Photo: «Fontanka»
In St. Petersburg, businessman Ilya Traber, who is considered close to Vladimir Putin, has been detained as part of a contract killing case. This was reported by «Fontanka».
Details. According to the publication, FSB officers today searched Traber’s country house, his office at Starorusskaya, 12, and several enterprises. Traber’s business partner Vladimir Danilenko was detained along with him. VChK-OGPU writes that searches are also being carried out at the premises of businessman and alleged leader of the Tambov organized crime group Gennady Petrov.
As «Fontanka» writes, the grounds for detaining Traber and Danilenko were the contract killing of businessman and deputy Alexander Petrov in October 2020. He was shot dead at a cottage in the Leningrad region at that time. No suspects in the case were identified then.
According to «Fontanka», the criminal case was opened by the central office of the Investigative Committee. Traber will be sent to Moscow for questioning.
Who he is. Ilya Traber began his business career trading antiques in St. Petersburg: in the early 1990s, he opened his first shop on Nevsky Prospekt, which later grew into a chain selling antique items. Then, in the 1990s, the St. Petersburg port entered the sphere of interest of companies linked to Traber, amid a fierce struggle between business groups and criminal authorities.
It was during that period that Traber met then deputy mayor Vladimir Putin, something Putin himself acknowledged in 2011 through his press secretary Dmitry Peskov. At that time, Peskov told «Novaya Gazeta» that Traber and his partner Dmitry Skigin “at one time worked in St. Petersburg on a project to build an oil terminal, in connection with which they repeatedly officially appealed to the leadership of the St. Petersburg mayor’s office.” This refers to the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal, PNT, which was partially nationalized in 2024-2025 following a lawsuit by the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Traber’s interests were not limited to one port: his business interests extended to nearly all marine transshipment complexes in the Baltic, as well as Murmansk. He also had interests in the trade of petroleum products in northwestern Russia.
Now, according to Rusprofile, he owns 31.7% of Primorsky UPK, the management company of a major port on the Gulf of Finland, as well as stakes in several companies operating in the port business and real estate management.