Recently, a significant event occurred in the financial world: the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, making investments in BTC more or less legal in the United States.
The legalization of cryptocurrencies in Ukraine is still at the stage of consideration of relevant bills, but, obviously, the authorities still intend to legalize the circulation of virtual assets in the country in order to be able to levy 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 “washed off,” Andrey Karpinsky writes in his review
Sergey Tron (pictured above), 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 are not at all interested in the cryptocurrency market, you have a huge chance of coming across its name just by scrolling through your news feed.
Here Sergey Tron talks about the benefits of Bitcoin for the national economy, there he seduces with the super-profitability of BTC, and here he describes how cryptocurrency will raise Ukraine from ruins after the war. Even a superficial analysis of hundreds of publications, in which Sergei Tron is a newsmaker, shows that we are dealing with a very primitive, but lengthy and costly information campaign aimed at creating a positive image for the character.
Unlike information campaigns of scammers, for example, the one behind which is the crypto-swindler Mikhail Romanenko and his shady partners, here we are not talking about drawing gullible citizens into a financial pyramid built on “crypt”. It’s more about throwing dust in the eyes of the bigger “suckers” – Tron’s investors who are keeping a low profile and invested in his Bitcoin mining adventure.
The Mystery of the White Mountain
For the last couple of years, Sergei Tron has appeared to the public 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, press releases incorrectly indicate the name of the organization, which correctly reads as “the unregistered Parea First Foundation.”
Both companies specialize in investing in cryptocurrency mining. Moreover, in biographical information and PR publications devoted to the vigorous activities of Sergei Nikolaevich, sometimes there is some confusion regarding White Rock Management.
It is usually stated that Sergey Tron founded this company in 2016 (for example), but sometimes it is stated that the company appeared in 2018, when “several IT companies” of Tron united under one “umbrella”. This confusion can be explained by the fact that neither his “PR people” nor Sergei 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 the North Data service, the founding date of the company should be considered May 9, 2018, when its statute was officially registered.
As you can see, the registration documents were submitted by a “member of the board” - German citizen Oleg Tsyura.
Oleg Tsyura was behind the company ITS International Trade & Sourcing GmbH & Co from Düsseldorf (Germany) - a key player in the scandalous scheme with the supply of ilmenite from the Ukrainian state-owned United Mining and Chemical Company to the plant of the disgraced oligarch Firtash in the Rashist-occupied Crimea. Oleg Tsyura “schemed” in the gasket at the same time that 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 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 Belarusian impostor president Alexander Lukashenko.
With great caution, we can assume that Giovanni Salvetti, for a considerable fee, played the role of a “wedding general” in White Rock Management AG - the regalia of an Italian entering the Rothschild house gave unprecedented prestige to a small Swiss company with a dozen staff.
Salvetti’s place on the board of Belaya Gora was taken by Tron’s man Alexander Voronov (he appears in White Rock Management AG as chief operating officer). Before this, Alexander Evgenievich Voronov worked as the general director of the White Rock Investments fund, registered in Kyiv on Mechnikov Street.
According to registration data, the owner of 100% of the fund’s shares is Sergei Nikolaevich Tron. This is not very important, but, as the registers show, the key beneficiary of the “schematism” in which White Rock Investments was seen was Igor Voronov. This is Alexander’s uncle, with whom Sergei Tron also has common affairs. Therefore, it is possible that here Alexander Voronov is not playing on Tron’s team, but in the interests of his dad’s brother.
So, if the Swiss registers are to be believed, characters associated with Tron will begin to appear in the corporate structure of White Rock Management AG in 2021. In particular, in 2021, together with Salvetti, British citizen Andy Long, now listed on the official website of White Mountain as the CEO, will join the company’s board of directors with two votes.
And it is in 2021 that White Rock Management begins activities related to the mining of cryptocurrencies. At least this is evidenced by the “time line” on the main page of the company’s official website.
It turns out that until that time, White Mountain was involved in anything but virtual assets. And Sergey 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 - these are the laws there. But the laws of Ukraine oblige the disclosure of ultimate beneficiaries, and thanks to Ukrainian registries it is reliably known that the de jure owner of White Rock Management AG is not Sergey Tron.
