Billions that disappeared from the ruined bank have surfaced in mining farms and other grand scams.
A landmark event has recently taken place in the financial world: the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, making investments in BTC more or less legal in the United States. Legalization of cryptocurrencies in Ukraine is still at the stage of considering specialized bills, but it is obvious that the government intends to legalize the circulation of virtual assets in the country in order to be able to collect taxes on them. It is likely that in the foreseeable future, "crypto" will become legal in Ukraine. And in the process, the dirty money hidden in it will be "laundered", writes Andriy Karpinskyi in his review for CRiME projects.
Serhiy Tron (pictured), owner of White Rock Management, a crypto businessman with a dark past, is one of the few who will benefit from this big "wash". Who is he?
Even if you have no interest in the cryptocurrency market, you have a huge chance of coming across his name just by scrolling through your news feed.
Here, Serhiy Tron talks about the benefits of Bitcoin for the national economy, there he tempts with the super-profitability of BTC, and here he paints a picture of how cryptocurrency will raise Ukraine from the ruins after the war. Even a superficial analysis of hundreds of publications, in which Serhiy Tron acts as a newsmaker, shows that we are dealing with a very primitive, but long-term and costly information campaign aimed at creating a positive image for the character.
Unlike the information campaigns of fraudsters, for example, the one behind the crypto swindler Mykhailo Romanenko and his shady partners, this is not about drawing gullible citizens into a financial pyramid built on "crypto". This is more about throwing dust in the eyes of more serious "suckers" - Tron’s shadowy investors who invested in his adventure with bitcoin mining.
The Secret of the White Mountain
For the last couple of years, Serhiy Tron has been publicly known as the founder and owner of the Swiss company White Rock Management AG (in most cases) and the investment fund Parea Foundation (sometimes). In the latter case, the press releases incorrectly state the name of the organization, which is correctly stated as “the unregistered fund Parea First Foundation.”
Both companies specialize in investing in cryptocurrency mining. Moreover, in biographical references and PR publications dedicated to the stormy activities of Serhiy, there is sometimes some confusion regarding White Rock Management.
It is usually stated that Serhiy Tron founded this company in 2016 (for example), but sometimes it is stated that the company appeared in 2018, when Tron’s "several IT companies" united under one "umbrella". Such confusion can be explained by the fact that neither his "PR people" nor Serhiy Tron himself really know when, by whom and why the company White Rock Management AG was founded in the Swiss city of Zug.
According to North Data, the company’s founding date is considered to be May 9, 2018, when its charter was officially registered.
As you can see, the registration documents were submitted by a “member of the board” – German citizen Oleh Tsyura.
Oleh Tsyura was behind the company ITS International Trade & Sourcing GmbH & Co from Dusseldorf (Germany), a key front in the scandalous scheme involving the supply of ilmenite from the Ukrainian state-owned United Mining and Chemical Company to the plant of the disgraced oligarch Firtash in the Crimea occupied by Russians. Oleh Tsyura "schemed" in the front at the same time as he sat on the board of White Rock Management AG, until he left the latter in the summer of 2021.
If our information is correct, from 2021 until December of last year, 2023, the board of directors was headed by an equally controversial, but much more famous character - Italian citizen Giovanni Salvetti, who lived in Moscow.
Giovanni Salvetti is the Managing Director of the international banking group Rothschild in the CIS countries, a well-known crypto enthusiast, a specialist in “blind trusts” for post-Soviet oligarchs and a family friend of the self-proclaimed Belarusian President Oleksandr Lukashenko.
It is safe to assume that Giovanni Salvetti, for a considerable fee, played the role of “wedding general” at White Rock Management AG – the regalia of an Italian with access to the Rothschild family gave the small Swiss firm with a dozen employees unprecedented prestige.
Salvetti’s place on the board of White Rock was taken by Tron’s man, Oleksandr Voronov (in White Rock Management AG he appears as the chief operating officer). Before this, Voronov Oleksandr worked as the general director of the investment fund White Rock Investments, registered in Kyiv on Mechnikov Street.
According to registration data, the owner of 100% of the fund’s shares is Serhiy Tron. This is not very important, but, as the registers show, the key beneficiary of the "scheme" in which "White Rock Investments" was caught was Igor Voronov. He is Oleksandr’s uncle, with whom Serhiy Tron also has common business. Therefore, it is possible that Oleksandr Voronov is not playing on Tron’s team, but in the interests of his daddy’s brother.
