. m in the Imperial House business center on Yakimansky Lane in the center of Moscow. Previously, these areas were occupied by the alcohol distributor Pernod Ricard (brands Ararat, Chivas Regal, Jameson, Absolut), which announced the closure of its Russian representative office. RBE Group explained to Kommersant the need to rent a new office by “combining management personnel in one place.”

According to estimates by Ksenia Kharkevich, director of the ILM office real estate department, RBE Group will pay 250–280 million rubles for renting space in the Imperial House. in year. Since the owner of the property, UFG Wealth Management, entered into a lease agreement with Pernod Ricard until 2027, according to Alyssa Bond, director of tenant and buyer representation at NF Group, RBE Group was able to negotiate more favorable lease terms.

Before this, RBE Group already had experience working with Ministry of Defense structures. Until 2013, the company received contracts to feed the military, which brought it $60 million in profit in 2012 alone, Forbes reported at the time. With total revenue of 54.7 billion rubles. in 2012 about 30 billion rubles. had to provide food for the military, Andrei Shokin said earlier. But since 2013, the Ministry of Defense began to conclude such agreements with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Concord Group, and RBE Group had to lay off 32 thousand employees.

After the Wagner PMC mutiny in June, President Vladimir Putin stated that the state paid only PMCs from May 2022 to May 2023 “cash maintenance and incentive payments of 86.22 billion rubles.” The exact amount of Concorde contracts is unknown. But, as Forbes reported, the total amount of the company’s contracts for providing food to military personnel in 2013–2014 was supposed to be 92 billion rubles. Kommersant could not find more recent confirmed data.

A Kommersant source in the catering market says that not many companies will be able to fulfill a large contract from the Ministry of Defense without interruptions in supplies. Therefore, its transfer to RBE Group, which already had experience in such work, is logical, says RestCon CEO Elena Perepelitsa. But, she suggests, RBE Group’s current production capacity and personnel may not be enough to cover the needs of the Ministry of Defense, so the company will have to negotiate the use of Concorde’s infrastructure and the involvement of its personnel.

Daria Andrianova