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He lost $1 billion. Now he sells James Bond's favorite bubbly

Evgeny Chichvarkin has been many things over the past two decades: a billionaire mobile phone retailer, a jetsetter who plays polo with princes, a wanted man in his native Russia, a political exile. 

Edward Robinson (Agence France-Presse)
Mon, June 10, 2019

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He lost $1 billion. Now he sells James Bond's favorite bubbly After losing $1 billion Russian exile Evgeny Chichvarkin rebounds with pricey wine (Bloomberg/-)

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vgeny Chichvarkin has been many things over the past two decades: a billionaire mobile phone retailer, a jetsetter who plays polo with princes, a wanted man in his native Russia, a political exile. These days he’s a shopkeeper—though at the kind of venture you’d expect from a man with his resume: a store with more than $20 million worth of wine and spirits and customers that include A-list celebs such as David Beckham and Mark Wahlberg.

Chichvarkin, 44, owns Hedonism, an over-the-top emporium that has shaken London’s staid wine scene since it opened in 2012. The place has a giddy, funhouse atmosphere. A chandelier of Riedel wine glasses hangs over a cast-iron staircase. The walls of an alcove sprout dozens of hands, claws, and tentacles clutching bottles of Sine Qua Non, a California cult wine. A see-through panel in the floor reveals a gyrating mobile sculpture meant to look like tree roots.

The prices can be equally surreal: A 42,800 pound ($54,240) magnum of 1992 Screaming Eagle cabernet sauvignon from Napa Valley rubs shoulders with a 1945 Chateau Mouton Rothschild (17,800 pounds). A nearby cooler brims with James Bond’s favorite bubbly, Dom Perignon, in vintages from the Roger Moore era (a 1973 runs 3,580 pounds). Patron Extra Anejo Lalique tequila in a French crystal decanter clocks in at 9,100 pounds.

“It’s the only wine shop I know where you’d spend less at the Porsche dealership next door,” says Jim Griffen, a former co-owner of Uncorked, a rival wine shop in London.

Despite the raised eyebrows, Chichvarkin has demonstrated the store isn’t just a vanity project for a rich expat with a penchant for conspicuous consumption. Hedonism earned a profit of more than 2 million pounds in 2017 and Chichvarkin says he frequently receives offers to expand his franchise to Asia or the U.S.

The self-described “anarchist-capitalist” who plays polo with the likes of Prince William and Prince Harry has instead invested in fine dining. Last year, he and his business partner, British chef Ollie Dabbous, opened Hide, a 10-minute walk away, past the hedge funds and art galleries that line the streets of Mayfair. The three-story eatery, with a handcrafted spiral oak staircase, offers tasting menus from 115 to 610 pounds per person. Chichvarkin has invested 31 million pounds in Hide and Hedonism, according to financial filings, and it could take the restaurant five years to show a profit.

“There’s actually not much difference between selling mobile phones and selling wine – retail is retail,” Chichvarkin says with a shrug in his Russian-accented English. “But restaurants? Whew. The economics in central London are difficult.”

Chichvarkin is deepening his ties to his adopted country even as many other wealthy Russians are feeling less welcome. When he fled to the U.K. in 2008, he arrived in what became known as “Londongrad,” a playground where oligarchs indulged their appetites for soccer teams, Georgian mansions, and costly claret. Then in March 2018, British officials say, Russian intelligence agents traveled to England and poisoned a former spy and his daughter with a nerve toxin that killed a local woman and sickened two other Britons.

Amid national outrage, the U.K. government last year expelled 23 Russian diplomats and cracked down on “golden visas”—residency permits for wealthy emigres who invest in Britain. The authorities didn’t renew a visa for Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of the Chelsea Football Club and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The rejection of Abramovich, who promptly moved to Israel, appeared to signal an end to the go-go playboy years of Londongrad.

“It’s felt like we’ve all been tarred with the same brush, even those of us who made a conscious decision to leave the country long ago,” says Katya Zenkovich, a Russian émigré and partner at the London real estate firm Knight Frank. “But Evgeny has reinvented himself as an Anglophile, and he’s not afraid to be very public.”

Chichvarkin flaunts his public persona with pride, spending many hours a week in the shop. He twists the ends of his mustache into Daliesque points and typically sports outlandish clothes such as fire-engine red trousers, a faux-distressed white pullover with carefully curated holes, and curly yellow boots that might have been designed for one of Santa’s elves.

On a recent evening, a pair of twentysomethings ask him for a selfie. Chichvarkin complies, then pauses at a phonograph to drop the needle on The Doors’ “People Are Strange.” He cranks the volume. “That’s better,” he says.

His girlfriend and business partner, Tatiana Fokina, cuts a more restrained figure. A former waitress and art gallery worker from St. Petersburg, Fokina moved to London in 2009 and the next year became Chichvarkin’s first hire for Hedonism. Today she serves as chief executive officer of both the restaurant and the wine store, and she helped develop a key part of Hide’s business model: Its wine list offers bottles from the store with no markup beyond a corkage fee of 40 pounds.

Read also: Kremlin says Abramovich 'has right' to Israeli citizenship

Chichvarkin’s current ventures could hardly be more different from his first business, an electronics chain called Evroset. He built the company into Russia’s biggest mobile phone retailer, and by 2008 it was doing more than $3 billion in annual sales. Media reports estimated Chichvarkin, who owned half the company, was worth more than $1.5 billion.

In September 2008, as he and his business partner were planning an initial public offering, Russian prosecutors accused the company of evading duties on imported handsets. They later charged Chichvarkin in the kidnapping five years earlier of Evroset’s former logistics supervisor, allegations he denies. But as the legal troubles mounted, he and his business partner sold Evroset to another Russian billionaire for $400 million.

While driving through Moscow with a friend a few days before Christmas that year, Chichvarkin was seized by a sudden fear that the police were about to pick him up. He hunkered down in the back seat and asked his friend to head straight to the airport, where he boarded the next flight to London with no luggage.

For years, the Russian government tried to extradite Chichvarkin, who has become an outspoken critic of Putin. As an exile, he could only watch from afar as a 2012 deal valued his former company at $2.6 billion.

Today Chichvarkin is worth more than $100 million—far less than he might have had, but plenty to recast himself as the gastronomic king of Mayfair. He yearns, though, for his homeland; he’s scared to return even though Putin’s government dropped charges against him in 2011.

“He still loves Russia, and our circle of friends and family here are all Russian,” Fokina says. “But he misses a country that doesn’t exist anymore.”

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