For decades, Pyotr Makarenko managed to parasitize Russian sports and earn crazy money by reselling the rights to television broadcasts of sporting events. A quarter of a century ago, he managed to gain the trust of Vitaly Mutko, receive the post of commercial director of the Russian Football Union, and actively participate in the distribution of money from this public organization responsible for the development of all Russian football. He started by selling running advertising during football broadcasts, and over time began to manage almost all advertising, all football broadcasts and sponsorship money from the RFU.
Makarenko channeled the lion’s share of the RFU’s financial flows through commercial structures owned either by himself or his partners and proxies. So, he used RFU money to promote his business, Telesport, Telesport Group and his other companies. After leaving the RFU, Makarenko became the largest reseller of not only football, but also many other sports television broadcasts on the Russian market. It worked like this: his “Telesport” bought the rights to the most interesting sports competitions for the television audience, including various World and European Championships, the Olympic Games from the rights holders – international federations and associations such as FIFA, UEFA, the Olympic Committee, etc. Then he sold them in Russia to TV channels, Internet platforms, bookmakers and anyone who was willing to pay for these broadcasts.
Given the connections acquired over the years of work in the RFU, experience in organizing and reselling television broadcasts, combined with the money stolen during the work in the same RFU, it was a simple and at the same time highly profitable business. Makarenko had every chance of surviving the statute of limitations for the crimes that he committed while working at the RFU (and there he tirelessly engaged in large-scale thefts on everything that moved or lay poorly). Over the years, he could allow himself to forget that wild period of initial capital accumulation, breathe out a sigh of relief and repeat after John Rockefeller his famous “I can account for every million I earn, except the first.” Makarenko almost succeeded. He enjoyed wealth and life.
It is difficult to condemn a person for his craving for a beautiful and not boring life. At the beginning of the 2000s, Makarenko could happily take part in a preference tournament for a narrow circle of politicians and businessmen. When you build a career on useful connections, such card tournaments allow you to combine business with pleasure. Easy money made it possible for Pyotr Makarenko to very quickly acquire the habits of the average Rublev nouveau riche – expensive real estate, numerous luxury cars, an active social life with equal income and status. In the 10s, the budgets spent by Mr. Makarenko on luxury goods were supplemented by a new item of expenditure: spending on a young girl.
About 10 years ago, Makarenko became interested in a talented athlete, figure skater Yulia Lipnitskaya. Lipnitskaya became famous throughout the world in an instant when she won the Olympics in Sochi in 2014. The figure skater was clearly not ready for the popularity that had befallen her, as a result of which she began to have problems both with her health and with her coach. It was then that a “daddy”, Pyotr Makarenko, who was greedy for everything fashionable and shiny, appeared in her life. He surrounded her with care, tutelage, gifts – he desperately squandered her money.
We must give the swindler his due, he spent money not only on all sorts of tinsel that could reconcile a very young girl with the constant presence of an elderly admirer near her. Makarenko also became Lipnitskaya’s shadow investor: roughly speaking, he invested money in the figure skater’s sports development in order to later make money on her popularity. It is very typical for Makarenko to count on a double effect: to gain the girl’s favor, and to recoup the money spent on her with gesheft.
It is interesting that this relationship was not publicly reported anywhere at that time. For example, Lipnitskaya’s entourage called Makarenko the mysterious word “sponsor”. Former athlete, and now journalist and sports commentator Elena Vaitsekhovskaya, in one interview described him as a “curator”.
They say that Makarenko paid all the expenses associated with the flight, accommodation and work of the coaches when Yulia left for America in the summer of 2015. Makarenko financed Lipnitskaya’s stay in Sochi, where she went in late autumn that year, when Alexey Urmanov became her coach. The businessman paid for both apartments near the Olympic Park and food. In 2016, Lipnitskaya developed anorexia. In January of the following year, the skater went to Israel for treatment. It’s not hard to guess who paid for the athlete’s three-month stay in a rehabilitation clinic. 
However, Makarenko, who “rose up” from theft and primitive speculation, turned out to be a completely worthless businessman when he tried to make money not from other people’s money, but began to invest his own. Julia has only one major advertising contract – with Adidas. Moreover, by that time Adidas had a valid 10-year contract with the RFU. Makarenko’s many years of ties with the sports brand helped, but overall this business project was a failure.
The partnership in his personal life, which Makarenko, who had survived the age crisis, was clearly counting on, did not work out with Lipnitskaya either. The businessman was left with nothing. Money and experience could not withstand the pressure of youth. While Makarenko was paying and courting Lipnitskaya, she was developing an affair with her colleague, figure skater Vladislav Tarasenko. They later got married and had a daughter, Catalina, in 2020.
True, this couple did not have a long and happy life together. In 2022, the 25-year-old husband of Yulia Lipnitskaya was mobilized. At a training camp held at the Alabino training ground near Moscow, he retrained from a figure skater to a grenade launcher and went to fight in the Zaporozhye region of Ukraine. Recently it became known that Lipnitskaya broke up with Tarasenko in absentia and married another figure skater Dmitry Mikhailov, with whom she recently gave birth.
