Mayfair’s most wanted: ES meets Yevgeny Chichvarkin

To succeed in business you need luck. Yevgeny Chichvarkin has had dollops of it, most of it bad. He has been persecuted by the Russian authorities and was forced to flee to London, hiding from the Moscow police in the back of a car. Once he arrived, he spent a fortune on lawyers resisting extradition and fighting what he insists are trumped-up kidnapping charges.

But that was then. Today, he stands at the door of Hedonism. It’s not a lap-dancing bar; it is, he says, ‘the finest wine shop in London’. The thing is, he’s right. The capital’s big vintners, Berry Bros & Rudd and Justerini & Brooks — both a cork’s throw away on St James’s — and El Vino on Fleet Street may have nifty cellars and be so old that they have the paperwork to prove Napoleon was a customer, but they are not really shops. They are merchants’ houses with bars and restaurants attached.

Hedonism on Davies Street, which opened four months ago, is the only store devoted to the best wines and spirits in the world, all sold in the kind of multimillion-pound designer space that is more Moschino than Majestic.

Walking across Berkeley Square past the Rolls-Royce and Bentley showrooms, the latest designer shops, new members-only clubs and spiffy restaurants, you soon begin to wonder why it has taken anyone so long to open a place like Hedonism. ‘Mayfair is the perfect terroir for this business,’ Chichvarkin grins.

But he is an unlikely grape pedlar. The 38-year-old started drinking vodka in his late teens because ‘Russian wine is terrible’. He insists: ‘My taste in wine is awful. I like big bursting fruit explosions — Shiraz, Grenache. My favourite wine is American, not from Burgundy. I don’t drink champagne.’ It’s not his fault. He’s a technophile, not an oenophile.

Fourteen years ago he founded Evroset, Russia’s biggest mobile phone company, and in the early days of wild east capitalism made hundreds of millions of roubles. At its height, Evroset had more than 5,000 shops in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Azerbaijan. But four years ago everything changed in a heartbeat. ‘I went out one morning the boss of a large mobile phone company and ended up in exile in London.’

Chichvarkin had been under investigation for weeks. The police alleged he had kidnapped a truck driver because he believed the driver had stolen a $1m consignment of the latest mobile phones. Prosecutors wrote to him asking him to appear for interview. He refused. He was innocent, he said. Three days before Christmas Day, he left home in his car to go to work and noticed he was being tailed by the police. That meant one thing. ‘They were going to arrest me and, after that, I knew it would be very bad,’ he recalls. ‘Things in Russia don’t happen the way things do in England.’

He managed to give the cops the slip, met up with a colleague and persuaded him to drive him straight to Domodedovo, Moscow’s main airport. Luckily, he was carrying his passport and already had a British visa. ‘I was so scared I lay face down on the back seat, so no police could see me.’ At the airport, he bought a ticket for the first flight to London and was relieved to find immigration did not stop him leaving. ‘They were not expecting me to go just like that,’ he says. His wife Antonina and their two children, then under ten, followed him the next morning. The family have been here ever since. They live near Godalming in Surrey.

Chichvarkin’s employee and co-accused, Boris Levin, was not so fortunate. He was arrested and spent years in prison before being released when a jury dismissed all the charges against both men. Chichvarkin was tried in absentia. He says he was targeted by the Russian authorities because he spoke out against government policies on business and tax.

Chichvarkin spent his first years in his new home selling Evroset for $400m, resisting extradition and fighting to prove his innocence. Once he had done that, he, like all entrepreneurs, got bored. Projects came and went. Like many tortured souls, he found his salvation at the bottom of a bottle — a £170 2001 Roda Cirsion to be precise. Chichvarkin wanted to share the Rioja with Antonina. So he telephoned Justerini & Brooks, Selfridges, Harrods, Harvey Nichols and just about anyone else he could think of. ‘They all had the same answer. No. The best any of them could do was to get it to me in two weeks. I was amazed. I knew then I had my business. Upscale wine with luxury service.’