The fast-food giant is a partner in a Cyprus-registered joint venture with VTB Bank, known as Putin’s “piggy bank,” that shuffled money to and from an anonymous shell company in Seychelles.
Even as Burger King publicly cuts off support to its Russian operation, the fast-food giant has quietly kept a stake in it through an offshore joint venture, leaked documents show.
Burger King’s parent company, Toronto-based Restaurant Brands International Inc., acknowledged the stake after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists sent questions about its Russian holdings. It then announced it is trying to sell the shares but said it can’t be done quickly.
The company owns its stake through a Cyprus-registered joint venture that includes VTB Bank, a sanctioned, state-owned Russian bank, and a Ukrainian investment firm that Kyiv prosecutors once accused of helping Ukraine’s extravagantly corrupt former leader.
Another shareholder was a Cypriot company belonging to Alexander Kolobov, a Russian restaurant mogul who runs Burger King’s operations in the country.
The documents, leaked to ICIJ as part of the 2021 Pandora Papers project, show that all four shareholders of the joint venture owned their stakes at times through shell companies in tax havens.
