Lyudmila Ocheretnaya, Vladimir Putin’s former spouse — who had not worked a single day while her husband ran the country — is a businesswoman now. Her microfinance company, CarMoney, lends money to Russians in need at annual rates up to 364%.
Such interests, by any standards, amount to robbery in plain sight.
According to recently published data, CarMoney pocketed 427 million rubles (over $5 million) in net profit in 2025 alone — more than 100 million rubles above its 2024 earnings. Since the start of the Ukraine war, the company has accumulated nearly 1.6 billion rubles in net profit.
CarMoney is just one of the ex-first lady’s many businesses that have operated smoothly and undisturbed by the authorities — even as tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and even industry moguls have had their enterprises seized by the state for the needs of the war machine.
CarMoney’s loan volumes soared from 5.1 billion rubles in 2024 to 6.1 billion in 2025. Its customers are mostly regular people from various backgrounds. Rates range from a “generous” 15% to a truly unphilanthropic 364% annually.
Unsurprisingly, court documents obtained by the investigative outlet Mozhem Obyasnit show that such rates often leave borrowers unable to repay on time — many have their vehicles seized via court order. Overall, CarMoney has filed over 25,000 such lawsuits so far against its clients.
CarMoney issues loans secured by cars. Its legal entity is PSB Finance LLC, a financial corporation. In the first half of 2025, it was in the top 20 largest microfinance organizations in Russia by net profit in a ranking compiled by the Expert RA center.
A screenshot of PSB Finance LLC’s financial report for 2025.
Lyudmila Ocheretnaya — who remarried the 20 years younger Artur Ocheretnyi, a former athlete turned businessman — also collected a handsome 57-million-ruble interest from a personal deposit in Gazprombank, a financial institution serving the Kremlin elite, according to bank records dated January 2025. She holds 397 million rubles at Gazprombank.
Ocheretnaya directly owned CarMoney through the Cypriot offshore Carmoney CY LTD, which was in turn controlled by a company called Meridian. In early 2023, Western sanctions determined CarMoney to move into Russian jurisdiction and change the nominal associates, but the real beneficiaries remained the same.
Previous investigations revealed that the former first lady is one of the richest women in the Russian Federation, earning mainly from kickbacks from private and public companies of Putin’s friends. The team of the late opposition politician Alexei Navalny found villas and properties in Europe and North America on the names of the Ocheretnyi couple; their fortune was estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars in 2022.
The latest report on her microloan business is a shocking example of the moral decay of an elite thriving on the expense of a population impoverished by war and repression. While Russian law imposes a cap on the daily interest rate for microloans — maximum 0.8% per day or 292% per year — CarMoney had blatantly violated the rule. A rate of 364% would equate to approximately 1% per day, which has been illegal for new loans since July 2023.
yudmila Ocheretnaya (née Shkrebneva, formerly Putina) was married to Vladimir Putin for nearly 30 years. In June 2013, the couple publicly announced their separation, and in 2014 the divorce was officially finalized.
After the divorce, Lyudmila changed her surname to Ocheretnaya after her new husband Artur Ocheretny, head of the Center for the Development of Interpersonal Communication — a vehicle for absorption of public funds in return for fictive services.
Mrs. Ocheretnaya has led a private life and has rarely appeared in the media ever since. While her former husband continues to drive ordinary Russians into misery, she quietly robs them of their little remaining savings.