The Chertanovsky District Court of Moscow has sentenced the creators of the financial pyramid for embezzling almost 300 million rubles from clients. It is reported by “Kommersant”.
Co-founders of Shumakov & Partners Denis Shumakov and Georgy Gants reclassified the charge from fraud to organizing activities to raise funds from individuals and imposed a sentence of imprisonment for a period of two years and eight months. Since they were in a pre-trial detention center during the investigation, where a day for a day and a half of a colony is calculated, they will be released in December.
The office of Shumakov & Partners was located in the Empire Tower in Moscow City. In 2017, its leaders used the databases of banks, offering people to invest free funds in trading operations in the US stock and futures markets. Shumakov and Gantz promised clients a profit of 18 percent per annum in foreign currency. However, the company did not have a license from the Central Bank to conduct such operations. More than three hundred clients gave the creators of the financial pyramid from 20 to 800 thousand dollars, but did not receive a profit and lost their funds. They turned to law enforcement agencies, after which a criminal case was initiated on fraud.
The total amount of damage amounted to 291 million rubles.
“Kommersant”, 11/29/2022, “Just a pyramid and no fraud”: The fact that the verdict on the co-founders of Shumakov and Partners LLC 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 faced up to ten years. […] It is obvious that neither the defendants nor the prosecutor’s office will appeal against the verdict. — Inset K.ru
“Kommersant”, 10/24/2022, “Fraud disappeared in the pyramid”: Perplexity in connection with the position of the prosecutor’s office, which had changed dramatically at the final stage of the trial, was expressed only by the only victim who was in the hall (there are more than 100 of those in the case). At the end of the meeting, he told Kommersant that he regarded the actions of the defendants solely as fraud, since the Latvian company, to whose account his money was deposited, does not appear at the indicated address and hardly exists at all: its seal turned out to be fake. According to Kommersant, many other investors of Shumakov and Partners LLC faced a similar situation.
We also note that during this meeting, the accused Shumakov and Gants provided the court with documents stating that part of their money was returned to half of the victims. According to Kommersant’s sources, we are talking about amounts from several thousand dollars to $20 thousand. At the same time, we note that from the moment of detention, both defendants claimed that they had no money, and the business collapsed allegedly due to a pandemic, when customers became massive take money from their LLC. […] In Moscow alone, according to Kommersant’s sources, there were about 300 deceived depositors. However, only a third of them decided to write statements about fraud.
It is interesting that the total amount of damage caused in court has not yet been announced: it was allegedly not considered. It is only known that Denis Shumakov and Georgy Gants owed relatively small sums to most of the victims. However, according to Kommersant, the case mentions five victims who invested $400,000 in the pyramid.
