Wildberries CEO Tatyana Kim said the company had launched its first support measures for sellers whose goods were destroyed in strikes on the company’s warehouses in Elektrostal and Kotovsk. According to her, the marketplace is introducing discounts on warehouse storage for the next 45 days from the date of delivery, as well as a 100 percent discount on transit shipments to regional warehouses.
WB Bank also said affected sellers would be offered soft loans and payment deferrals of up to six months. A day earlier, Kim had reiterated that the company was not obliged to compensate for lost goods if they were damaged or destroyed by drone, missile, or other ammunition attacks. At the same time, she said the company would work separately on the possible scale of payouts and other financial support measures.
“Work on a support mechanism for sellers is continuing. This is a more complex process, since the consequences must be assessed in order to determine the scale of payouts. According to expert estimates, this will take up to 30 days,” she wrote.
The project Post- reported that on July 19 Wildberries began removing records of goods remaining at the burned warehouses from its database. Sellers said they were trying to preserve reports on remaining stock, but the data was disappearing from their personal accounts. Journalists noted that these reports are needed for a possible court challenge to the offer terms stating that the company bears no responsibility for goods destroyed by drones. Wildberries itself denied deleting information on remaining stock.
According to Vedomosti, the total damage from the Ukrainian attack on the Wildberries warehouses in Elektrostal and Kotovsk may exceed 50 billion rubles. The company has not commented on that estimate.
Filipp Yefanov, the head of Elektrostal, said the main seat of the fire had been localized on July 19, although the blaze continued; Radio Svoboda said this was visible in a satellite image. After the strikes on Elektrostal and Noginsk, 61 people were reported injured, one of whom later died. The fire at the warehouse in Kotovsk was extinguished the previous day; according to the latest data, seven people were killed there and another 25 were injured.