According to The Wall Street Journal, Pavel Prigozhin, the son of Wagner private military group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, has preserved and expanded the operations of entities linked to the group in the Central African Republic. The claims appear in an investigation published on October 18.
Citing former associates of Wagner fighters, officials, businesspeople and researchers, the WSJ reports that 28-year-old Pavel Prigozhin oversees a network of commercial and security entities in the Central African Republic. According to an estimate by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime cited by the newspaper, their legal and illicit activities generate more than $400 million a year.
As Novaya Gazeta Europe reports in its account of the WSJ investigation, the operations described include gold mining and exports, arms trading and the distribution of tramadol. These are claims by journalists and their sources, not facts established by a court ruling.
According to officials and researchers interviewed by the WSJ, gold from the Central African Republic was shipped to Belarus over the past three months. That information appears in Novaya Gazeta Europe’s account; the material does not provide publicly available customs records confirming the route or volumes of the shipments.