In the same 2021, White Rock Management Ukraine LLC was founded at the mass registration address in Kyiv with an authorized capital of 100 thousand UAH. The founder with 100% of the authorized capital was White Rock Management AG, and the final beneficiaries are the owners (at least de jure) of the Swiss company - citizens of Liechtenstein Clemens Gregor Laternser and Andrian Roman Rheinberger.
From the moment of its foundation until the summer of 2022, Anton Cherednichenko was listed as the general director of the Ukrainian “White Mountain”. A person with the same name is listed as the chief technical officer of White Rock Management AG on the company's official website.
Sergey 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 begin publishing the Ukrainian localization of the magazine about virtual assets Bitcoin Magazine. Sergey Tron publicly calls himself a partner and investor of 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 act as the ultimate beneficiaries of Redutna Estate LLC, which specializes in real estate. The general director of this real estate office is Denis Volobuev. This name will appear a couple more times throughout the story.
For now, let’s draw a line under this chapter of our story.
Sergei Tron, in his final interview for 2023, published by Forbes Ukraine on a commercial basis, radiated optimism about his enterprise.
According to him, “White Rock Management’s revenue in 2022 increased by more than $200 million - double compared to 2021 (i.e., up to $400 million - author’s note). The company has data centers on three continents and runs on 99.9% renewable energy. The secret of White Rock’s success is a deep analysis of the experience of the largest crypto market players, a hybrid business model and financing only with the founder’s funds, without loans.”
But we cannot take Sergei Nikolaevich’s word for it.
Here he declares White Rock data centers on three continents (that is, the company has at least three mining sites), but on the official website of White Rock Management only two are mentioned - in Texas (USA) and somewhere in Sweden . In 2021, Sergei Tron triumphantly announced the opening of a very powerful (100 MW) data center in Kazakhstan with mining equipment worth $200 million. But this mega-farm disappeared somewhere without starting to work.
Sergey Tron also voiced White Rock Management’s plans to start mining in Canada and South America. Alas... Moreover, White Mountain avoids indicating the exact location of its supposedly exactly existing mining farms (in Texas and Sweden), publishing only photographs of some locations in industrial zones.
White Rock Management is a non-public company; it does not publish financial statements in the public domain and is not audited. Sergei Tron calls himself its founder, but this is not true; strangers are listed as the owners of the authorized capital. The revenue figures he announced are most likely just beautiful words. And we can only guess whose ears they are intended for.
Impressed by the scale of Sergei Nikolaevich’s slyness, one can come to the conclusion that White Rock Management is a complete fake, and Sergei Tron himself doesn’t know a damn thing about virtual assets in general, or BTC mining in particular. As for the last assumption, this is far from true. Our subject is by no means new to bitcoin mining.
“Crypto-diggers” worth half a billion, customs swindlers and the Russian mafia in the USA
In March 2018, the Odessa Regional Prosecutor’s Office and the Investigative Department of the State Fiscal Service, with the support of the SBU, began an investigation into a large-scale scheme at Odessa customs. Criminal proceedings No. 32018160000000026 began with several episodes of importing large quantities of second-hand goods into the country in circumvention of customs rules and led to smuggling of astronomical proportions. But after a year and a half of investigation, the proceedings were curtailed and the criminal case was buried.
In this unsuccessful investigation, we are interested in one episode. On December 11, 2018, SBU operatives at the “Chernomorsky” customs post of the Odessa customs “stopped” a truck full of mining equipment (during inspection they found 768 system units in it). The documents for the goods were by no means in perfect order; in particular, the incorrect HS code was indicated. And the serial numbers on the equipment were carefully destroyed by the owner.
The owner of the detained mining machines was identified as Kiev-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 is Sergei Tron.
According to the intelligence officers, Tronya was going to export the mining equipment detained in Odessa to Kazakhstan. But the point is not where the equipment was sent, but how it got to Ukraine.
According to the investigation, reflected in one of the court decisions, during May – November 2018, VIM Ukraine (count Sergey Tron) imported equipment for mining cryptocurrencies worth 557 million (!) UAH into Ukraine. With the connivance of customs officers, our miner “cue ball” illegally registered the import of several thousand mining machines under the temporary import regime, thus “throwing away” the state budget by about 50 million UAH in unpaid duty.
