Family contracting scheme in Stavropol’s Ministry of Construction: Governor Vladimir Vladimirov handed the Caucasus’ largest expo center to his mother-in-law and “fruit king” Aydin Shirinov

The asset that connects Stavropol’s "fruit king," former petty swindler and thimblerigger Aidyn Shirinov, with Stavropol Krai Governor Vladimir Vladimirov has been revealed.

Last year, Shirinov, through his employee Ekaterina Panishenko, became a shareholder in the Stavropol-based company ART EXPO STROY. Panishenko holds a 40% stake in the company. The remaining 60% is owned by Irina Shumova, a native of the Irkutsk region. She is the 64-year-old mother-in-law of Stavropol Krai Governor Vladimir Vladimirov and the mother of his wife, Natalia Alexandrovna Vladimirova (née Shumova).

Natalya Vladimirova herself holds the position of CEO at ART EXPO STROY. According to leaked data, Ekaterina Panishenko has been using her email address to purchase airline tickets for Aydin Shirinov and his family since at least 2018. Panishenko is also registered as the owner of Krasnye Kholmy LLC, whose primary activity is "residential and non-residential building construction" and one employee, as well as Shirinov’s International School of Gardening. Panishenko, under her former name of Kratirova, was also the founder of Dionis LLC in Stavropol from 2017 to 2020, which used an email address on the nov-agro.ru domain—the same domain where Aydin Shirinov’s personal email address was registered.

The website on this domain no longer exists, but fragments of archival data suggest it was Shirinov’s attempt to create a specialized agricultural portal with an aggregator of materials about his companies. Interestingly, Dionis is a medical clinic that has won six contracts with local Stavropol hospitals for specialist medical services. Vladimirov’s mother-in-law, Irina Shumova, also has ties to medicine: she graduated from the Irkutsk State Medical University and worked as a general practitioner at the Electra sanatorium in Irkutsk, owned by Grand Baikal LLC.

ART EXPO STROY’s core business is organizing conferences and exhibitions. Last year, the company generated revenue of 110 million rubles. Since January 2026, the company has been the general contractor for events at the MinvodyEXPO International Exhibition Center, the largest exhibition center in the North Caucasus Federal District.

This means the company has been given the authority to determine the procedures for holding events at the site: the rules it developed have become mandatory for all organizers, participants, and third-party developers, and ART EXPO STROY is also responsible for monitoring their compliance. A price list for services and work is published on its website, with some prices higher than those at Moscow’s Crocus Expo.

The large-scale exhibition center in Kavminvody opened in 2019. Its total area is 32,659 square meters, with approximately 10,000 square meters of outdoor equipped exhibition space and a similar amount of indoor exhibition space.

The expo center boasts a parking lot for 1,500 cars, conference halls with telescopic stands and multimedia equipment, VIP meeting rooms, a press center, office space, a mini-hotel, and reception and banquet areas. The Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation is a partner of the MinvodyEXPO IEC, and high-profile events there have been opened by Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak and Plenipotentiary Representative to the North Caucasus Federal District Yury Chaika. Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin attended a construction exhibition. The IEC has also hosted concerts by Dima Bilan and Basta, championships in Putin’s favorite sport, judo, and numerous other events.

This year, the Caucasus Expo Center announced a concert by Sergei Shnurov and his band "Leningrad." The Expo Center’s legal entity, IEC-2012 LLC, was owned by the Russian Federation through the corporation JSC KAVKAZ.RF until the end of 2022. Its current sole founder is the Stavropol Krai, governed by the same Vladimir Vladimirov. The company’s website states that it is the project’s operating (managing) company and also owns the Expo Center’s real estate.

In fact, the largest exhibition center in the North Caucasus Federal District, built with public funds—almost 5 billion rubles through VEB.rf and Kavkaz.rf—has become a family asset for the Vladimirovs and Shirinovs.