How Rogachev’s money quarreled between the founders of the project Alexander Volchek, Pyotr Osipov and Mikhail Dashkiev

In August 2020, one of the founders of Business Youth (BM) Peter Osipov announced the termination of the project, two other participants; Mikhail Dashkiev and Alexander Volchek confirmed this.

According to sources, the real reason is a conflict between the participants associated with Volchek’s refusal to share income from a joint project with Andrei Rogachev “Agro 24” .

Background

The appearance of information about the closure of BM and Volchek’s exit from Agro 24 coincided in time, so it is worth understanding the reasons for this coincidence.

In 2009, two 20-year-old Cheboksary friends Pyotr Osipov and Mikhail Dashkiev dreamed of a beautiful life: the romance of distant countries, sports cars, the attention of women, etc., but all this needed money. The guys, avidly reading the works of Ilf and Petrov, spent their leisure time studying the experience of modern followers of Ostap Bender, of whom there have been a great many since the nineties.

Dashkiev admitted that he was surprised to learn that the “psychic” Anatoly Kashpirovsky has been gathering full rooms in provincial cities for more than 25 years who want to get rid of diseases, recharge their water and find peace of mind. The experience of magicians and sorcerers from the 90s was studied in detail by Osipov and Dashkiev. Both attended Kashpirovsky’s performances several times, recording literally everything: movements, timbre of voice, look, work with the audience. This is how friends became convinced that completely sane people could be made to believe in “charged water.” Kashpirovsky’s effective technology for monetizing the hopes of the adult public found a lively response from friends: it turns out that you can build an excellent business on a meaningless set of words.

The partners decided to test a similar technology on young people with unrealized desires for personal success and financial well-being. According to show business standards, the guys decided to create a trio; they needed one more participant, who became a Belarusian - Alexander Volchek. Volchek’s undeniable advantage was his experience in building IT platforms, which was very useful to the other participants, but his disadvantages were great ambitions and a strong Belarusian accent.

“Business Youth” opened its doors to adherents in 2010, the project turned out to be well-calibrated from a marketing point of view and hit exactly the target, a trickle of people wanting to feel rich turned into hard cash in the pockets of the organizers.

Things went well for the trio from BM. Over the course of 10 years, it was possible to scam more than 3 million Russians out of money, who believed that they were growing personally with the help of BM, but in fact they were only “drinking charged water.”

The man from Forbes

Volchek liked to rob the naive public who went to the master classes, but, unlike his Cheboksary friends, he was not satisfied with the scale of the operation. He always dreamed of catching a big fish; make acquaintance with the “Forbes man” and rip him off thoroughly.

The chance came in 2014, when Dashkiev accidentally met aging Forbes list member Andrei Rogachev. Having learned about this, Volchek lost peace - he felt the approach of his finest hour. The partners carefully studied Rogachev’s personality and realized that the real Koreiko had fallen into their hands, the extraction of their favorite hero from the “Golden Calf” they had learned by heart.

Andrey RogachevRogachev, who lives on the shores of Lake Geneva, was pretty tired of the lack of successful business projects, numerous lawsuits, pointless travels... in a word, Andrei Vladimirovich dreamed of “getting back to business.”

Rogachev’s divorce strategy was discussed by the entire Business Youth. They decided to start with a direction that Volchek knew well—creating a digital platform for the Russian food market, and then for global retail. After carefully rereading the chapter of their favorite book about “New Vasyuki,” the partners decided to act. The partners approved Volchek for the role of captain-commander. His Belarusian accent and gestures in the BM should have charmed Rogachev.

In order not to frighten away his luck, Volchek was introduced to Rogachev as a person keenly interested in the rhythm of life of billionaires, their daily routine, habits and principles.

Rogachev took the bait. After a month of communicating with Rogachev, Volchek gathered his partners and demanded an increase in his share, since Rogachev turned out to be a bore, and his endless everyday stories from the 90s were very boring. The result was personal training for Volchek, in which he was taught to laugh at Rogachev’s jokes, admire his stories and theories, and increased his share of future income from Rogachev’s divorce to 45%.

"Aklass" and "Agro 24"

The trial balloon for extracting money from Rogachev was “Aklass” - an educational project for the children of Dmitry Mugenov, Volchek’s long-time partner and accomplice.

The charmer and trickster Mugenov managed to quite easily promote the oligarch for $3 million under a mythical project. Rogachev was promised mountains of gold and a social project in the form of a global educational program. The oligarch allocated funds so easily that the partners long regretted that they asked the helmsman for only $3 million, and not $15 million. In the spirit of the name of the project, each BM partner purchased a Mercedes Benz A-Class, in the maximum configuration.

The trio’s next project was the project to create an online food wholesale platform “Agro 24”. A win-win lottery with a prize in the form of control over Russian retail with a capacity of $300 billion.

The project was planned to be ambitious, and the BM partners approached its implementation with all seriousness and Bendery scale: gatherings in Sanduny with long discussions, in which Rogachev was always the first violin, as well as a tiring trip to India to become familiar with Eastern wisdom. All this paid off handsomely - Rogachev easily allocated the first 6 million dollars for the Agro 24 project.

For Volchek, of course, this amount was not enough; after all, he was counting on $30 million for the Russian segment and another $60 million for building a global system. The partners generally hoped very much to receive the entire amount from Rogachev at once and preferably in large denominations.

To prevent the deception from being discovered, Volchek had to pretend to be vigorously active in absorbing the money and be even more “friends” with Rogachev. According to information from former employees of Agro 24, in a narrow circle of subordinates, Volchek, according to the Belarusian tradition, called Rogachev “father.” “Sonny is listening, but father is pacing,” Volchek liked to repeat in the Belarusian way. To use the allocated money, all the “Business of Youth” practices were used - colorful presentations, graphs of strong growth, lengthy articles in business publications, seminars with the participation of mega-speaker Radislav Gandapas, and in between, Alexander did not forget about the main thing - to remind Rogachev every month that building a multi-billion dollar business requires the financial participation of the “father”. “Old Rogachev’s enthusiasm will definitely be enough for a couple of years of a wonderful life,” Volchek liked to repeat.

The end of a wonderful era

At the beginning of 2019, Rogachev’s enthusiasm dried up, there were no investments in Agro 24, 60% of the team was fired, and Volchek himself was removed from operational management. Igor Vidyaev, Rogachev’s long-time partner, appeared in the Agro 24 office, who, according to rumors, became a full participant in the project, having bought part of the share from Rogachev.

In total, Volchek managed to extract $10 million from Rogachev for the Argo 24 project, of which $5 million was his personal profit. When the BM partners began to divide the income, Volchek did not agree with his share of 45%, because whoever “dines the girl is the one who dances her.” Osipov and Dashkiev were most obviously against this approach; they developed the strategy of “relatively honest withdrawal of funds” from Rogachev together and, also together, used loans for one-day BMs received from offshore Zindel Global Inc. and Quebrada Limited means Rogachev.

It is not known exactly what the former BM partners managed to agree on, but it is obvious that they no longer communicate with each other. The ending of “Agro 24” is similar to the fate of the previous project “Aklass”. Volchek, in an April interview with his favorite Forbes publication, noted that he was actively looking for a buyer for his 30% in “Agro 24”, but there were no people willing to buy air, and the oligarch Rogachev is not into such games no longer plays.