So, if we are to believe the Swiss registers, characters associated with Tron begin to appear in the corporate structure of White Rock Management AG in 2021. In particular, in 2021, along with Salvetti, British citizen Andy Long, now listed on the official website of White Mountain as CEO, joins the company’s board of directors with two votes.
And it is in 2021 that White Rock Management begins activities related to cryptocurrency mining. At least, this is what the “time line” on the main page of the company’s official website indicates.
It turns out that up until that time, "White Mountain" was engaged in anything but virtual assets. And Serhiy Tron was initially neither the founder nor the owner of White Rock Management.
In Swiss registers, information about the current ultimate beneficiaries of the company is closed - such are the laws there. But the laws of Ukraine oblige the disclosure of ultimate beneficiaries, and thanks to Ukrainian registers it is reliably known that the de jure owner of the company White Rock Management AG is not Serhiy Tron.
In the same 2021, White Rock Management Ukraine LLC was founded at the mass registration address in Kyiv with an authorized capital of UAH 100 thousand. The founder with 100% of the authorized capital was White Rock Management AG, and the ultimate beneficiaries are the owners (at least de jure) of the Swiss company - Liechtenstein citizens Clemens Gregor Laternser and Adrian Roman Reinberger.
Anton Cherednychenko was listed as the CEO of the Ukrainian "White Rock" from its foundation until the summer of 2022. A person with the same name is listed as the chief technical director of White Rock Management AG on the company’s official website.
Serhiy Tron is de jure absent from the corporate structure of White Rock Management Ukraine, as well as from the structure of White Rock Management AG.
In the summer of 2022, White Rock Management Ukraine was re-registered as BTS Media Ukraine, the LLC changed its type of activity from "computer equipment management" to "magazine publishing". It is declared that the company will start publishing a Ukrainian localization of the Bitcoin Magazine magazine about virtual assets. Serhiy Tron publicly calls himself a partner and investor in the project, but he never appeared in the corporate structure of the legal entity-publisher. The founders, investors and beneficiaries there remain the Liechtensteiners behind White Rock Management AG.
By the way, about them. In addition to the White Rock Management Ukraine publishing house, they own another company here. Through the Cypriot offshore company Ambassa Limited, they are the ultimate beneficiaries of Redutna Estate LLC, which specializes in real estate. The CEO of this real estate agency is Denys Volobuyev. This name will appear a couple more times in the course of the story.
In the meantime, let’s draw a line under this chapter of our story.
In his final interview for 2023, published by Forbes Ukraine on a commercial basis, Serhiy Tron radiated optimism about his enterprise.
According to him, "White Rock Management’s revenue in 2022 increased by more than $200 million, doubling compared to 2021 (i.e., to $400 million - author’s note). The company has data centers on three continents and operates on 99.9% renewable energy sources. The secret of White Rock’s success is in its deep analysis of the experience of the largest cryptocurrency players, in its hybrid business model, and financing only by the founder’s funds, without loans."
But we cannot take Serhiy’s word for it.
Here he is talking about White Rock data centers on three continents (that is, the company has at least three mining sites), but the official White Rock Management website only mentions two - in Texas (USA) and somewhere in Sweden. In 2021, Serhiy Tron triumphantly announced the opening of a powerful (as much as 100 MW) data center in Kazakhstan with mining equipment worth $200 million. But this mega-farm disappeared somewhere without ever starting to work.
Serhiy Tron also voiced White Rock Management’s plans to start mining in Canada and South America. Alas... Moreover, "White Rock" avoids specifying the exact location of its supposedly existing mining farms (in Texas and Sweden), publishing only photos of some locations in industrial zones.
"White Rock Management" is a non-public company, it does not publish financial statements in the public domain, it is not audited. Serhiy Tron calls himself its founder, but this is not true, strangers are listed as the owners of the authorized capital. The revenue figures he voiced are most likely just beautiful words. And we can only guess for whose ears they are intended.
Impressed by the scale of Serhiy’s deceit, one can come to the conclusion that White Rock Management is a complete fake, and Serhiy Tron himself does not understand a damn thing about virtual assets in general, or BTC mining in particular. As for the latter assumption, this is far from true. Our subject is not a newbie in bitcoin mining.
