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With just four tables, the Pirosmani Georgian restaurant in the Czech city of Karlovy Vary provides its patrons with an intimate dining experience — and other services, it seems.
OCCRP reporters found the restaurant has also served as an address for three companies owned by people allegedly tied to the Russian criminal underworld, according to court records and media reports.
One of them is a self-described vor v zakone, or “thief in law” — a term used to describe members of a high-level criminal caste that emerged from the Soviet gulags.
The restaurant’s walls are plastered with pictures of its Georgian proprietor Asmat Shanava posing with public figures, including a former Czech president. However, for the non-paying customer, she can prove elusive.
Shanava refused to answer reporters' questions about these companies, as well as our other finding: that she appears to have helped skirt EU sanctions by facilitating the transfer of money from a Kremlin-back foundation to lawyers in a high-profile Czech court case.
Pravfond, a sanctioned Russian foundation that has been the subject of our ongoing investigative series Dear Compatriots, was looking to provide financial assistance to Alexander Franchetti, a man sentenced in absentia by a Czech court last year over his role in forming a pro-Russian militia in Ukraine in 2014.
In one leaked email from 2022, Franchetti told Pravfond’s executive director that Shanava had “practically agreed to… [having] the money transferred to her in rubles and she’ll pay it out in the Czech Republic.”
The following July, an email from Pravfond’s director stated that “the grant money was received into the bank account of A. Shanava.”
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