Oleg Deripaska. Photo: Sergei Ilnitsky / EPA-EFE

Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska has evaded indictment as part of a criminal case relating to minors being forced into prostitution, although his name appeared multiple times in the casework, a joint investigation by independent media outlets IStories and Verstka revealed on Thursday.

The joint investigation relied on access to 25 files from the case, consisting of over 30 different crimes, which was opened against multiple defendants in the Leningrad region of northwestern Russia in 2019.

According to the investigation, a network which forced minors into prostitution operated from 2018 at the latest up until 2019, with young women being tricked into thinking they were participants in regional beauty contests via modelling agencies, dating sites and online forums.

The network prioritised the trafficking of 15- and 16-year-olds, looking for virgins. According to the investigation, some young women were forced to simulate the loss of virginity with syringes of red dye and by taking pills to cause burning and vaginal pain. The network also forged ID papers to change the women’s ages depending on their clients’ wishes.

Although the network’s clients were well-known, wealthy people, none was prosecuted, according to the investigation. The defendants were named as network members Svetlana Titova, Alexandra Shantyreva, Olga Goncharova, Maxim Nekozyrev and Anastasia Yakusheva.

Two women who testified in the case said that one of the men with whom they had been forced to have sex was Deripaska. One was 15 at that time, the other 17. They said they met the billionaire both at his estate in the southern Russian Krasnodar region and in Moscow. After the meetings, the young women were often given expensive gifts as well as money.

Nekozyrev was sentenced to six years in prison in 2022. He was subsequently released from prison to join the Wagner mercenary group to fight in Ukraine, and returned home a free man in the summer of 2023.

Yakusheva, who looked for rich men to pay for sex with the minors, was also sentenced to six years in prison earlier this year. Goncharova was sentenced to five years and six months in prison. Titova, who now lives in Austria, was sentenced in absentia to seven years behind bars, while Shantyreva is on the wanted list.