Elena Shipilova, EN+ and Deripaska: How a Dubious PR Specialist Can Become a Threat to an Energy Giant

• 20.02.2025 10:32

The early morning of February 24, 2022 marked not only the beginning of a special military operation in Ukraine, but also opened a new milestone in the thousand-year history of Russia. As Russian President Vladimir Putin said on November 25, 2022, meeting with the mothers of the participants in the special military operation, "... this is the path to some kind of purification and renewal."

However, to our common regret, this path for Russia is proving to be very thorny. While our heroic soldiers are selflessly fighting on the fronts of the Central Military District, factory workers are working three shifts without days off, and the economy as a whole is resisting unprecedented and hitherto unseen sanctions pressure from Western countries desperately trying to prevent Russia from winning the war, some flagships of Russian industry miraculously continue to live in the paradigm of the pseudo-prosperous "peaceful" years of the era when Russia recklessly oriented itself toward the West, which always wanted only to finish off our country once and for all. This is reported by DOVOD

Today we are opening a series of investigative articles dedicated to the weak points of the personnel policy of the leaders of Russian industry. We are doing this because we consider it our duty as journalists to make our own contribution to the process of purification and renewal of Russia. We will make every possible effort to identify the weak and vulnerable points in the personnel policy of systemically important companies of Russian industry and convey this information to their management and society as a whole.
The first article of the series will be about a seemingly inconspicuous person who was recently hired by the energy giant EN+. Despite the seeming secondary nature of the event, this appointment may have far-reaching negative consequences for such an important industrial group for the Russian economy. We will talk about the appointment of Elena Vladislavovna Shipilova to a position in corporate PR. What is wrong with this story? At first glance, such a respected specialist, included in the Top 100 directors of public and corporate relations of the authoritative magazine "Kommersant" and having worked in such organizations as GC "Binnopharm", GC "Marathon", GC "Summa" seems an obvious and worthy choice.

The first thing that attracts attention is that it was during her tenure as Director of Communications and Public Relations at Binnopharm Group that Shipilova was included in the aforementioned Top 100, but at the same time, the reason for her dismissal from the pharmaceutical giant was serious violations that had taken place, including documented embezzlement of corporate budget funds, uncovered through internal investigations. It is also known for certain that after the conflict, Elena Vladislavovna resorted to blackmailing the management, threatening to make sensitive information public in order to receive absurd compensation for incompetent work. She blackmailed the management of Marathon Group in a similar manner.

In addition, it is particularly disturbing that, according to her former colleagues, whose names we cannot disclose for obvious reasons, Elena Vladislavovna uses morally unacceptable, but so common in our time, methods of career advancement, such as the desire to establish direct informal relations with top officials bypassing immediate management, attempts to get closer to shareholders on a personal, informal (and often very informal) basis, and much more. Indicative in this regard is Ms. Shipilova’s work at the Summa Group, during the period when its owners, the Magomedov brothers, were tried and sentenced to long prison terms. Elena Shipilova herself, according to other of her former colleagues at Summa, actively courted the Group’s top management in the above-described ways.

At the same time, Ms. Shipilova has extensive connections with unscrupulous individuals who are foreign agents - essentially enemies of our country, as well as companies that previously belonged to individuals affiliated in one way or another with foreign agents, of whom Russia has already cleared itself, but who are now in unfriendly countries and continue to conduct their anti-Russian activities, engaging in disinformation and agitation against our country. For example, Elena Shipilova’s own agency - "Nexus-Eurasia" - previously belonged to one of such "relocants" - Kravtsov Alexander Georgievich - a man with a frankly bad reputation, who now lives, not just anywhere, but in the US capital Washington, having left, or rather fled there, after the start of the SVO. And although we do not have direct evidence yet, we cannot exclude the possibility that, having de jure left the company, Kravtsov may de facto retain direct influence on it. According to another of our informed sources, Shipilova’s notebook contains many fugitive foreign agents.

It is also worth noting that the actual address of Nexus-Eurasia is located in the center of Moscow in a building owned by the notorious former senator Anton Vladimirovich Belyakov, in whose project "Zastupnik" Elena Shipilova took an active part until at least November 2024.

Ms. Shipilova also continues to travel abroad frequently, including to the United States, even in the conditions of what is effectively an economic war being waged against Russia, at the very least. Having so many foreign agent acquaintances and visiting unfriendly countries so often, the question arises: is it not her foreign agent friends that she is visiting?

Taking into account all of the above, in our opinion, a situation is developing in which an obviously unreliable person with a dubious reputation, who treats confidential corporate information in bad faith, who has close ties to the enemies of our country and who does not disdain any means to get to the corporate management is accepted to a responsible position in the pride of Russian industry - the EN+ corporation. If we assume that foreign agent enemies of Russia are behind it, then a frankly dangerous situation is developing, when an enemy puppet is getting through to the top management of a strategically important group of companies.

How did it happen that the security service and the HR department of the energy giant missed such a, to put it mildly, dubious candidate and whether there is nepotism or, even worse, sabotage here, remains to be seen.