As far as is known, at least part of the equipment mined bitcoins for Tron on the territory of the Parkovy data center in the very center of the capital. This conclusion can be drawn from some publications in the media.
The Parkovy data center, also known as the “Yanukovych heliport”, registered at Ante Media LLC, 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 Sergei Tron was mining cue balls in Parkovy, the main owner of the data center (70%) was a certain Yuri Loik. He was then listed as the director of VIM Ukraine, through which Tron mined cryptocurrency.
Loic also has a stake in Allotis LLC, which specializes in computers and software. We would not have mentioned this circumstance if we had not discovered one infernal character among the co-owners of this company. According to the registration data of Allotis, 20% of the authorized capital of the LLC belongs to a certain Semyon Kislin, who lives on Broadway in New York.
Information: Semyon Kislin, aka Sam Kislin
The FBI connects the founder of the Trans Commodities company in the USA, a native of Odessa Sam (Semyon) Kislin, with the late Ivankov (Yaponchik) from the Solntsevskaya organized crime group and the brothers Mikhail and Lev Cherny (Izmailovskaya organized crime group). Kislin did not hide his friendship with the Cherny brothers and, on the contrary, proudly spoke about it in an interview with NTV. Kislin’s companies acted as a co-sponsor of the visa of Anton Malevsky, the leader of the Izmailovskaya organized crime group, and also served to pump money for Mikhail Cherny (Cherny was wanted by Interpol from 2009 to 2016). Kislin's name came up at the trial of Mikhail Cherny against Oleg Deripaska in London. The court concluded that Kislin conducted his business of trading with Russia through Trans Commodities thanks to Cherny’s contacts, and not vice versa. Kislin’s nephew (Arnold Kislin) was also accused of raider takeovers of enterprises of the Izmailovskaya organized crime group and bribes to Russian officials (entrepreneurs Mikhail Zhivilo and Jalol Khaidarov filed a lawsuit against him in the United States with these accusations).
Sam Kislin is also known as an ally and donor of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (of which he is very proud), an adviser to former US President Donald Trump, and it was he who reportedly tried to organize pressure on the Ukrainian law enforcement system in order to open an investigation regarding Joe Biden's son.
It turns out that Sergei Tron is connected through at least one handshake with a seasoned Russian mafioso from the USA. This, however, is not so important, but Yuri Loik is not Tron’s only connection with Kislin.
However, first things first.
Black hole in the City Commercial Bank
“All investments in White Rock Management are my own capital. This is several hundred million dollars at the initial stage,” said Sergei 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 mining farms, hundreds of millions of dollars (which is billions of hryvnias in terms of the exchange rate) from his own pocket. Let's try to figure out where his “own capital” could come from.
In last year’s article, which Sergey Tron squeezed into the Bitcoin Magazine he fed, you can read the following pompous nonsense:
“When Tron was 22 years old, his father passed away, leaving him as the family’s main breadwinner. By 2010, his company operated 120 gas stations and five oil depots near Lugansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. He invested in oil tank cleaning technology and sold the extracted sediment.”
I dare say that a couple of inaccuracies crept into this paragraph of the publication. Firstly, Tron’s company did not clean oil tanks of sediment, but the country’s budget of money. Secondly, the company was not exactly Tronia - he was a junior partner in it.
We are talking about Donetsk LLC Ecooil. Tron still owns 33% of the authorized capital. The rest, the lion's share, was and is with Nurulislam and Roman Arkallaev. What is noteworthy is that the general director of Ecooil, according to registration data, is still listed as Denis Volobuev - 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 Arkallaev, as the old ORD slander, in his youth was part of the Lux organized crime group, in the dashing “nineties” he was known in gangster Donetsk under the “revil” Nurik. He matured, settled down, acquired a business, joined the Party of Regions, from which he became a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada three times.
Actually, the coming to power of party leader Viktor Yanukovych in 2010 allowed the company of his accomplice Arkallaev, to whom young Sergei Tron then joined, to pump out astronomical amounts of dough through state tenders. In 2011 alone, Ecooil made almost a billion hryvnia from fuel supplies to the army and Ukrzaliznytsia.
