Leonid Rafailov

We did not reduce volumes during the crisis, and I did not cut a single position from the staffing roster.

A biography that ends where it begins #

There is an unusual fact about Leonid Solomonovich Rafailov: the CEO of one of Russia’s largest alcohol distributors — a ₽25-billion business with 5,000 SKUs and 15,000 restaurant accounts — has no documented biography before 1992. No education records, no early career, no origin story in any public source. For a man who has run a company that pours champagne for the Kremlin, negotiated with Bacardi and Moët Hennessy, and served on the Board of Directors of the Russian Jewish Congress, this absence is remarkable. It appears deliberate.

The converging evidence points toward the Mountain Jewish community of Quba, in northern Azerbaijan. His surname — Rafailov — appears on STMEGI’s authoritative list of Mountain Jewish family names. His patronymic “Solomonovich” is a standard Jewish patronymic. His colleague and co-founder Simandu Simanduyev bears a name directly derived from the Juhuri word for “good omen”; the Simanduyev family traces to Rabbi Simandu ben Aharu Simanduyev, who served as Chief Rabbi of Baku and the Caucasus. The company’s Commercial Director and Deputy Director both carry the surname Mardakhaev — another confirmed Mountain Jewish name from the same region. The circumstantial case for a Mountain Jewish founding network is strong; the documentary record is silent.

What is certain is that Rafailov arrived at AST’s founding in 1992 — the same year Telman Ismailov formalized the company as an alcohol distribution arm of his Cherkizovsky empire — and that he ran it operationally from the first day. In a business culture where ownership and management rarely separated for thirty years, this arrangement made him the most powerful person in the company who wasn’t on the ownership registry.

Building within an empire #

For its first fifteen years, AST International was one successful business inside a very large empire. Rafailov built its distribution capabilities systematically. The Dovgan vodka contract in 1996 established national reach. The Dugladze Winery partnership in 2002 — an own-brand production arrangement with the former 1st Tbilisi Wine Factory in Kakheti — showed forward thinking about provenance at a moment when imported wine was still a premium novelty for most Russian consumers.

The position Rafailov occupied inside Ismailov’s empire was structurally unusual. He held operational authority over the business while appearing on no ownership registry. Every decision about which principals to court, which channels to develop, which markets to build — all of these were his. The profits and the equity were Ismailov’s. This arrangement was common enough in the Moscow business culture of the 1990s and 2000s, where professional managers built businesses within holding structures and waited for the moment when ownership could be acquired. What made Rafailov’s version unusual was the length of the wait, and the conditions under which it played out.

The Bacardi and Moët Hennessy contracts in 2004 changed the character of the business entirely. These were not commodity distribution deals; they required demonstrating operational excellence to global brand owners who had alternatives in the Russian market. Both principals made active choices about who to trust with their brands. That Rafailov secured both in the same year — and kept them for nearly two decades through one of the most politically turbulent periods in Russian business history — speaks to what he had built in terms of personal credibility and operational reliability.

The 2006 Georgian wine embargo was the first test of whether AST’s strategic bets would hold under political pressure. It failed in the immediate term — the Dugladze portfolio became unsaleable overnight. But Rafailov maintained the Kakheti relationship throughout the seven-year ban, a decision that required ongoing investment in a partnership with no near-term commercial return. That choice, which would have been easy to abandon and difficult to justify to Ismailov’s sons, would matter significantly in 2013.

The year everything changed #

On the last day of June 2009, the world Rafailov had operated in for seventeen years collapsed. Putin’s order closed Cherkizovsky Market on June 29. Ismailov was on a plane to Turkey. A relative — Zhanuko Simonovich Rafailov, who had run AST-Cargo and other group companies — was among those arrested in the aftermath of the market’s closure, charged under articles including the use of slave labor, with a maximum sentence of twenty-seven years.

The political risk to Leonid Rafailov was real. He ran a company owned by a fugitive, connected by surname to someone now facing serious criminal charges, in a political environment where the government had just demonstrated its willingness to destroy a business empire that employed 100,000 people. The rational decision for a manager with options was to find another situation.

He stayed.

In October 2009, Forbes Russia published a profile of AST under the headline “How AST Lives Without Cherkizovsky Market.” Rafailov told journalist Maria Abakumova: “We did not reduce volumes during the crisis, and I did not cut a single position from the staffing roster.” When she pressed him on Ismailov’s whereabouts and the market’s closure, he flatly refused to discuss it: “I do not experience any pressure and I do not feel any hostile actions.” The interview reveals a man exercising perfect public discipline in circumstances that most managers would have described as catastrophic.

