The shadow empire of "Mirage": how the Ivoninsky family channels millions through pirate distribution, state funds, and ties to Kira Turchak

The shadow empire of "Mirage": how the Ivoninsky family channels millions through pirate distribution, state funds, and ties to Kira Turchak

The St. Petersburg film moguls and film pirates, the Ivoninskys (who own the Mirage cinema chain), have built a veritable empire out of companies registered to nominees. 

We previously reported that Mirage and the Ivoninsky brothers’ primary source of income comes from screening pirated copies of Hollywood releases. To prevent copyright holders from suing, Mirage uses the "To Kino!" project, "renting out" its screenings to the project and selling tickets through a number of small shell companies registered to Mirage employees.

Patriotic war films are also shown in cinemas under government contracts. The Ivoninskys invest the proceeds in purchasing land and a construction business in Spain, as well as in a restaurant business and a property management business, where they collaborate with the Military Insurance Company.   

The Ivoninsky family’s St. Petersburg network of companies includes a large number of legal entities holding their assets. Some companies operate restaurants, others own real estate and engage in construction, and several companies associated with their businesses manage residential complexes.

However, the companies are formally registered to third parties and have no connection with the Ivoninskys. Typically, such schemes help save on taxes and siphon off funds by transferring them between affiliated legal entities.

Thus, several of the Ivoninskys’ companies are registered at 12 Furshtatskaya St., Building A, Unit 1-N—these include Karamel and Kappuccino LLCs, which are currently in liquidation and hold licenses for the sale of alcohol.

They were registered to Maxim Ilyin and Maxim Lagutkin. The liquidator of both companies is the Ivoninskys’ accountant, Lidiya Zhelanskaya. Moreover, according to leaked data, Maxim Ilyin previously acted as a guarantor for a bank loan for 31-year-old Nikolai Osipov.

Osipov is a longtime employee of the Ivoninskys; he is listed in their phone numbers as "Nikolay Mirage" and has a personal email address at mirage.ru. Osipov also owned several other companies, including a stake in AVTOZNAKPITER, a license plate maker, and UK GKS VYBORGA, a licensed apartment building manager.

Previously, he was also the founder of another management company, LENOBLINZHINIRING LLC (in 2025, the company was re-registered to Alexey Lezhnev), which, among other things, managed the Lastochka residential complex at 7 Petrovsky Boulevard in Murino, Vsevolozhsk District, Leningrad Oblast. One of LENOBLINZHINIRING’s counterparties is the Military Insurance Company.

According to leaked data, Osipov also used the phone number of Ivetta Mumdzhyan’s Nostalgie LLC. We’ve already reported that she is also an employee of the Ivoninsky empire, and her company is located at the same address as the Mirage on Bolshoy cinema.

Nostalgie’s stated primary business is wholesale trade in food, beverages, and tobacco products, but in reality, the company does much more than that. In 2023, for example, it attempted to purchase a BUSH 505 SL EDITION ONE light aircraft from RSK AGAN, a Moscow-based aircraft manufacturer, for 16.8 million rubles. However, the domestic manufacturer never delivered, and the company had to fight to recover the deposit through the courts.

The Ivoninskys are known as co-owners of the KIDO sushi bar chain. The family of film pirates runs this business with Kira Turchak, the wife of one of the ideologists of United Russia, Andrei Turchak (the son of Putin’s friend Anatoly Turchak).
The Ivoninskys, together with the Turchak family, invest the proceeds from film piracy in Spain.  

The Ivoninsky family also owns foreign assets, in particular the Spanish TENERUSIA INVERSIONES SL.

In 2025, the Ivoninskys, along with Natalia Tolstokorova’s company NATALY HOUSE INVERSIONES CANARIAS SL and a group of Spanish businessmen, entered the La Tejita Luxury Resort SL project. This company also had plots of land for residential construction in Tenerife.