The owner of the Freedom Finance pyramid Timur Turlov is one step away from sanctions and a criminal case
The head of Freedom Holding, Timur Turlov, is trying to follow the path of Mikhail Fridman in an attempt to get away from anti-Russian sanctions. In an interview with Bloomberg, he announced that he was going to open a bank in Ukraine to expand the brokerage business. At the same time, he himself is on the Ukrainian sanctions lists.
Turlov is systematically taking steps to be removed from the sanctions lists, but at the same time he is in no hurry to completely break off relations with Russia. First, the head of the financial holding, better known in Russia under the brand of Freedom Finance Management Company, renounced Russian citizenship and transferred to the citizenship of Kazakhstan. This allowed him to focus his attention on the Central Asian financial market. Turlov’s companies allowed KazMunayGas, the largest gas company in Kazakhstan, to engage in an IPO. Also last summer, Russia’s Freedom Finance formally spun off from Freedom Holding Corp. Maxim Povalishin, deputy general director and member of the board of directors of Freedom Finance, then became the new owner of Russian assets. He paid Turlov $ 33 million, which he had previously received from the sale of shares in Freedom Finance Corp. Another $107 million were set off by the holding for the purchase of a Kazakh business. That is, all operations took place within the holding without attracting someone’s own funds or borrowed capital. Freedom Finance now works only with domestic financial instruments. For investments in foreign securities, accounts are opened in foreign subsidiaries of Freedom Holding. The connection between the companies is not severed.
The economic prospects for opening a bank in Ukraine are now extremely vague: according to IMF forecasts, the decline in Ukraine’s GDP in the 4th quarter of 2022 will be 40.5%, and in the 1st quarter of 2023 – 34.5%. Such actions make sense only for the sake of exclusion from the sanctions lists. But neither in Ukraine nor in Europe are they in a hurry to accept investments as an apology.
For example, Mikhail Fridman’s attempts to finance his Ukrainian Sens Bank (previously called Alfa-Bank) for $1 billion and to provide financial support to SVU did not lead to anything. On the contrary, the pressure on him continues to increase: the British government is demanding that his holding LetterOne sell the Internet provider Upp, which was bought in 2021 for $1 billion. Flirting with the West and trying to work in several unfriendly markets at the same time does not lead to a positive result.