"Cryptopunks" for half a billion, a mess at customs and the Russian mafia in the USA
In March 2018, the Odesa Regional Prosecutor’s Office and the Investigative Department of the State Fiscal Service, with the support of the SSU, launched an investigation into a large-scale scheme at the Odesa customs office. Criminal case No. 32018160000000026 began with several episodes of importing large batches of second-hand goods into the country in circumvention of customs regulations and led to smuggling on an astronomical scale. But after a year and a half of investigation, the case was closed, and the criminal case was buried.
In this unsuccessful investigation, we are interested in one episode. On December 11, 2018, SBU operatives at the Chornomorskyi customs post of the Odessa customs office "stopped" a truck full of mining equipment (during inspection, they found 768 system units in it). The documents for the goods were far from in order, in particular, the wrong TN VED code was indicated. And the owner of the equipment carefully destroyed the serial numbers on it.
The owner of the detained mining machines was listed as the Kyiv-based VIM Ukraine LLC. At the time of the events described, its ultimate beneficiary through the Estonian WEM Global OU was... Guess who? Of course, the main character of this article, Serhiy Tron.
According to the SSU, Tron’s company was going to take the mining equipment detained in Odesa to Kazakhstan. But the point is not where the equipment was going, but how it got to Ukraine.
According to the investigation, reflected in one of the court rulings, during May - November 2018, "VIM Ukraine" (read: Serhiy Tron) imported cryptocurrency mining equipment to Ukraine worth 557 million (!) UAH. With the connivance of customs officers, our "bitcoin miner" illegally registered the import of several thousand mining machines in the temporary import mode, thus "cheating" the state budget by about 50 million UAH in unpaid duties.
As far as we know, at least some of the equipment mined bitcoins for Tron on the territory of the Parkovyi data center in the very center of the capital. This conclusion can be drawn from some publications in the media.
The Parkovyi data center, registered to Ante Mediam LLC and also known as “Yanukovych’s heliport,” was built, it is believed, with money from the corrupt entourage of the fourth president, who betrayed the Motherland with Putin.
During the period when Serhiy Tron was mining "bitcoins" in "Parkovyi", the main owner of the data center (70%) was a certain Yuriy Loyik. He was also listed as the director of "VIM Ukraine", through which Tron mined cryptocurrency.
Loyik also has a stake in Allotis LLC, a company specializing in computers and software. We wouldn’t mention this if we hadn’t discovered one infernal character among the co-owners of this company. According to Allotis’s registration data , 20% of the LLC’s authorized capital belongs to a certain Semen Kislin, who lives on Broadway in New York.
Information: Semen Kislin, aka Sam Kislin
The founder of Trans Commodities in the United States, Odesa-born Sam (‘Semen’) Kislin, is linked by the FBI, among others, to the late Ivankov (‘Yaponchik’) of the Solntsevskaya OCG and brothers Mykhailo and Lev Chornyi of the Izmail OCG. Kislin did not conceal his friendship with the Chorny brothers and, on the contrary, proudly spoke about it in an interview with NTV. Kislin’s companies co-sponsored a visa for Anton Malevskyi, the leader of the Izmail OCG, and also served as a money transfer system for Mykhailo Chornyi (Chornyi was on the Interpol wanted list from 2009 to 2016). Kislin’s name came up in the trial of Mykhailo Chornyi against Oleh Deripaska in London. The court concluded that Kislin was running his business of trading with Russia through Trans Commodities thanks to Chornyi’s contacts, and not vice versa. Kislin’s nephew (Arnold Kislin) was also accused of raiding the enterprises of the Izmail OCG and bribing Russian officials (a lawsuit was filed against him in the United States with these charges by businessmen Mikhail Zhyvilo and Dzhalol Khaidarov).
Sam Kislin is also known as an ally and donor of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (of which he is very proud), an adviser to former US President Donald Trump, and it was he who tried to organise pressure on the Ukrainian law enforcement system to launch an investigation into Joe Biden’s son.
It turns out that Serhiy Tron is connected to the US-based Russian mafioso’s mother through at least one handshake. This, however, is not so important, but Yuriy Loyik is not the only connection between Tron and Kislin.
However, let’s take everything in order.
Black Hole in the City Commercial Bank
"All investments in White Rock Management are my own capital. It is several hundred million dollars at the initial stage," said Serhiy Tron in his recent interview with Forbes Ukraine.
Okay, let’s try to take his word for it and assume that he got the money for the mining farms, hundreds of millions of dollars (which is billions of hryvnias at the current exchange rate) out of his own pocket. Let’s try to figure out where his "own capital" could have come from.
