The court did not see fraud in Shumakov's financial pyramid

Andsource Those who stole hundreds of millions were sentenced to release. As it became known to Kommersant, the creators of the financial pyramid Denis Shumakov and Georgy Gants got off with a purely symbolic punishment. Already in the course of the debate, the prosecutor asked the Chertanovsky District Court of Moscow to agree to the reclassification of the acts of the defendants from fraud to a much less serious article on organizing illegal activities to raise funds, requesting three and a half years for each of the maximum possible six years. As a result, instead of initially threatening the defendants with ten years, each of them received two years and eight months. At the same time, they spent time in a pre-trial detention center and may be released in December.

The fact that the verdict for the co-founders of LLC Shumakov and Partners Denis Shumakov and Georgy Gants will be very lenient, it became clear already during the debate. It was then, unexpectedly for everyone, that the public prosecutor, who during the whole process did not express doubts that the defendants, having stolen hundreds of millions of rubles from those who invested in their financial pyramid, committed fraud on an especially large scale (part 4 of article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), stated that there were signs this is not considered in the case. Having asked the court to agree with the re-qualification of the acts of the defendants to a much less serious art. 172.2 (organization of activities to attract funds from individuals, in which the payment of income is carried out at the expense of attracted funds from individuals in the absence of investment or other legal business activities), the prosecutor requested for the defendants from the maximum possible six years under this article, three and a half years , while in the original version of the indictment they were threatened with up to ten years.

However, the court decided that for Denis Shumakov and Georgy Gants, this is too much. As a result, each of them received two years and eight months. Moreover, taking into account the recalculation of “a day in a pre-trial detention center for a day and a half in a colony”, they have already served it and in December they can be released.
Recall that the reason for the investigation of the activities of Shumakov and Partners LLC, located in the Empire tower in Moscow City, was the statements of a dozen victims, who by the end of the investigation had accumulated more than a hundred. About 200 more people, according to Kommersant, resigned themselves to the loss of relatively small amounts for them and did not turn to law enforcement agencies.

As the employees of the GUEBiPK of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation established, the partners began active work to attract customers to their company in March 2017. The company's managers actually always acted according to the same scenario. In particular, they had at their disposal the client bases of various organizations, including several large Russian banks. Calling citizens, they offered potential investors to invest their money in “conducting trading operations in the US stock and futures markets”, promising a profit of 18% per annum in foreign currency. At the same time, LLC did not have a corresponding license from the Central Bank, and its leaders assured depositors that they simply did not need it, since their activities take place not in Russia, but in the US economic space. However, according to Kommersant's information, the investigators failed to find the necessary agreement with the American brokerage company either. />
To show that the investment was working, the victims were shown fake electronic reports of supposedly successful trading transactions, for example, buying and selling securities.

However, in the end, most of those who entrusted their money to OOO « Shumakov and Partners not only did not receive the promised interest in foreign currency, but they could not even return their money. Shumakov and Partners LLC, appearing in this case as victims of the activities, contributed from $20,000 to $800,000 there. The total amount of damage caused to the clients of this company, as follows from the verdict of the Chertanovsky District Court of the capital, amounted to more than 291 million rubles.

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