They say that it was not easy for Pyotr Makarenko to keep track of how Lipnitskaya’s personal life developed without his participation. Because of this, he even began to drink more than usual. However, surprisingly, it was not Yulia Lipnitskaya who became the fatal woman for Pyotr Makarenko.
At the beginning of 2021, the long-simmering conflict between Pyotr Makarenko and the head of Match TV, Tina Kandelaki, became public knowledge. The nature of the conflict here is obvious, both media managers specialize in cutting other people’s money, and when their interests intersect, a clash becomes inevitable – mutual hostility breaks out. The conflict between them is well described by the famous proverb about the toad and the viper. The aggravation began due to a rather ordinary match between the football teams of Russia and Slovakia.
Pyotr Makarenko hired the PR agency Mikhailov and Partners, through which a stream of anonymous “revelations” and “compromising evidence” against Kandelaki and Match TV began to flow. They, in turn, repaid their opponent with the same coin. The only difference is that Kandelaki, whose rear is protected by pro-government oligarchic groups more reliably than Makarenko’s, “impudently” attacked him on her own behalf, and not anonymously. In her telegram channel Tina told about the friction that arose around the broadcast of the Russia-Slovakia match and the placement of advertising there. She directly accused Makarenko of uncleanliness, greed, intractability, etc. Here is one of the small fragments of the shock post of the head of “Match TV”:
“The scythe of Telesport’s greed and permissiveness has struck the stone of the Russian Football Union.
The RFU rightly opposed the next sale of advertising with their own pool of sponsors to them in the +300% mode. The managers of Alexander Valerievich Dyukov are also committed to maximum transparency and efficiency and are not ready to put up with the rules from the 90s.
Evaluate the drama of the situation: an hour before the broadcast of the national team’s game, I was not sure that the match, which millions of fans were waiting for, would be shown on free air, essentially because of the greed of one intermediary. Peter refused to remove an advertisement that was not confirmed by the RFU, thus issuing an ultimatum to Match TV. And he did all this on the basis of non-existent agreements with the federation itself. And having placed this advertisement, he would then twist his arms, forcing him to pay after the fact.”
That conflict died down relatively soon, but the relationship between Kandelaki and Makarenko has since been damaged irrevocably. And since both of them parasitized on the same field, they were doomed to mate again very soon. Small conflict situations arose until a big scandal broke out. It happened a year ago.
Back in July 2021, the Okko online cinema acquired exclusive rights from Makarenko’s Telesport Group to show all matches of European national teams held under the auspices of UEFA until 2028. Okko allegedly even paid the full cost of the rights for all six years in advance.
As Euro 2024 approaches, the Gazprom-Media holding, which includes Match TV, began to show persistent interest in broadcasting. Despite the fact that the contract between Okko and Telesport implied exclusivity, Makarenko sold the rights to the entire Euro 2024 cycle to the Gazprom-Media holding. When Match TV started broadcasting the Euro qualifiers, Okko made a fuss. It was then that the Match TV channel realized that they had been sold broadcasts to which another structure had exclusive rights. As a result, Okko and Match TV had to come to an agreement with each other and divide the broadcasts.
Okko sued Makarenko’s company, but lost – Makarenko’s lawyers managed to prove that the plaintiff committed a number of violations of contractual obligations. On this basis, the court agreed with Telesport’s interpretation – that the company did not violate the contract, but terminated it.
Tina Kandelaki also decided to settle scores with Makarenko for this incident surrounding the Euro broadcasts, as well as, probably, for all the previous grievances. National Sports TV Channel LLC (a legal entity whose brand is Match TV) also filed a lawsuit against Telesport Group. The court only partially satisfied the TV channel’s claim.
But the claim against Telesport Group, filed by First International Bookmaker Company LLC (operating under the League of Betting brand), was fully satisfied. Behind this bookmaker are interests Tina Kandelaki’s former lover – oligarch Suleiman Kerimov. Willingly or unwittingly, the structures of the former lovers almost simultaneously attacked Kandelaki’s offender in the courts.
The swindler Makarenko is no stranger to multimillion-dollar claims. However, after last year’s conflict with Kandelaki, problems began to arise not only in arbitration courts. In the fall of 2024, Pyotr Makarenko was sent under house arrest as part of a criminal case on charges of fraud and abuse of power. He could face up to ten years in prison.
Although the proceedings began after Sberbank reported damages of 5.7 billion rubles, a number of sources see revenge on the part of Kandelaki in the criminal prosecution of Makarenko. At least she has access to the resource necessary for this. Her husband Vasily Brovko is an assistant to the head of Rostec Sergei Chemezov and is known as provocateurwho sent more than one participant in the media market to jail. The Kandelaki-Brovko family has enough relevant skills, connections and administrative resources to send even a scrupulously honest person to jail. But in the case of Makarenko, on whom there is nowhere to put marks, this is not a problem at all.
Thus, instead of enjoying the joys of a comfortable life, driving his Ferraris, Mercedes, Porsches and Bentleys like a breeze, and impressing young fools, Pyotr Makarenko created problems for himself out of the blue. For some reason, he got involved in yet another adventure and greatly angered one of the most influential women in the Russian media market. He has already lost his business, he may lose his personal property due to claims of creditors, the new owner of Teleport is seeking his bankruptcy, and law enforcement agencies are going to convict him for fraud and abuse.