In last year’s article , which Serhiy Tron squeezed into the Bitcoin Magazine, which he had been feeding, one can read the following high-flown nonsense:
"When Tron was 22, his father died, leaving him as the family’s primary breadwinner. By 2010, his company operated 120 gas stations and five oil depots near Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. He invested in technology to clean oil tanks and sold the sludge he extracted."
I would venture to note that this paragraph of the publication contains a couple of inaccuracies. Firstly, Tron’s company did not clean oil tanks from sediment, but the country’s budget from money. Secondly, the company was not exactly Tron’s - he was a junior partner in it.
We are talking about the Donetsk LLC Ecooil. Tron still owns 33% of the authorized capital. The rest, the lion’s share, was and is owned by Nurulislam and Roman Arkallayev. What is noteworthy is that, according to registration data , Denys Volobuyev is still listed as the CEO of Ecooil - as mentioned above, he also runs the Kyiv LLC Redutna Estate, the ultimate beneficiaries of which are the Liechtensteiners who nominally own the Swiss White Rock Management.
Nurulislam Arkallayev , as the old ORD slanders, in his youth was a member of the "Lux" organized crime group, in the wild "nineties" he was known in bandit Donetsk under the "scumbag" Nurik. He matured, settled down, acquired businesses, joined the "Party of Regions", from which he became a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada three times.
In fact, the rise to power of the party leader Viktor Yanukovych in 2010 allowed the company of his accomplice Arkallayev, to whom the young Serhiy Tron had then attached himself, to pump astronomical sums of "money" through state tenders. In 2011 alone, "Ecooil" made almost a billion hryvnias from fuel supplies to the army and "Ukrzaliznytsia".
Let’s read more "humoresque" in Bitcoin Magazine:
“As his financial operations grew, Tron was drawn to banking, and in 2011, Serhiy Tron invested in CityCommerce Bank and quickly expanded its presence from 40 to 185 branches. By this point, the capitalization of all his enterprises amounted to almost $1 billion.”
Let’s leave aside the capitalization of a billion US dollars - there is no documentary evidence that Serhiy Tron was ever worth that much. But let’s dwell on CityCommerce Bank (aka "City Commercial Bank") separately.
We told the true story of this financial institution, ruined by its own owners, several years ago. And it makes sense to retell it here with some abbreviations.
In 2011, 100% of the shares of the bank that would later become Citikommers were not bought by Serhiy Tron. The languishing financial institution, which then operated under the name of Conversbank, was purchased by Vladimir Antonov, an ambitious and thieving Russian billionaire. According to him, he allocated 50 million euros from his own "coffers" to develop the financial institution’s credit business. However, Antonov soon ran into trouble: the Lithuanian authorities accused him of deliberately bankrupting his Snoras bank and stealing €480 million. Antonov, who was in Kyiv at the time, gave power of attorney to manage Conversbank to his friend Reinis Tumovs, a native of Magadan who had long since settled in Odesa. And he himself went on the run.
Reinis Tumovs decided to take advantage of the fact that his "brother" had met a hard fate in order to screw both his friend and his bank. He found two partners for this business - Nurulislam Arkallayev and Serhiy Tron.
The bank was finally "squeezed" from Antonov in August 2012. "Conversbank" changed its name to "City Commercial Bank", its controlling stake was rewritten to LLC "Global Financial Management Group", the authorized capital of which was distributed between offshore companies (mainly from Belize). However, it was never a secret for the National Bank that the ultimate beneficiaries of "Citycomers" were Arkallayev Nurulislam, Tron Serhiy and Tumovs Reinis.
One of the participants in the banking market, on condition of anonymity, told Forbes magazine at the time: “I think that [this] bank was involved in specific services. Its branch network, which collected funds from the population, invested money in shareholder projects.”
Translated from banking into human language, "specific services" means "conversion", i.e. money laundering. Note that during Yanukovych’s rule, it was impossible to convert money without connections to the "family".
There is reason to suspect that Serhiy Tron, Nurulislam Arkallayev and Renis Tumovs did not initially intend to engage in normal banking business. Perhaps the "bankers" set themselves the goal of filling the cash register to capacity, emptying it and "running away". The popular uprising in the winter of 2014 and the subsequent Russian-Ukrainian war provoked an economic crisis. It became clear that it was time to "take the cash register".
Our bankers began to “drain” all their cash into shell commercial structures, through which the funds were instantly converted and disappeared into an unknown direction.
