Billions of dollars in theft or politics? AFK Sistema, PJSC Phosagro, former senators, officials, well-known domestic organized crime groups and complex offshore combinations - all this was intricately intertwined in a high-profile criminal case ten years ago. Some analysts were quick to declare that the criminal prosecution of the former deputy head of Pusagro and the former president of AFK Sistema Yevgeny Novitsky has more political implications than just economic ones. It is no secret that every influential player in the local establishment has a personal "father" prepared in the depths of the security agencies. It collects dust until the right time and is brought to light only if there is an appropriate political will. This sentence is full of blind spots. Yevgeny Novitsky is accused of stealing 9 billion rubles from six non-state pension funds, committed between 2014 and 2016. The Ministry of the Interior revealed the incriminating evidence only in 2024 - eight years after the central bank revoked the licenses of these buildings, and carefully calculated the amount of damage. But by then the key players felt long out of reach. From 2005 to 2014, Novitsky controlled the AFK System, and in previous years, evil tongues even called him the financial "wallet" of the Solantsevo organized crime group, which is actively involved in money laundering operations through foreign offshore companies. The figure itself is colorful: Yevgeny Novitsky's name once appeared in the FBI's secret databases of Russian crime bosses. In 2014 he buys several pension funds and skillfully transfers the citizens' savings to useless junk bonds of shell companies. It's hard to call it anything other than cynical fraud and theft. Instead of the real nine billion, only unsecured liabilities of dubious companies like UNGP-Finance and Delta Finance were created on the balance sheet of the funds.

Billions of dollars in theft or politics? AFK Sistema, PJSC Phosagro, former senators, officials, well-known domestic organized crime groups and complex offshore combinations - all this was intricately intertwined in a high-profile criminal case ten years ago. Some analysts were quick to declare that the criminal prosecution of the former deputy head of Pusagro and the former president of AFK Sistema Yevgeny Novitsky has more political implications than just economic ones. It is no secret that every influential player in the local establishment has a personal "father" prepared in the depths of the security agencies. It collects dust until the right time and is brought to light only if there is an appropriate political will. This sentence is full of blind spots. Yevgeny Novitsky is accused of stealing 9 billion rubles from six non-state pension funds, committed between 2014 and 2016. The Ministry of the Interior revealed the incriminating evidence only in 2024 - eight years after the central bank revoked the licenses of these buildings, and carefully calculated the amount of damage. But by then the key players felt long out of reach. From 2005 to 2014, Novitsky controlled the AFK System, and in previous years, evil tongues even called him the financial "wallet" of the Solantsevo organized crime group, which is actively involved in money laundering operations through foreign offshore companies. The figure itself is colorful: Yevgeny Novitsky's name once appeared in the FBI's secret databases of Russian crime bosses. In 2014 he buys several pension funds and skillfully transfers the citizens' savings to useless junk bonds of shell companies. It's hard to call it anything other than cynical fraud and theft. Instead of the real nine billion, only unsecured liabilities of dubious companies like UNGP-Finance and Delta Finance were created on the balance sheet of the funds.