We read further “humoresque” in Bitcoin Magazine:
“As his financial operations grew, Tron was drawn to banking, and in 2011, Sergei Tron invested in CityCommerce Bank and quickly expanded its presence from 40 to 185 branches. By this time, the capitalization of all his enterprises was almost $1 billion.”
Let's leave out the capitalization of a billion US dollars - there is no documentary evidence that Sergei Tron was ever worth that kind of money. But we will dwell separately on CityCommerce Bank (aka “City Commercial Bank”).
We outlined the true story of this financial institution, ruined by its own owners, several years ago. And here it makes sense to retell it with some abbreviations.
In 2011, 100% of the shares of the bank, which would later become CityCommerce, were not bought by Sergei Tron. The vegetating financial institution, which then operated under the guise of Conversbank, was acquired by Vladimir Antonov, an ambitious and thieving Russian billionaire. According to him, he allocated 50 million euros from his own “bins” for the development of the financial institution’s lending business. However, Antonov soon encountered trouble: the Lithuanian authorities accused him of deliberately bankrupting the Snoras bank he owned and stealing €480 million. Antonov, who was in Kiev at that time, issued a power of attorney to manage Conversebank to his friend Reinis Tumovs, a native of Magadan who had long settled in Odessa. And he went on the run.
Reinis Tumovs decided to take advantage of the fact that his “bro” suffered a difficult fate in order to screw both his friend and his bank. For this business, he found two partners - Nurulislam Arkallaev and Sergey Tron.
The bank was finally seized from Antonov in August 2012. “Conversbank” changed its sign to “City Commercial Bank”, its controlling stake was transferred to “Global Financial Management Group” LLC, the authorized capital of which was distributed among offshore companies (mainly from Belize). However, it has never been a secret for the National Bank that the final beneficiaries of Citykomers are Nurulislam Gadzhievich Arkallaev, Sergey Nikolaevich Tron and Reinis Aivarsovich Tumovs.
One of the participants in the banking market, on condition of anonymity, then told Forbes magazine: “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,” that is, money laundering. Let us note that during the era of Yanukovych’s rule, it was impossible to convert money without connections with the “family”.
There is reason to suspect that Sergei Tron, Nurulislam Arkallaev 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, gutting it and “making their legs.” The popular uprising in the winter of 2014 and the subsequent Russian-Ukrainian war provoked an economic crisis. It became clear that it was necessary to “take the cash register” already.
Our bankers began to pour all their real money into frontal commercial structures, through which the funds were instantly converted and disappeared in an unknown direction.
At the end of 2014, the Deposit Guarantee Fund of Individuals (DGF) revealed the theft of assets in the City Commercial Bank worth UAH 3 billion. CityCommerce Bank turned out to be one of the most illiquid institutions that the Deposit Guarantee Fund (DGF) began to withdraw from the market at that time. By the time the temporary administration was introduced into it on November 21, 2014, the institution’s assets exceeded UAH 3.9 billion. Subsequent analysis of the statements showed that the total damage from the actions of the bank’s former owners and managers reaches UAH 3 billion.
“At the time of the transfer of the bank 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 - UAH 40 million. I think their real value is even lower,” Andrey Olenchik, deputy managing director of the Fund, said at the time.
According to him, the Fund submitted 29 applications to law enforcement agencies for UAH 3 billion. “Criminal proceedings have already been initiated based on 26 applications worth UAH 1.8 billion,” said Andriy Olenchyk. Most of the cases were investigated under the articles “Fraud” and “Abuse of Official Position”.
The portfolio of the City Commercial Bank also included illiquid pledges, which are now located in territories not controlled by Ukraine. For example, on April 29, 2014, Garant-Avto PJSC pledged premises in Donetsk to Beverly Rocks LLC as collateral for a loan in the amount of UAH 45 million. It is noteworthy that the deputy chairman of the board of Garant-Avto PJSC was Mikhail Pryanichnikov, who since 2012 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. He was also a member of the supervisory board of ProFin Bank.
Funds were also withdrawn from the bank through foreign structures, for example, the Austrian Meinl Bank. A letter to the Prosecutor General’s Office signed by temporary administrator Andrei Ryazantsev states that the day after the administration was introduced, according to accounting data, there were 59.35 million euros in the correspondent account of the City Commercial Bank with Meinl Bank. On November 26, on behalf of the administrator, 10 thousand euros from the correspondent account were transferred to Raiffeisen Bank International. After this, a request 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. “Given 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, we can conclude that the account was manipulated by the management of the City Commercial Bank.” with a correspondent account at Meinl Bank,” said the statement to the Prosecutor General’s Office.
