Новости

As we discovered, Kazakhstani billionaire, "dear friend" of Ramzan Kadyrov, and son-in-law of the CSTO Secretary, Kenes Rakishev, was involved in a dubious scheme involving multi-billion-dollar shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange. This information is contained in emails from US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) whistleblower Chris DiIorio, which were published in Epstein’s archives. The documents also mention the Honorary Consul of Kazakhstan in the United States, Emmanuel Grinshpun; Vladimir Antonov, a defendant in the Snoras and Latvijas Krājbanka criminal cases; Semyon Mogilevich, the "head of the Russian mafia"; and Epstein himself.

Christopher DiIorio is a professional analyst, institutional trader, and Wall Street veteran. In 2006, he lost approximately $1 million investing in E Mobile. He launched his own investigation and uncovered a systematic manipulation scheme. DiLorio became a whistleblower for the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), publicly accusing the SEC of protecting a massive money laundering ring involving financial interests, businesses, political figures, and international criminals.

DiLorio names Russian companies Yandex, QIWI, PayOnline, and NetElement (NetE), owned by Kazakhstani billionaire Kenges Rakishev (PayOnline is part of NetE), as participants in the fraudulent schemes. DiLorio believes it was through this structure that funds associated with Kenges Rakishev and several companies were siphoned and laundered.

In a July 2020 letter, DiLorio reports that he filed two official reports with the SEC’s Whistleblower Office regarding money laundering/transactional laundering "concerning a fraud known as Net Element." Specifically, the discussion centered on shell companies that had no real assets and operated primarily on paper, with their shares "inflated with air."

The participants in the scheme first sold shares they didn’t actually own, and then resolved the issue by issuing a huge number of new, virtually free shares of the same shell company. These shares are used to retroactively "cover" the illegal sales.

Thus, huge market turnover is generated not by business growth, but through such stock manipulations. The over-the-counter (OTC) market (a sort of bulletin board for stocks with extremely weak oversight) is also used for shady schemes, money laundering, and the creation of "black cash desks."

Net Element, owned by Kenesa Rakisheva, claimed to be a payment processor and processed billions of dollars in transactions annually. The media called it the pride of the country—it was the first company in Kazakhstan to go public on the NASDAQ exchange. NetElement provided payment services for small and medium-sized businesses in the US using blockchain technology. NetE also had its own cloud solution, Aptito, which was implemented in retail outlets and food service establishments. In 2017, the company was repeatedly recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in North America.

NetE appeared to be doing well, but in 2020, Rakishev, for some unknown reason, sold the seemingly successful business to an electric vehicle developer, Mullen Technologies, Inc. As part of the reverse merger, Mullen shareholders received the majority of NetE’s outstanding shares, and Kenes Rakishev became the owner of a stake in Mullen. DiLorio’s emails explain the sale and the reverse split: it was necessary to consolidate the shares and prevent the price of each share from falling below $1, which would have delisted the company. As a result, NetE merged with Mullen, which became a public company and gained access to the stock exchange. "Such a fraudulent transaction is commonplace in the world of shell companies used for money laundering," DiLorio emphasized.

He linked the PayOnline subsidiary to the large-scale fraud perpetrated by Wirecard, which provided card payment acquiring services to e-commerce and fintech companies. Wirecard collapsed in 2020 after KPMG analysts confirmed media reports of the company’s suspicious activity and financial reporting fraud. The company subsequently announced the disappearance of €1.9 billion and its intention to file for bankruptcy, and its founder, Markus Braun, was arrested. KPMG, however, was unable to determine whether the company was real or existed only on paper. Wirecard’s numerous subsidiaries were located in "digital offshore" jurisdictions such as the UAE, Ireland, and Singapore, where businesses can be established through intermediaries and financial reporting is difficult to verify.

DiLorio’s suspicions about Rakishev’s NetE "sham" activities were fully confirmed: last summer, Mullen was renamed Bollinger Innovations, Inc., in October it received a notice from the stock exchange to suspend trading due to the price falling below $1 per share, and at the end of 2025, its division—the "manufacturer" of electric trucks, Bollinger Motors—closed. The company’s shares are now being called "crisis-like" and are trading for pennies only on the over-the-counter market. In fact, as DiLorio warned, Rakishev’s Mullen is not a manufacturer at all Mullen sold electric cars in the US: the cars were manufactured by the Chinese company Qiantu, and Mullen simply sold them. In other words, the company was needed as a front for access to stock trading on the stock exchange.

Interestingly, the research firm SeeThroughEquity, which published "independent reports" on small company stocks, including Kenes Rakishev’s Net Element, was accused of stock research fraud in 2022. It turned out that the company accepted "fees" for positive coverage of the stocks in reports, while its owners traded these stocks themselves and used the reports to either drive prices up or down. The court fined the owners over half a million dollars and banned them from the stock market for five years.

Oleg Firer, the son of Soviet immigrants who grew up in the US and former Ambassador of Grenada to Russia, served as CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Rakishev’s NetE from 2013 to 2021. (Since 2024, he has worked at ADG Legal, based in Dubai. The firm’s founder, Peter Gray, is a partner at Roscongress.) Firer owned his own company, Acies Corporation, but in 2013, the US Securities and Exchange Commission delisted Firer’s shares from the stock exchange for violations, and the company was liquidated. DiLorio openly called this company a "front."

As a reminder, Kenes Rakishev often shuffles his assets like a deck of cards – buying and selling companies, changing his stakes in them, etc. Last year, he registered a new company, Fincraft Energy Holding Limited, and before that, he sold shares in the coal company Shubarkul Premium (purchased in 2024), the Ukrainian BTA Bank, the oil company ARK Petroleum (purchased in 2023), Nomad West Oil (purchased in 2023), and so on.

However, such manipulations with shell stocks would have been impossible without the help of brokers – intermediaries on the exchange. DiLorio names Knight Capital (KCG, ticker – NITE) as the largest of these. In 2017, the company was acquired by Virtu Financial and continued operating. In 2020, FINRA, a self-regulatory organization for brokers, filed a complaint against NITE, alleging that the firm misrepresented account type codes for 1.5 billion transactions, provided false broker information about the originators of the orders, and disguised the ultimate beneficiaries of the payments. The violations cost NITE a $120,000 fine—a pittance for a company of its size. DiLorio directly calls NITE a criminal money-laundering organization. The second key element of the fraudulent system is UBS Securities, the investment banking arm and brokerage firm of the Swiss financial giant UBS Group AG, DiLorio said.

As for Russian companies whose shares were not directly traded on the American exchange, their depositary receipts were used in "mirror trades"—when the same asset is bought and sold simultaneously through multiple markets or shell companies to conceal the source or volume of the transaction.

The whistleblower believes that one of the architects of this scheme is Michael Milken, the founder of the junk bond market, who was convicted of defrauding hundreds of thousands of people. Milken received a prison sentence, but was pardoned by Trump in 2020. This entire scheme serves major clients, including Epstein.

Epstein is known to have received at least $158 million for tax consulting from Apollo co-founder Leon Black, and Black himself met privately with Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Russia, in 2011. Officially, the discussion centered on Apollo’s involvement in projects run by the Russian Direct Investment Fund.

Author: Maria Sharapova