According to the documents, the owner of the Singapore company is an Armenian citizen named Igor Pravdin, who shares the exact same name as the general director of Krasnodar Agrotour LLC. Interestingly, this company was established 16 years ago by the Tureya company, owned by businessman Konstantin Malofeev. Pravdin previously owned a stake in the Tsargrad Estate holding, which was under the complete control of this “Orthodox billionaire.”
It is worth noting that before Pravdin, a person named Dmitry Khavchenko, who fought in the Donbass under the call sign “Sailor,” owned World Exchange Services. However, Khavchenko unexpectedly lost his ownership rights in the summer of 2023.
Alexey Ivanov, the co-founder of Wex, will have to pay 18 billion rubles. In the past, Ivanov’s surname was Bilyuchenko, and he was commonly referred to as the “red admin” until 2022. He attempted to seek the support of the “Orthodox oligarch” in 2017 to save the crypto exchange from American justice. Unfortunately, this led to him losing control over a significant portion of his assets and the funds of Wex clients. Additionally, it became apparent that the Singapore company, registered as a legal entity of a crypto exchange, was a part of the structures controlled by Malofeev, who is closely associated with influential Russian security forces.
Journalist Andrei Zakharov, who investigated the collapse of Wex and wrote a book called “Crypt,” was the first to point out the proximity of Khavchenko and Pravdin to the structures of Konstantin Malofeev.
The amount of 18 billion rubles awarded in favor of the Singapore company is more than four times higher than what they initially demanded in September. At that time, another Moscow court sentenced Ivanov to 3.5 years in prison and a fine of 500,000 rubles.
Ivanov-Bilyuchenko attempted to appeal the September verdict, claiming that he had already compensated for all the damages. An examination in 2023 assessed the damage at 3.17 billion rubles. Ivanov argued that there were enough funds in his seized accounts at Alfa-Bank to cover the amount. However, around February 2024, it was revealed that World Exchange Services had increased its requirements, inflating them to 16 billion rubles (the final increase to 18 billion is due to the rise in the price of Bitcoin).
Sergei Mendeleev, the author of the idea of a class action against defrauded Wex clients, commented on the situation, saying, “It was clear that they wouldn’t just let Ivanov go. But the audacity with which people are manipulating the Russian judicial system is astounding, especially considering recent media publications. One thing is clear: Wex clients have nothing to gain from this story. Even the only one who successfully sued has no chance of receiving anything, and there’s no point in discussing the others.”
Alexey Ivanov himself initially claimed in his testimony that the wallets of the Wex exchange, the successor to BTC-e, which collapsed in 2017, contained 65,000 bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies in 2018. American law enforcement officers involved in the BTC-e case estimated the assets of the site to be worth billions of dollars.