In 2018, the Deposit Guarantee Fund tried to recover through the court from Tron, Arkallaev, Tumovs and other participants in the “scheme” 2.573 billion UAH stolen from the City Commercial Bank. But the Economic Court of Kyiv rejected the Fund for formal reasons.
As for the investigation of criminal cases of fraud at CityCommerce Bank, only one episode is reliably known, which reached the court in ten years. We are talking about the scheme described just above for withdrawing 90 million UAH through Meinl Bank. There are two accused in the trial - the former president of the bank and its shareholder Reinis Tumovs, as well as the then head of the board - Dmitry Grabovetsky.
However, court hearings are being held with an empty dock, since the accused have been successfully hiding from Ukrainian justice for a long time. Reinis Tumovs lay low in Latvia, and Dmitry Grabovetsky acquired citizenship of the aggressor country and settled in occupied Crimea, where he gradually continues to engage in his favorite banking business.
Sergey Tron, Nurulislam Arkallaev and his brother Roman somehow miraculously avoided charges of participating in the robbery of CityCommerce Bank, despite the fact that they were clearly not naive extras in the criminal schemes. Quite the contrary.
One way or another, the name of Tron, although he calls himself almost the creator and sole owner of the City Commercial Bank, did not appear for a long time in the context of the looting of a 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 amount. But let us emphasize once again: these are just rumors.
So. If the words of our hero that Sergei Tron built 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 apparently stolen from the City Commercial Bank.
Irradiation by Russian atom
White Rock Management and the mining of “cue balls” seem to be a personal business initiative of Sergei Tron, to which he most likely also attracted money from senior partners. But Sergei Tron took direct part in larger schemes, the creators of which were much more significant players.
For example.
In a number of third-tier online publications, Tron’s participation in the adventure with the UkrTVS company has recently been recalled with “kindly, quiet words.” But they don’t reveal, so to speak, the full depth of the game.
And here we need a little history.
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, the Russian JSC TVEL and CJSC National Atomic Company Kazatomprom (Kazakhstan). The purpose of creating UkrTVS was to produce nuclear fuel for Ukrainian nuclear power plants in Ukraine. Russia has never been 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 an eccentric Russia. As a result, an alternative supplier of nuclear fuel for Ukraine emerged – the American company Westinghouse Electric.
Under pro-Western President Yushchenko, in 2008-2009, Westinghouse Electric proposed building a nuclear fuel production plant in Ukraine. The idea of building a plant was liked by those around the next president, the pro-Russian Yanukovych. And in 2010, the right to build the plant was given to the Russian TVEL.
The following year, 2011, TVEL and the State Property Fund created the PrJSC “Nuclear Fuel Production Plant” (nobody intended to build a plant as such, since, I repeat, this always contradicted the economic and geopolitical interests of Russia).
After the Revolution of Dignity in the winter of 2014, Russia began an armed intervention and occupation of Ukrainian territories. In the Pechersk Hills they clearly realized that with the nuclear power plant dependent on the enemy’s 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 48 million UAH it was bought by Vice Trade LLC, founded in 2014 by a certain Andrey 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 appeared on the stage. These were Sergei Tron (who later became the head of the board of UkrTVS) and Nurulislam Arkallaev, who were already familiar to us, as well as Leonid Kryuchkov.
We will dwell on the latter separately.
As ZN.UA wrote, the most interesting figure in the context of nuclear issues is Leonid Kryuchkov, whose older brother, former BYuT people's deputy Dmitry Kryuchkov, was a defendant in NABU criminal proceedings on multimillion-dollar thefts in energy networks.
The younger Kryuchkov, apparently, is also an extraordinary and versatile personality. Leonid Kryuchkov also managed to work in the arms business with Pshonka Jr.; and together with his brother, make friends and work with the influential Kremlin agent Andrei Derkach (one of the main lobbyists for Rosatom and TVEL in Ukraine) when he was the head of Energoatom. As Our Pennies wrote, the Kryuchkov brothers “became known as businessmen who were lobbied into state energy enterprises by the first deputy head of the parliamentary faction of the BPP, Igor Kononenko, a business partner of President Petro Poroshenko.”
