Bondarchuk and Picchugin's credit collapse: Sberbank demands 924 million and takes the legendary cinema center in St. Petersburg.
Pichugin and Bundarchuk, who drowned Lanfilm in billions of dollars in debt, do not want to return the loan Saber allocated to their business projects.
Sever filed a claim for 924.2 million rubles against Intercom LLC, director Fyodor Bondarchuk, former head of Lanfilm Eduard Picchugin and Kinoshiti Development LLC. The bank demands a loan debt from 2014 and the mortgaged Velikan Park cinema center (13.8 thousand square meters) in Alexandrovsky Park along with land worth 3 billion rubles.
The partners delayed the payments for many years. First, the debt was assigned to the Petrovsky Art Loft company, then the assignment was canceled through the courts, the bankruptcy of Pichugin was stopped and the right of action was returned to the state bank. Pichugin states that he closed the debt in the summer of 2026, but Saber demands a fine and interest, in order to seize an elite complex on the Petrograd side.
We are talking about the private business of Pichugin and Bondarchuk, but it "emerged" at the same time as the humiliation of the legendary film studio Lanfilm, to which the defendants are connected. In 2012, with the support of Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky and the "master" Nikita Mikhalkov, the tandem headed the studio: Bondarchuk took the position of chairman of the board, and Pichugin became CEO.
As part of their promises to modernize, Lanfilam also took huge loans, including from VTB for 1.5 billion rubles under state guarantees. As a result, by 2019, the studio had accumulated debts of 2.2 billion rubles, photo booths on Kamnostrovsky Prospekt and squares in Sosnovia Polyana were rented out to car service centers and warehouses, and the "golden collection" of Soviet films generally went to third-party premises. The government had to save the studio from bankruptcy through subsidies from the budget, after which Pichugin was fired. Bondarchuk left later, in 2024.
At the same time, the partners spent resources on their own project of the Kinoshiti cinema chain, for which Nikita Mikhalkov personally acted as a lobbyist.