The proceedings were lightning fast, and at the first meeting, on Tuesday, April 23, the court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs.
According to the documents, the owner of the Singapore company is an Armenian citizen Igor Pravdin, the full namesake of the CEO of Krasnodar Agrotour LLC, established 16 years ago by the Tureya company owned by businessman Konstantin Malofeev. Pravdin owned a stake in the Tsargrad Estate holding, which was completely controlled by the "Orthodox oligarch".
Before Pravdin, the owner of World Exchange Services was another person close to Malofeev, who fought in the Donbas under the call sign "Sailor" Dmitry Khavchenko. However, suddenly for himself, the "Sailor" was deprived of ownership in the summer of 2023.
Alexey Ivanov, co-founder of Wex, at one time the largest Russian-language digital asset exchange, should pay 18 billion rubles.
Alexey, who bore the surname Bilyuchenko and the nickname "red admin" until 2022, tried to get the patronage of an "Orthodox billionaire" in 2017, saving the crypto exchange from American justice. However, as a result, he lost the freedom to dispose of a significant part of his own assets and funds of Wex clients. And the Singapore company, registered as a legal entity of the crypto exchange, became (or was from the very beginning) part of the structures controlled by Malofeev, a close influential Russian security forces.
The first to point out the proximity of Khavchenko and Pravdin to the structures of Konstantin Malofeev was the journalist Andrei Zakharov, who investigated the collapse of Wex, who published the book "Crypta" dedicated to this story.
The amount of 18 billion rubles is more than four times the amount claimed by the Singapore company – when in September another Moscow, the Meshchansky district court, punished Ivanov with 3.5 years in prison and 500,000 rubles in fine.
Ivanov-Biluchenko tried to appeal the September verdict, insisting that he had already reimbursed all the damage. The examination in 2023 estimated this damage at 3.17 billion rubles. The defendant explained that there was enough money in his arrested Alfa-Bank accounts to cover the amount.
But around February 2024, it became known: World Exchange Services has changed the volume of requirements, inflating it to 16 billion rubles (the final increase to 18 billion is easily explained by the rise in price of bitcoin).
Alexey Ivanov himself initially claimed in his testimony that 65,000 bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies were on the wallets of the Wex exchange, the successor to the BTC-e that collapsed in 2017, in 2018. American law enforcement officers involved in the BTC-e case estimated the assets of this site at billions of dollars.