An investigation by SHADOW team
In this article you will learn
- Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is one of Russia’s allies in Europe. He claims that the EU is helping Ukraine at the expense of European interests and that Hungary will not quit Russian oil and gas. suspect that the Russian authorities have given Orban’s inner circle the opportunity to earn hundreds of millions of dollars from energy commodities trading.
- At the center of attention is the mysterious trader of Russian oil, Normeston Trading, which in 2009 got half of a gas trader created by Hungary’s largest oil and gas company, MOL, and then transferred its stake to Orban’s friends and their partners.
- Normeston Trading itself, on the Hungarian side, is co-owned by people affiliated with Orban’s friends. For years, the press and experts have tried to understand how Normeston could be connected to Russia’s top political circles.
- IStories found out that the former Russian owner of Normeston — race car driver Lev Tolkachev — was also a business partner of Gennady Timchenko’s top-managers. Vladimir Putin’s close friend Timtchenko was the biggest Russian oil trader before 2014 sanctions. One of his former managers, Aleksandr Zhuravlev, still sits on the boards of some companies in the Normeston group together with the race car driver.
- In 2017 and 2018, Cyprus-based Normeston Trading was “under common control” with the Russian company of the race car driver, which was half-owned by another Timchenko top manager — Sergey Gzhelyak. In Cyprus, “common control” means that the companies are owned or their finances are controlled by the same parties.
- After the race car driver, the Russian businessman Valery Subbotin became a co-owner of Normeston. Subbotin is a former vice president of Lukoil, who fled Russia in 2016 and settled in Europe, but established business ties with Putin’s friends and the entourage of former pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
“The mother is a woman”
“The father is a man, the mother is a woman, the fuel price is 480 forints,” — a post on the Facebook page of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in May 2022. This was a way he reported on his “victory” at the EU summit in Brussels, where sanctions against Russia were discussed. At that time, the embargo on Russian oil supplies to EU countries was introduced with an exception — it did not apply to pipeline deliveries. At the end of 2023, this exception was extended, and Orban says, that he will continue to prevent a complete ban on Russian oil and gas supplies to the EU. On June 23 of this year, it became known that Hungary and Slovakia blocked another EU sanctions package, which would have meant a rejection of Russian energy resources.
Orban, in his speeches, sometimes echoes Russian propaganda. In 2024 he declared, that Europe acts at the behest of the United States and, to its own detriment, supports the war in Ukraine, while Hungary stands apart, guarding its national interests and cannot quit cooperation with Russia, especially when it comes to oil. Russian oil still flows to Hungary and neighboring Slovakia (to the Czech Republic until 2025) via the southern section of the Druzhba pipeline, crossing Ukraine.
One of the major suppliers of Russian oil to Eastern Europe — Normeston Trading, is a mysterious trader with an opaque ownership structure.
It is a paradox, but after the sanctions for the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Normeston Trading’s deliveries via Druzhba through Ukrainian territory jumped more than fivefold. And after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — tenfold. During the lull between these events, deliveries dropped to insignificant volumes.
In 2014, 5.7 million tons of Russian oil were sold to Eastern Europe via Normeston Trading (all further figures are IStories’ calculations based on Import Genius data) — more than a third of the total volume pumped through the southern section of Druzhba at that time. In 2023, about 2 million tons passed through Normeston, including more than 1 million to Hungary, almost a quarter of Druzhba’s deliveries to that country. In total, since 2011, more than 20 million tons of Russian oil worth over $10 billion have been sold to Europe via Normeston Trading.
The intermediary has attracted a lot of attention of Hungarian media and anti-corruption activists. They called Normeston a participant in one of the most “critical episodes in the country’s economic history,” which allowed Orban’s friends to get hundreds of millions of dollars.
IStories found out that the business ties of Russian owners and top managers of Normeston lead to Vladimir Putin’s friends.
How it’s done in Russia. The racer
The roar of engines at the start. The car accelerates to 50 kilometers per hour in less than two seconds, tries to overtake a competitor sharply turning left, and crashes into a green Audi lingering at the starting line. This was the shortest race in Lev Tolkachev’s career in 2020 at the Smolensk Ring track. Tolkachev, with number 47, was involved in another incident two years later at the Nizhny Novgorod Ring — entering a turn, he rammed the side of a car overtaking him. Both times, there were no injuries.
It was Tolkachev who was officially named as the owner of Normeston Trading in 2014.
The company was registered in Belize in 2006 and did not disclose its owners. Only in 2014, when Normeston was buying Lukoil’s gas station network in Slovakia, did the local antimonopoly service name the official owners of the oil trader: Lev Tolkachev — from Russia, and Imre Fazakas — from Hungary.
“In Russia under no circumstances could a race car driver, even if he’s a former oil company employee, be the real owner of an oil trading business with contracts worth billions of dollars. It is simply unrealistic if he doesn’t have people with big connections behind him,” a former high-ranking Russian official told IStories. “People involved in Russian oil trading are like exclusive private club members; outsiders simply can’t get in,” says another source — an entrepreneur who was a member of Russian Forbes billionaires list.
The backstory of Normeston Trading confirms it might be true. The racer and Gennady Timchenko’s managers
The business connections of the racer (see diagram), as well as the money flows of Normeston Trading, led to the top managers of Russian billionaire Gennady Timchenko — the longtime friend of Putin. Timchenko owned the famous oil trader Gunvor, which handled up to a third of Russian oil exports. He came under US sanctions in 2014, sold his stake in Gunvor, and since then has not been directly involved in Russian oil trading.
Former Lukoil vice president and Putin’s friends
A new, bright villa with a pool and a park on the French Riviera is surrounded by a fence, topped with three rows of barbed wire, and lined with surveillance cameras along the perimeter. A person involved in the villa’s maintenance was impressed by the security measures and the large number of guards; he assumed the villa belonged to Rosneft chief Igor Sechin. But according to documents at IStories’ disposal, it belonged to the family of another Russian oilman — former Lukoil vice president and ex-chairman of the board of Lukoil’s oil trader Litasco, Valery Subbotin.
In 2016, while the villa was still under construction, Subbotin left Russia. “In fact, he was being rescued,” Russian Forbes. The state-controlled Rosneft at that time took control of Bashneft. Contracts with Lukoil were immediately terminated — they “raised questions,” Forbes quoted Rosneft press secretary Mikhail Leontyev. In 2017, Lukoil announced Subbotin’s resignation from the central office, and until January 2020, he headed the board of directors of Litasco.
The presence of former Lukoil top manager Subbotin in Normeston seems logical. Previously, more than 40% of oil deliveries via Druzhba were provided by Lukoil. When Ukraine imposed sanctions against Lukoil in 2024, its oil deliveries via Druzhba through Ukrainian territory were stopped for some time, causing great concern at the highest levels in Hungary and Slovakia. Lukoil has been replaced by the Hungarian oil and gas company MOL (it buys the same Russian oil at the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, and via Druzhba through Ukraine territory it is transported as the oil of MOL).
Normeston Trading has never faced any restrictions. According to ImportGenius, it did not buy oil directly from sanctioned Lukoil. And Valery Subbotin left Russia long ago and became a European. But, as IStories noted, Subbotin, who escaped from Sechin, managed to establish business ties with other friends and acquaintances of Putin, people associated with their business interests, as well as with the entourage of former pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia after mass protests in Kyiv in 2014.