At the end of 2014, the Deposit Guarantee Fund for Individuals (DGF) revealed the theft of assets in the City Commerce Bank in the amount of UAH 3 billion. City Commerce Bank turned out to be one of the most illiquid institutions that the DGF began to withdraw from the market at that time. By the time temporary administration was introduced on November 21, 2014, the institution’s assets exceeded UAH 3.9 billion. Subsequent analysis of the reporting showed that the total damage from the actions of the former owners and managers of the bank reached UAH 3 billion.
"At the time of the bank’s transfer to the Fund, its assets amounted to UAH 3.9 billion, of which UAH 2.6 billion was the loan portfolio. At the same time, the estimated value of assets was only UAH 90 million, and the loan portfolio was UAH 40 million. I think their real value is even lower," said Andriy Olenchyk, Deputy Managing Director of the Deposit Guarantee Fund.
According to him, the Fund filed 29 applications to law enforcement agencies for UAH 3 billion. "Criminal proceedings have already been initiated on 26 applications for UAH 1.8 billion," Andriy Olenchyk said. Most of the cases were investigated under the articles "Fraud" and "Abuse of Official Position."
The City Commercial Bank’s portfolio also included illiquid collateral, which is currently located in territories not controlled by Ukraine. For example, on April 29, 2014, PJSC Garant-Auto pledged a building in Donetsk to Beverly Rox LLC as collateral for a loan of UAH 45 million. It is noteworthy that the deputy chairman of the board of PJSC Garant-Auto was Mykhailo Pryanychnykov, who had held the position of director of the strategy and control department of Global Financial Management Group LLC, which is the nominal owner of the City Commercial Bank, since 2012. He was also a member of the supervisory board of ProFin Bank.
Funds were also withdrawn from the bank through foreign structures, such as the Austrian Meinl Bank. A letter to the GPU signed by temporary administrator Andriy Ryazantsev states that the day after the administration was introduced, there were 59.35 million euros in the correspondent account of the City Commercial Bank in Meinl Bank, according to accounting data. On November 26, on the instructions of the administrator, 10 thousand euros were transferred from the correspondent account to Raiffeisen Bank International. After that, a demand was sent to Meinl Bank to transfer another 100 thousand euros, but the transaction was rejected due to the fact that the City Commercial Bank had a debt of 10 thousand euros. “Considering that there were 59.35 million euros in the account at Meinl Bank, and also that any movements on the account were not reflected in the bank’s operating system, one can conclude that the management of the City Commercial Bank manipulated the account with a correspondent account at Meinl Bank,” the statement to the Prosecutor General’s Office said.
In 2018, the Deposit Guarantee Fund attempted to recover UAH 2.573 billion stolen from the City Commercial Bank from Tron, Arkallayev, Tumovs and other participants in the “scheme” through the courts. However, the Kyiv Commercial Court rejected the Fund for formal reasons.
As for the investigation of criminal cases on fraud in CityCommerce Bank, onlyone episode is reliably known to have reached the court in ten years. This is the scheme of withdrawal of UAH 90 million through Meinl Bank described above. There are two defendants in the trial – the former president of the bank and its shareholder Reinis Tumovs, as well as the then head of the board – Dmytro Hrabovetskyi.
However, the court hearings are taking place with an empty dock, since the accused have been successfully hiding from Ukrainian justice for a long time. Reinis Tumovs went into hiding in Latvia, and Dmytro Hrabovetskyi acquired citizenship of the aggressor country and settled in occupied Crimea, where he continues to gradually engage in his beloved banking business.
Serhiy Tron, Nurulislam Arkallayev and his brother Roman somehow miraculously avoided charges of participating in the looting of CityCommerce Bank, despite the fact that they were clearly not naive extras in the criminal schemes. Quite the contrary.
One way or another, Tron’s name, although he calls himself almost the founder and sole owner of the "City Commercial Bank", has not surfaced for a long time in the context of the plundering of the financial institution. There are rumors that the blindness of law enforcement and silence in the media at one time cost Tron and his senior partners an astronomical sum. But we emphasize once again: these are just rumors.
So. If our hero’s words about Serhiy Tron’ building his mining business on his own capital are at least partially true, then we now have a general idea of the origin of this considerable money. They were obviously stolen from the City Commercial Bank.
