The curious case of the Russian JCB dealer and the millionaire
Guests huddled beneath a leaden Moscow sky as the opening chimes of Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy rang out across a car park. On cue, a fleet of JCBs rumbled into life to begin their favourite party trick: the dancing diggers.
It was October 2016 and JCB, one of the UK’s biggest privately owned companies, was celebrating the opening of a 2bn rouble (£25m) factory on the outskirts of the capital. The factory would assemble and service JCBs but had been paid for by its Russian dealer, Lonmadi.
Guest of honour was the Queen’s cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, who expressed hope for “fruitful cooperation between the two countries”. JCB’s chief executive, Graeme Macdonald, also spoke, as did Vadim Khromov, a Moscow city official, noting how the investment had been attracted “despite the sanctions”.
Those sanctions from the EU and US were in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014, leading to its increasing isolation on the global stage.
The Moscow factory was a gamble by JCB’s biggest distributor, a chain of more than 20 outlets across Russia that trade as Lonmadi and Kwintmadi. They are owned by an obscure dealership group called JVM, which is in turn 51%-owned by a reclusive Briton called Max Milne-Skillman. Skillman, who attended the opening with his family, was betting that the post-Soviet construction boom would continue even as relations between the west and Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin crumbled.
Skillman, now 67, his business partner Lina Sokolova, 52, and her sister Tatiana Sokolova, have made multimillion-pound fortunes selling JCBs and other construction gear to the Russian market. Many of those vehicles have been exported to Russia from Staffordshire, the home of Lord (Anthony)
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