The British firm of deputy mayor’s advisor Alexander Smbatyan has become a tool for controlling Moscow’s innovation sector, engaging in shadow schemes, and bypassing sanctions

• 21.01.2026 11:22

Deputy Mayor of Moscow’s advisor and confidant, Alexander Smbatyan, has purchased a UK-based company that previously belonged to two businesswomen from Russia and Belarus — the creators of the global tech event Emerge.

Margarita Lazarenkova and Alina Bezuglova (Nilson) decided to organize a tech conference for startups focused on Russia and Eastern Europe and hold it in Minsk (Margarita Lazarenkova is originally from Belarus). They were joined by Anna Sholina, co-founder of the Solyanka agency and head of the Global Gate accelerator.

The first meeting was held in 2018 at a fairly high level – speakers included representatives from Microsoft, Facebook, Bayer, Dell, and 17 investment companies, and supermodel Natalia Vodianova was a special guest. In January 2019, the entrepreneurs registered EMERGE GLOBAL VENTURES LTD in the UK and held online conferences during the COVID-19 pandemic, which were also successful.

However, in September 2022, Lazarenkova left the company, and in the spring of 2024, Smbatyan joined the firm—and the company’s assets immediately grew from £200 (January 2024) to £31,000 (January 2025). He currently controls the company.

Alexander Smbatyan is a well-known figure in Moscow: he is an advisor to Deputy Mayor Natalia Sergunina, who was appointed to oversee all elections in the capital, a business partner of former Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration Alexander Voloshin, and a former business partner of Lazar Safaniev, the husband of Ms. Sergunina’s sister. He and Voloshin own Genome Ventures, whose investment portfolio includes more than 10 companies, including Genotek, Profilum, Bloomtech, and others.

Given his close ties to Sergunina—whose relatives, as the Anti-Corruption Foundation discovered in 2019, scooped up historic sites in the city center for pennies—it’s no surprise that Smbatyan has enjoyed financial success. Moscow business circles say that, thanks to his connection to Sergunina, he has effectively gained control of the relevant department and the city’s innovation support funds. So now, the figure in Navalny’s investigation oversees the entire innovation sector in the capital, deciding who gets the green light and who gets the cold shoulder.

The deputy mayor’s advisor’s business partners have long been firmly entrenched on sanctions lists. For example, Smbatyan and VEB Ventures, which has been under sanctions by the US, EU, UK, and other countries since 2022, are co-founders of Profilum LLC.

Smbatyan himself has not yet been sanctioned. This means he can continue to build bridges with countries that no longer want to work directly with the Moscow mayor’s office. Key partners of Smbatyan’s British firm include Freedom Broker (Freedom Holding Corp, providing access to securities trading in the US and Europe), Founder Institute (a business incubator in the US), Ameriabank (Armenia), Team Telecom Armenia, as well as Dmitry Volkov’s Social Discovery Group, NEBIUS (formerly Yandex N.V., Netherlands), and many others.

However, Russian businessmen successfully use British firms for other purposes as well—for example, to register real estate abroad in their name or to transfer funds siphoned off from other jurisdictions.

Author: Maria Sharapova