Eugene Kashper ( rus, Евгений Кашпер) is an American beer entrepreneur and Chairman of Blue Ribbon Partners. He also served as the Chairman and CEO of
Pabst Brewing Company
The Pabst Brewing Company () is an American company that dates its origins to a brewing company founded in 1844 by Jacob Best and was, by 1889, named after Frederick Pabst. It is currently a holding company which contracts the brewing of over ...
.
Biography
Kashper was born in the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
to
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
parents; he has told Russian interviewers he was born in Leningrad in 1969. He and his family immigrated to the United States as political refugees when he was six years old, and he became an American citizen shortly after. He grew up in Arizona and New Jersey, and after high school attended
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
, graduating in 1992 with a degree in East Asian Studies.
He then went to work for
Ernst & Young
Ernst & Young Global Limited, trade name EY, is a multinational professional services partnership headquartered in London, England. EY is one of the largest professional services networks in the world. Along with Deloitte, KPMG and Pricewat ...
, which quickly capitalized on his language skills by sending him to Moscow. Soon after that move, he left Ernst & Young and moved into the beer industry.
He began his beer industry career in 1994 by importing Stroh beer from The
Stroh Brewery Company of Detroit, Michigan into Russia. After the Russian government started imposing taxes on imported beer, he founded the Pivovarni Ivana Taranova (PIT) brewery with plants in Khabarovsk, Novotroitsk, and Kaliningrad. In just a few years the company had become the biggest independent producer of beer before its founders sold it to Heineken in 2005 – only to start all over again just outside the Russian capital with an even bigger, even more modern enterprise in 2006
Moscow Brewing Company
He later co-founded Oasis Beverages and served as its chairman from 2008 to 2014. In press releases from September 2014, Oasis Beverages was mentioned as the buyer for the Pabst Blue Ribbon brand. The headquarters for Oasis was an address on Cyprus - a known tax-haven used by Russian oligarchs.
Under Kashper, Pabst announced on November 13, 2014, that it had completed its sale to Blue Ribbon Intermediate Holdings, LLC. Blue Ribbon is a partnership between Kashper and
TSG Consumer Partners
TSG Consumer Partners is an American private equity company based in San Francisco, California. The firm was founded in 1987, and was among the first private equity firms to invest exclusively in consumer companies. , a San Francisco–based private equity firm.
"We are thrilled to complete the acquisition of this great company," said Kashper, who said he would relocate with his family from New York to Los Angeles.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kashper, Eugene
Living people
American chief executives of food industry companies
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Year of birth missing (living people)
Columbia College (New York) alumni
Ernst & Young people
Pabst Brewing Company
Businesspeople from Saint Petersburg
Russian businesspeople in the United States