Alexander Smbatyan, advisor and friend to Moscow’s Deputy Mayor, has purchased a UK company that had been owned by two Russian and Belarusian entrepreneurs, founders of the Emerge tech conference.
Margarita Lazarenkova and Alina Bezuglova (Nilson) organized a tech conference for startups in Russia and Eastern Europe, hosted in Minsk (Lazarenkova hails from Belarus), joined by Anna Sholina, co-founder of Solyanka and head of the Global Gate accelerator. The inaugural 2018 event attracted speakers from Microsoft, Facebook, Bayer, Dell, 17 investment firms, and featured supermodel Natalia Vodianova. In January 2019, EMERGE GLOBAL VENTURES LTD was registered in the UK, and online conferences during the COVID-19 pandemic 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.