What the article does not show — and what no public source has captured — is what Rafailov actually thought during those months. His public persona is consistent and impenetrable: focus on operations, refuse to discuss the crisis, present stability to principals and suppliers. Whether this represented genuine equanimity or extraordinary professional self-control, the effect was the same. Bacardi, Diageo, and Moët Hennessy watched how he handled the situation. They maintained their contracts.

The practical stakes of this choice went beyond personal risk. The business had 400 employees. It had long-term distribution agreements with global companies that monitored the legal and reputational situation carefully. It had government procurement relationships with clients who were simultaneously pursuing the man who owned it. Rafailov managed all of these simultaneously without any of them breaking. That he did so while occupying a public position — serving on the Board of Directors of the Russian Jewish Congress, speaking at industry conferences — suggests the stoicism was genuine rather than performed.

The eight years that followed 2009 were a form of extended patience test. The Ismailov sons nominally held the shares. Creditor proceedings moved slowly. Each year that AST continued operating successfully, that the Western principals maintained their relationships, that government contracts kept flowing — each year made the management buyout both more feasible and more valuable. Rafailov was building the condition of his own ownership, though no agreement guaranteed it.

The long patience #

What followed was eight years of operating a business owned by a fugitive whose family was simultaneously trying to protect assets from creditor proceedings that eventually totaled more than ₽160 billion. In 2013, Ismailov transferred his 40% stake to his sons — a legal restructuring that further insulated AST from his personal bankruptcy, which was formally declared in December 2015. Rafailov managed through all of it, maintaining the Western principal relationships that were the business’s real value.

The Georgian wine gamble paid off in the same year of the ownership transfer. On June 15, 2013, the first post-embargo shipment — 30,000 bottles from Dugladze — crossed the Russian border. AST was first. Rafailov had spent eleven years maintaining a partnership through a seven-year ban, spending money on a relationship with no commercial return for most of that period. When the embargo lifted, AST had the infrastructure and the trust to move immediately.

The management buyout completed on June 30, 2017. Rafailov and Simanduyev acquired the Ismailov family’s combined 80% stake. The purchase price was never disclosed. Neither party gave interviews. What is visible is the consequence: AST became, according to EGRUL records, the only major Ismailov asset that passed to management rather than creditors. Every other significant holding — the Praga restaurant, Voentorg business center, the Las Vegas shopping center, the Mardan Palace hotel, properties in France and Montenegro — was seized, auctioned, or frozen. AST passed cleanly to the man who had run it.

The market validated the transition with unusual speed. In October 2017, four months after the ownership change, Brown-Forman signed an exclusive long-term distribution contract for Jack Daniel’s, Woodford Reserve, and Finlandia. The spokesperson told Vedomosti the company expected AST to deploy “its extensive distribution network and business reputation.” The phrase suggests Brown-Forman had been watching the ownership situation and waiting for it to resolve.

After the second test #

The February 2022 sanctions triggered what Rafailov had already, in some sense, prepared for. Parallel import infrastructure was being built at OOO BIG — part of the AST group — before it was legally formalized. When Diageo, Brown-Forman, and Moët Hennessy announced their exits, AST was not caught unprepared. Revenue grew 142% over the following two years, reaching ₽25.2 billion in 2024.

The cost is visible in the margins. Net profit fell from ₽2.7 billion in 2023 to ₽1.95 billion in 2024. Parallel imports carry higher procurement costs, more complex logistics, and no brand-owner marketing support. The financial structure of the business Rafailov now owns is different from the one he spent thirty years building.

His response is the Russian wine pivot. Speaking at WineRetail Week in July 2025, he announced that domestic Russian wine had grown from under 5% to over 15% of AST’s portfolio in a single year, with projections above 20% by end-2025. He predicted double-digit category growth. After decades of building premium imported brand relationships, the distributor is now betting on the domestic terroir that the sanctions environment has made economically necessary.

The parallel import model gave Rafailov the revenue bridge. What it did not give him was the margin profile of a business with strong brand-owner relationships. Those relationships — the ones that Bacardi and Moët Hennessy and Brown-Forman offer to distributors they trust — depend on mutual commitment that parallel importing, by its nature, cannot replicate.

The Russian wine pivot may be the answer. A distributor that builds genuine relationships with Russian winemakers — in Krasnodar, in Crimea, in Kakheti via the Georgian partnership he has maintained for more than twenty years — is building the same kind of people-dependent value that saved AST in 2009. The brands are different. The structural logic is the same.

Whether Rafailov can replicate across a fragmented domestic wine market the relationship depth he built with global principals over two decades is the question his next chapter will answer. What the previous three decades established is that he has operated without the safety net of predictable ownership, navigated political risk that would have destroyed most managers, and built businesses worth owning precisely because he built them with long time horizons. That record does not guarantee the fourth act. It does, however, suggest who to watch.

Last updated: April 30, 2026