(Bloomberg) -- Russia’s richest woman, Tatyana Bakalchuk, is embroiled in a public dispute with her husband over the future of the country’s biggest online retail platform.
In a Telegram post late Tuesday, Bakalchuk rejected allegations by her husband Vladislav that a merger deal announced last month with Russ Group, the nation’s biggest outdoor advertiser, was unfavorable for her e-commerce company, Wildberries.
“For what purpose Vladislav misleads other people, and by whom and to what end this story with raiding was fabricated is a big mystery to me,” she said. In her post Bakalchuk, who has seven children, confirmed the beginning of divorce proceedings with her husband.
Tension between the couple unexpectedly spilled into public view after the notorious head of Russia’s Chechnya region, Ramzan Kadyrov, posted a video statement on his Telegram channel on Tuesday.
With Vladislav Bakalchuk sitting beside him, Kadyrov alleged “serious problems both within the family and with the family-founded business” in the video that received more than half a million views. Bakalchuk said that his wife was “doing business with a strange company under the guise of a merger that takes the business away and withdraws assets.”
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Tatyana Bakalchuk is worth $8.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. She holds a 99% stake in Wildberries, according to Spark-Interfax financial database, and her husband controls the remaining 1%.
The sudden public back-and-forth comes after Wildberries last month launched its venture with Russ Group to build a digital market to help small and medium-sized businesses promote and export their products. The companies also plan to create a payment platform.
The effort was approved by President Vladimir Putin, who chose Maxim Oreshkin, deputy head of the Kremlin’s administration, to supervise it, Bloomberg earlier reported.
Kadyrov is one of Putin’s most loyal allies. Last year, the local Russian subsidiary of French yogurt maker Danone SA was transferred under a management team linked to a relative of the Chechen leader.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Wednesday that the state “can in no way get involved in any family relationships, especially business relationships,” according to the Interfax news agency.
Wildberries said in an emailed statement that the company and Russ Group “continue to work in a normal way” and urged the public not to focus on “details of the divorce process.”
Bakalchuk started Wildberries while on maternity leave from her job as a teacher in 2004, as an online retailer for people on a limited budget with little time for shopping. She ordered clothes in bulk from a German mail-order catalog, scanned the pictures, and posted them on her website.
She has since transformed the firm from a small upstart in which she delivered products herself into a behemoth that sold 2.5 trillion rubles ($28 billion) worth of products last year.
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