ZN.UA, with reference to 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 testified that “the company and its partners have the necessary financial resources and experience and business connections” to realize the “ambitious goal” of building a nuclear fuel production plant in Ukraine. In connection with this, the company proposed to negotiate with it as a “potential investor” in the implementation of this project. Jomart Aliyev, a former top manager from Rosatom, was announced as the project manager.
After completing construction of the announced plant, UkrTVS allegedly planned to transfer it to the Nuclear Fuel Production Plant joint venture (half of which is controlled by the Russians) and receive a percentage or a fixed amount from each unit of production sold. From the Cabinet of Ministers, our nuclear operators wanted to receive a guarantee that the fuel produced at the Ukrainian plant would be fully purchased by NNEGC Energoatom.
If the government had succumbed to the pressure of an influential lobby and agreed to the “tempting” proposals of Tron, Arkallaev and Kryuchkov, naturally, no plant would have been built in Ukraine. But relations with Westinghouse would be extremely damaged, and Ukrainian nuclear power plants, which generate more than half of the country’s electricity, could be left without fuel altogether.
The government decided to nip this multi-step 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, the government in Ukraine is changing and the “nuclear scheme” has a new chance. However, a little about what preceded this.
On the eve of the presidential elections in Ukraine, the 1+1 TV channel released an interview with Moldovan businessman Renato Usatii that Poroshenko killed his own brother. Another “American” businessman, Sam Kislin, already familiar to us, with whom Sergei Tron is connected through at least one handshake, in pure Russian accused Poroshenko of stealing no less than $8 billion.
Semyon 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 government, from the Prosecutor General to President Poroshenko... Poroshenko and his gang earn one hundred dollars from every ton of coal. Poroshenko pocketed about 8 billion dollars. The atrocities of Poroshenko and his gang will not go unpunished. I know that in the United States they are accused of large-scale theft of budget funds from American financial assistance. I testified as a witness in this case.”
In an interview with Russian propagandists on NTV, Kislin admitted that it was he who convinced Giuliani to advise Trump to spin the story of corruption in Ukraine.
Kislin also had his own vested 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 (the offended Kislin in an interview paradoxically calls the confiscation of Yanukovych’s assets an “act of corruption”).
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 in her accounts in Ukrainian banks; they were under arrest. Together with interest, about $23 million came up. 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 was silent, but then, having established contact with Zelensky through the diaspora, he sharply 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 Kiev, in the frame behind the “fighter”, you can see Dmitry Kryuchkov (in a white shirt) - a defendant in a criminal case about the misappropriation of Zaporozhyeoblenergo and causing damage to Ukraine in the amount of 346 million hryvnia, opened by NABU.
“Getting into the frame was not accidental, it was Kryuchkov and Kislin who had a meeting, and Sam decided to show off in front of journalists,” a source in Kyiv close to the investigative authorities told The Insider.
A few months earlier, Kryuchkov was extradited from Germany to Ukraine. After Zelensky won the election, Dmitry Kryuchkov agreed during the investigation to a simplified justice procedure with an admission of guilt and minimal consequences. During the investigation, he stated that he followed the instructions of Poroshenko’s entourage, and he himself was not guilty of anything.
The change of power in Ukraine benefited both Semyon Kislin himself and his Ukrainian partners. In 2020, the beneficiaries of UkrTVS managed to get the bankruptcy procedure abolished, and they even launched a new cautious campaign to persuade the authorities to cooperate. Tronem launched a narrative into the information space that dependence on nuclear fuel supplies from either Russia or the United States is bad, we need to produce our own. Although “our own” meant licensed assembly of fuel cells from Russian components.
It seems that at the beginning of 2022, something began to happen at UkrTVS. This is evidenced by the fact that the Ukrainian shareholder of UkrTVS, the Vice Trade company, is changing its founder on February 22, 2022. He becomes Denis Volobuev - as mentioned above, a manager of structures associated with Tron and Arkallaev.
Previously, the 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, as well as all the assets of the aggressor country in Ukraine, were arrested by the authorities as part of a large-scale case of financing armed aggression.