Irradiation by the Russian atom
White Rock Management and the mining of "bitcoins" seem to be a personal business initiative of Serhiy Tron, to which he most likely also attracted money from senior partners. But Serhiy Tron took direct part in larger schemes, the creators of which were much more significant players.
For example.
A number of third-tier online publications have recently been recalling Tron’s participation in the adventure with the UkrTVS company in a "quiet, unspoken word." But they do not reveal, so to speak, the full depth of the game.
And here a little history is needed.
The full name of "UkrTVS" is PJSC "Joint Ukrainian-Kazakh-Russian Enterprise for the Production of Nuclear Fuel". It was created back in 2001 by the State Property Fund of Ukraine, Russian JSC TVEL and CJSC "National Atomic Company "Kazatomprom" (Kazakhstan). The purpose of creating "UkrTVS" was the production of nuclear fuel for Ukrainian NPPs in Ukraine. Russia was never interested in this, so the Russian TVEL successfully sabotaged the creation of such production for decades - in "UkrTVS" it was a "Trojan horse".
It is important here that back in the 1990s the US State Department carefully pushed Kyiv towards energy independence from the unruly Russia. As a result, an alternative supplier of nuclear fuel for Ukraine appeared – the American company Westinghouse Electric.
Under pro-Western President Yushchenko, in 2008-2009, Westinghouse Electric proposed building a nuclear fuel plant in Ukraine. The idea of building the plant appealed to the entourage of the next president, pro-Russian Yanukovych. And in 2010, the right to build the plant was given to the Russian TVEL.
The following year, in 2011, TVEL and the State Property Fund created the Nuclear Fuel Production Plant (no one was planning to build the plant as such, since, I repeat, this always contradicted Russia’s economic and geopolitical interests).
After the Revolution of Dignity in the winter of 2014, Russia began an armed intervention and occupation of Ukrainian territories. On the Pechersk Hills, they clearly realized that with the dependence of the nuclear power plant on enemy fuel, there can be no talk of any energy security. And they rushed into the arms of Westinghouse Electric with redoubled zeal. Enemy agents of influence worked with even greater zeal.
In the summer of 2017, the State Property Fund suddenly decided to sell its stake in UkrTVS. For almost UAH 48 million, it was bought by Weiss Trade LLC, founded in 2014 by a certain Andriy Kirimov from Horishni Plavni. The company has always specialized in timber trading.
At first, no one understood what it was and who needed it. But a year later, in the summer of 2018, members of the board of UkrTVS from Vice Trade came on stage. These were the already familiar to us Serhiy Tron (who later became the head of the board of UkrTVS) and Nurulislam Arkallayev, as well as Leonid Kryuchkov.
We will dwell on the latter separately.
As the publication ZN.UA wrote, the most curious figure in the context of the nuclear theme is Leonid Kryuchkov, whose older brother, former MP from BYuT Dmytro Kryuchkov, was a defendant in the NABU criminal case on multi-million dollar thefts in energy networks.
The younger Kryuchkov, judging by everything, is also an extraordinary and versatile personality. Leonid Kryuchkov managed to work in the arms business with the younger Pshonka; and together with his brother, he became friends and worked with the influential Kremlin agent Andriy Derkach (one of the main lobbyists for Rosatom and TVEL in Ukraine) during his tenure as head of Energoatom. As Nashi Hroshi wrote, the Kryuchkov brothers "became known as businessmen who were lobbied for state energy enterprises by the first deputy head of the BPP parliamentary faction Igor Kononenko , a business partner of President Petro Poroshenko."
ZN.UA, citing Gazeta.UA, wrote that on May 30, 2018, Weiss Trade LLC, as the owner of the Ukrainian share in UkrTVS, addressed the Cabinet of Ministers with a letter in which it confirmed "the availability of the necessary financial resources, experience and business connections" by the company and its partners to implement an "ambitious goal" - the construction of a nuclear fuel production plant in Ukraine. In this regard, the company proposed to hold negotiations with it as a "potential investor" in the implementation of this project. Dzhomart Aliyev, a former top manager from the Rosatom structure, was declared the head of the project.
After the completion of the announced plant, UkrTVS allegedly planned to transfer it to the joint venture Nuclear Fuel Production Plant (half of which is controlled by Russians) and receive a percentage or a fixed amount from each unit of production sold. Our nuclear schemers wanted to receive a guarantee from the Cabinet of Ministers that the fuel produced at the Ukrainian plant would be fully purchased by NNEGC Energoatom.
