Importance Score: 65 / 100 🔴
An American businessman is urging President Trump to help save his $200 million canned-food empire after Russian authorities took over his company and seized its assets.
Los Angeles-based Leonid Smirnov, who fled Soviet communism in the 1970s, says he’s in a race against time to save Glavprodukt — the Campbell’s of Russia — which he founded in 1999 and built into a household name in his homeland.
“What’s happening with my company is a raid under a government seizure and confiscation attempt,” he told The Post.
And if it can happen to him, he said in a warning to Trump, it can happen to any of hundreds of US-owned companies operating in Russia, after President Vladimir Putin set his sights on foreign businesses after the invasion of Ukraine.
About a dozen companies have been put under “temporary management” in the past three years. Smirnov’s Glavprodukt was the first American-owned company to be targeted, and is famous across the motherland for its canned soups, vegetables, fish, and meat.
And it was a key part of Smirnov’s business empire, which includes a $20 million, 14,000-square foot, Tuscan-style mansion once rented by Paris Hilton in tony Beverly Park in Los Angeles.
Things changed in October last year, when three strangers arrived at its headquarters to take charge.
They were sent on Putin’s orders. His decree ordered that Glavprodukt and other assets owned by Smirnov’s American company Universal Beverage be put under “temporary” Russian management.
Since then, he said, the Moscow-based company — which employed 1,000 workers across three factories — had begun taking losses for the first time. Overall, he estimates the company has lost as much as 30 percent of its value.
“We basically have this company being destroyed on a daily basis,” said Smirnov, describing how key staffers have been fired for not being loyal enough.
In the past month, the country’s prosecutor general accused him of illegally syphoning millions of dollars to the US and of joining with Washington in seeking the “strategic defeat” of Russia. He supplied partially obscured photos of himself to The Post, saying he now fears for his and his family’s safety.
Two weeks ago, a court ordered the seizure of cash and assets connected to Glavprodukt. Russian prosecutors claimed he had been illegally sending dividends from the business to the U.S.
It was all part of a pressure campaign, said Smirnov, to force him to sell at a knock-down price.
“I put 26 years of my life into that … building this company from scratch,” said Smirnov.
“And I have 1,000 people, some of them were with me for 20 plus years. It’s like a family.”
He said the timing of the initial seizure was no coincidence, weeks before last year’s election.
“If Kamala Harris had won the election I don’t think me, my company, or any other American business in Russia would have a chance, a single chance, to be saved,” he said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that Glavprodukt would be part of any conversation about resetting U.S.-Russia relations.
“There are opportunities to work together, and obviously that’s going to entail talking about not just Russian assets that have been seized by – by the Europeans or the U.S. or what have you, but also American companies that have been hurt,” he said.
But Smirnov fears his company will no longer exist by then. He wants Trump to intervene and send a clear message to Moscow that American-owned businesses are off limits.
“I am asking President Trump to get involved and save my company, save all other American companies,” he said.