The police detained top managers of the QBF financial pyramid. They stole up to 7 billion rubles from depositors, including ministers and generals

The police detained two top managers of the QBF financial pyramid in a criminal case of especially large fraud (part 4 of article 159 of the Criminal Code), informs Kommersant. In St. Petersburg, 31-year-old Alexei Golubev was detained, and in Moscow – 33-year-old Vladimir Pakhomov, who had been under recognizance not to leave since the spring of 2020.

QBF co-founder Zelimkhan Munaev and Pyramid lawyer Yevgenia Rossieva are already in jail. The court seized expensive foreign cars, including several Mercedes and Porsches, real estate in the capital and Moscow region, including a shopping center in Zelenograd, as well as shares in several closed-end investment funds owned by organizations affiliated with the group members.

During the interrogation, Pakhomov said that he was in charge of the QBF branches in the Sverdlovsk, Tyumen, Murmansk regions, Bashkiria and Tatarstan. During interrogation, Golubev responded with phrases from special memos for the QBF management, found earlier during searches on every table in the company’s office.

The founder of QBF is Roman Shpakov. He left for the UAE even before the initiation of a criminal case. At the moment, Russian law enforcement agencies have put him on the international wanted list.

About 500 people were officially recognized as victims in the QBF pyramid case, but in reality, according to the investigation, there are at least twice as many of them. Among them are unnamed ministers, clergymen, generals and leaders of various structures, who refused the status of victims, writes “New Newspaper”. The name of only one victim got into the media: the former ballerina Anastasia Volochkova suffered from the actions of scammers, who invested 1.7 million rubles in the pyramid.

One client transferred 1 billion rubles to the organizers of the pyramid in trust, and in total the investors lost up to 7 billion rubles. The central bank revoked QBF’s license on July 8, 2021, but even after that, the pyramid organizers continued to call customers and collect money from them.

Clients were attracted by the promise that they could earn about 20% from investing in QBF. Some depositors were paid dividends, but exclusively at the expense of subsequent depositors. When trying to collect their deposit, the client was refused under various pretexts, and then the QBF staff stopped answering his phone calls.