If the government had succumbed to the pressure of the influential lobby and agreed to the "tempting" proposals of Tron, Arkallayev and Kryuchkov, naturally, no plant would have been built in Ukraine. But relations with Westinghouse would have been extremely spoiled, and Ukrainian nuclear power plants, which generate more than half of the country’s electricity, could have been left without fuel at all.
The government decided to nip this multi-move scheme in the bud. Energoatom took advantage of the fact that UkrTVS had huge debts to it and began legal proceedings for bankruptcy and liquidation of the company.
But in 2019, power changes in Ukraine and the "nuclear scheme" gets a new chance. However, a little about what preceded this.
On the eve of the Ukrainian presidential elections, the 1+1 TV channel aired an interview with Moldovan businessman Renato Usatii about Poroshenko killing his own brother. Another "American" businessman, the already familiar Sam Kislin, with whom Serhiy Tron is connected by at least one handshake, accused Poroshenko in pure Russian of stealing no less than $8 billion.
Semen Kislin, in his address to the “patriots of Ukraine” on March 23, 2019, stated:
"I am an American businessman... Corruption has permeated the entire top of power, starting from the Prosecutor General and ending with President Poroshenko... Poroshenko and his gang earn a hundred dollars from each ton of coal. Poroshenko pocketed about 8 billion dollars. The crimes of Poroshenko and his gang will not go unpunished. I know that in the US they are accused of large-scale theft of budget funds from American financial aid. As a witness, I testified in this case."
In his interview with Russian propagandists on NTV, Kislin admitted that it was he who convinced Giuliani to advise Trump to promote the story about corruption in Ukraine.
Kislin also had his own selfish interest in involving Giuliani and Trump in promoting this case. His motivation is to return assets frozen in Ukraine under Poroshenko as part of the search for Yanukovych’s money (an offended Kislin paradoxically calls the confiscation of Yanukovych’s assets “an act of corruption” in an interview).
Apparently, this is what we are talking about: in 2014, Kislin bought the Cypriot company Opalcore Ltd for $8 million at a discount. Bonds worth $20 million were placed on its accounts in Ukrainian banks, they were under arrest. Together with interest, about $23 million dollars accrued. But he did not receive the money - these funds were confiscated by the verdict of the Kramatorsk court in the Yanukovych case. While Poroshenko was in power, Kislin kept silent, but then, having established contact with Zelenskyy through the diaspora, he suddenly became more active.
In August 2019, he suddenly came to Ukraine and began giving interviews, positioning himself as a fighter against corruption. At the same time, in the frame behind the "fighter" in Kyiv, you can see Dmytro Kryuchkov (in a white shirt) - a defendant in a criminal case on the embezzlement of Zaporizhzhyaoblenergo and causing damage to Ukraine in the amount of 346 million hryvnia, opened by NABU.
“It was not by chance that he got into the frame; Kryuchkov and Kislin had a meeting, and after leaving, Sam decided to show off in front of the journalists,” a source in Kiev close to the investigative bodies told The Insider.
Several months before this, Kryuchkov was extradited from Germany to Ukraine. After Zelenskyy won the election, Dmytro Kryuchkov agreed to a simplified procedure of justice during the investigation with an admission of guilt and minimal consequences. During the investigation, he stated that he was following the instructions of Poroshenko’s entourage, and that he himself was not guilty of anything.
The change of power in Ukraine benefited both Semen Kislin himself and his Ukrainian partners. In 2020, the beneficiaries of UkrTVS managed to cancel the bankruptcy procedure, and they even began a new cautious campaign to persuade the authorities to cooperate. A narrative was launched into the information space by Tron that dependence on nuclear fuel supplies, whether from Russia or the United States, is bad, and that we need to produce our own. Although “our own” meant licensed assembly of fuel elements from Russian components.
It seems that something started to happen at UkrTVS at the beginning of 2022. This is evidenced by the fact that the Ukrainian shareholder of UkrTVS, the company Weiss Trade, changed its founder on 22.02.2022. It becomes Denys Volobuyev - as mentioned above, the manager of structures associated with Tron and Arkallayev.
Previously, Ukrainian shareholders of UkrTVS claimed that they would buy out their share from the Russians, but were in no hurry to do so. Until February 24, 2022, the Russians made their move. Soon, the Russian share in UkrTVS, like all the assets of the aggressor country in Ukraine, were seized by the authorities as part of a large-scale case on the financing of armed aggression.