Stoli Group’s U.S. firms have filed for chapter following an August ransomware assault and Russian authorities seizing the corporate’s remaining distilleries within the nation.
As Chris Caldwell, the President and International Chief Government Officer of Stoli USA and Kentucky Owl, the 2 Stoli Group subsidiaries, stated in a Friday submitting, this comes after the August assault severely disrupted its IT methods, together with its enterprise useful resource planning (ERP) platform.
The cyberattack additionally pressured handbook operations throughout the group, affecting key processes resembling accounting, with full restoration not anticipated till early 2025.
“In August 2024, the Stoli Group’s IT infrastructure suffered severe disruption in the wake of a data breach and ransomware attack,” stated Caldwell.
“The attack caused substantial operational issues throughout all companies within the Stoli Group, including Stoli USA and KO, due to the Stoli Group’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system being disabled and most of the Stoli Group’s internal processes (including accounting functions) being forced into a manual entry mode.”
Caldwell added that the incident additionally prevented the Stoli U.S. subsidiaries from offering monetary stories to lenders who claimed the 2 firms had defaulted on a $78 million debt.
One month earlier, in July 2024, two distilleries valued at $100 million, the group’s final remaining property in Russia, had been additionally confiscated in reference to the designation of the Stoli Group and its founder, Yuri Shefler, as “extremists.”
This designation was associated to their humanitarian assist efforts and advertising and marketing campaigns supporting Ukrainian refugees through the ongoing warfare in Ukraine.
The Stoli Group has additionally spent dozens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} as a part of a long-term court docket battle spanning over 23 years and a number of jurisdictions, together with the US, with Russian state enterprise FKP Sojuzplodoimport over rights to the Stolichnaya and Moskovskaya vodka emblems.
This authorized wrestle stemmed from a March 2000 govt order by President Vladimir Putin to “reinstate and protect the state’s rights” in vodka emblems whose rights had been purchased by non-public firms within the Nineties.
Shefler, the corporate’s founder, was additionally pressured to flee Russia in 2002 as a result of politically motivated and “fabricated” expenses linked to his criticism of the Putin regime. Since then, Shefler was later granted asylum in Switzerland and UK citizenship after Russia’s extradition requests within the 2010s had been denied.
