All 11 defendants in the Heritage case, the consideration of which started in the Naberezhnye Chelny City Court, were charged with fraud, deliberate bankruptcy, money laundering and organizing a criminal community or participating in it. The leader is Rinat Nurislamov, a well-known ex-deputy of the City Council in Chelny and the owner of Useful Newspaper. About how the roles in the criminal organization were distributed, what the victims say and what the journalists were guilty of before the accused – in the report “BUSINESS Online”.
Under the cry of a child
Consideration of one of the most high-profile cases for the motor city – the company “Heritage”, which is called a financial pyramid – is being held in the Naberezhnye Chelny City Court to the crying and groaning of a four-month-old child. According to the co-owner of the business, Roza Khasanova, she will come to each meeting with her daughter so as not to interrupt breastfeeding. According to Khasanova, at the first court hearing (December 14, 2022), they were both shocked by “the shameless and boorish behavior of media representatives who, in pursuit of the editorial task, ignored the usual norms of humanity and ethics, actively filming how my my daughter was crying and suffering from everything that was happening.” She asked the court to hold court sessions no more than 2 times a month with breaks between them of at least 14 days, and also to prohibit the use of photo and video equipment by reporters. Federal judge Victoria Bondareva agreed with the latter. It should be noted that yesterday, due to constant 15-minute breaks due to the presence of a child, in four hours the prosecutor managed to read out only a little more than 20 pages.
Khasanova is the sister-in-law of the main person involved in the case, the founder of Heritage, the ex-deputy of the Chelny City Council Rinat Nurislamov. His sister Venera Nurislamova made a similar request: she would like to postpone the proceedings until her son’s second birthday. The court refused, providing, like Khasanova, a room for feeding.
Most likely, the court will be able to observe the maturation of these children – the trial runs the risk of dragging on for years. After the initiation of a criminal case, Nurislamov and Co. were called followers of Sergei Mavrodi, but it came to court only after 6 years. In the case of 100 volumes, 2,046 victims, the damage was estimated at 622 million rubles. The defendants (11 of them) pleaded not guilty. They face up to 15 years in prison.
As one of the victims, Vitaly Vasyutkin, who in 2015 invested 4.5 million rubles in Heritage (and his wife another 2.5 million) told BUSINESS Online, the company was recommended to him by a neighbor: “He got everything money. He was charged. And I invested later, too late. I don’t know how they survived such a loss of money. It was very hard. I nearly had a stroke. That’s why I’m talking late now.”
The financial pyramid, according to investigators, operated from October 2009 to September 2015. The accomplices created Naberezhnye Chelny Savings Company Nasledie LLC and 9 other organizations that accepted deposits from citizens in 13 cities of Russia, promising high returns. Depositors “bought” for a massive campaign in the media, purchased pension bills from Heritage at a favorable interest rate, the money from which was formally sent by the company for consumer loans to the population, both directly and through microfinance organizations.
At the beginning of 2015, Heritage stopped both paying interest on deposits and returning investments. The money received was withdrawn through the execution of loan agreements with affiliated companies, which were eventually deliberately bankrupt. The criminal community, the investigation is sure, operated on the territory of Tatarstan, as well as the cities of Ufa, Nizhny Novgorod, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Tolyatti, Tyumen, Izhevsk, Perm, Khimki, etc. The network of microfinance organizations even reached Ukraine. The company’s office in Chelny was located in the business center 2.18, better known as “Tubeteika”.
According to investigators
The defendants are charged with fraud, deliberate bankruptcy, money laundering and organizing a criminal community or participating in it (Article 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). “From October 2009 to May 2013, Nurislamov, realizing the social danger of his actions, foreseeing the onset of socially dangerous consequences in the form of the creation of a stable structured criminal organization whose activities are aimed at the theft of funds, their legalization (laundering) and deliberate bankruptcy, and wishing them offensive, with the aim of committing grave crimes, involved Anton Ioffe, Elena Samoilova, Ildar Nigmatullin, Gulshat Nurislamova, Venera Nurislamova, Roza Khasanova, Guzel Gilyazeva, Guzel Suleymanova, Vasily Chernyshov and Rashit Khasanova in the criminal organization, which he himself headed and personally participated in the committed crimes,” the spokesman said.
The investigation calls Nurislamov the creator and coordinator of all the activities of the criminal organization. His responsibilities, the prosecutor said, included general planning of criminal activity, determining the strategy and coordinating the actions of a criminal organization, organizing and expanding the criminal business through the development of separate structural units and general management of them, establishing a hierarchical structure and composition of participants in a criminal organization, each of which was endowed with special functions, collection of funds obtained by a criminal organization as a result of committing crimes, etc. After listening to this description, Nurislamov smiled not without complacency.
The prosecutor named his wife Gulshat Nurislamova and Khasanov as active participants in the OPS. They were part of the immediate environment of the head due to close family ties, the first was the deputy director for personnel, the second was the deputy chief accountant. One of the key positions in the hierarchy was occupied by Nurislamov’s cousin Ildar Nigmatullin. Anton Ioffe and Elena Samoilova also enjoyed special trust – according to their previous joint work. Nurislamov, together with Ioffe, founded the Useful Newspaper, which was published in Chelny for several years with a circulation of 120,000. The publication actively advertised Heritage, and closed in December 2015 amid problems with depositors. The prosecution is sure that Ioffe, being the director of Parallel-Invest LLC, received funds in the form of loans in the amount of more than 8 million rubles. He also received money on behalf of Meridian-Invest – 1.6 million rubles, as well as under the pretext of carrying out construction and other work – 11.2 million rubles. Funds, according to the investigation, no one was going to return. Nigmatullin also took a loan from LLC.
Venera Nurislamova, Guzel Suleymanova, Guzel Gilyazeva and Vasily Chernyshov, according to investigators, were not empowered to independently dispose of the stolen money, but at the same time they were aware of the main activities of the OPS, schemes, methods of committing crimes. “They deserved trust and unquestioningly obeyed Nurislamov,” the state prosecutor said. Suleymanova was the head of the regional development department, Gilyazeva was the technical assistant to the director and served as the general director of First Financial Leasing Company LLC, which, according to the investigation, was created for money laundering. Venera Nurislamova was the general director of SKN LLC, and Chernyshov was the general director of Naberezhnochelninskaya SKN LLC.
Rashit Khasanov (father of Gulshat Nurislamova and Roza Khasanova), the oldest defendant, was also an accomplice of the OPS. According to the prosecutor, he was a confidant of Nurislamov and his daughters, acted on their instructions. He, being an individual entrepreneur, was engaged in the production of wicker furniture with money received in the form of loans from the legal entities of Heritage. Participated, according to investigators, in making fictitious transactions in order to reduce solvency and subsequent deliberate bankruptcy of Naberezhnye Chelninskaya SKN LLC, First Financial Leasing Company LLC and IP Khasanov R.F. Another 15 people, although they worked for Heritage, did not become defendants in the case. These are client managers, they allegedly were not aware of Nurislamov’s intentions and plans.
The reading of the indictment will continue on February 6.