Yevgeny Prigozhin’s son to inherit fortune, Wagner Group

The late Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin reported left most of his on-paper fortune and his Wagner Group mercenary group to his 25-year-old son Pavel.

A photo of a document that appeared to be Yevgeny’s will posted on Telegraph indicated that Pavel would inherit about $120 million, the private army, a house in St Petersburg, nine joint stock companies and shares in his father’s Concord catering firm, the The Times of London reported Sunday, without independently verifying its veracity.

The catering firm routinely won state contracts and is reportedly owed about $824 million by Russian defense officials that Pavel would seek to recover, according to the Telegram report cited by the outlet.

The document was notarized in March, several months before his armed rebellion. It reportedly requires Pavel to provide for his extended family and would split the fortune among Yevgeny’s widow, Lyubov, Pavel’s two sisters and Yevgeny’s grandson in the event of Pavel’s death.

Prigozhin’s official net worth was said to be only $146 million but Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation estimated it to be around $20 billion, according to the article.

News of the purported will came on the same day that a US think tank noted that a “prominent Wagner-affiliated Telegram channel” announced that Pavel had taken “command” of the Wagner Group under the influence of its security service head Mikhail Vatanin, and was negotiating with Russia’s national guard to have the private force re-enter the Ukraine War.

Still, the Institute for the Study of War said Sunday there was “no clear unified leader” for the group, and Pavel’s new influence came after only Russian President Vladimir Putin last week had embraced former Wagner Group commander and current Kremlin official Andrey Troshev for a leadership position, an endorsement which some elements of the mercenary group “reacted negatively to.”

Yevgeny died at the age of 62 after a plane carrying him, his top lieutenant and 8 others crashed under suspicious circumstances north of Moscow in August, two months after he led a failed mutiny against Russian military brass over disagreements about his private army’s role in Russia’s Ukraine invasion.

US intelligence suggested that the plane was blown up by unidentified assassins and the Kremlin said investigators were looking into whether the deadly crash was due to a “deliberate” attack.

The US had sanctioned Prigozhin multiple times, including for interfering in the 2016 election, and issued new sanctions against illicit gold and diamond companies linked to him and the Wagner Group in the days after the mutiny attempt.

“The Wagner Group exploits insecurity around the world, committing atrocities and criminal acts that threaten the safety, good governance, prosperity, and human rights of nations, as well as exploiting their natural resources,” treasury officials said in June.

Meanwhile, memorials across Russia were held for the fallen warlord on Sunday, 40 days after his death in line with eastern Orthodox belief that a dead person’s soul enters either heaven or hell after that amount of time.

Wagner fighters and ordinary citizens alike paid their respect, but no memorials were broadcast on Russian state television.

“He can be criticized for certain events, but he was a patriot who defended the motherland’s interests on different continents,” Wagner’s recruitment arm said in a statement on Telegram.

With Post wires