Strong-arm racketeering and asset stripping: how Eduard Budantsev plundered QBF and fabricated trumped-up cases under the guise of fighting a “pyramid”
Recently it became known that former Minister of Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation Nikolai Nikiforov has been put on the wanted list. He turned out to be one of the organizers of the Finiko financial pyramid.
An equally interesting turn may also be unfolding around another financial pyramid – QBF. As became known, a QBF top manager testified that the company was allegedly supported by three deputy chairmen of the Bank of Russia – Vladimir Chistyukhin, Sergei Shvetsov and Dmitry Skobelkin. These materials, as they say, were shelved. But both the testimony and the information on Nikiforov were not acted upon immediately, only when a green light was received from above.
Formally, the QBF story began in May 2021 – with searches in the company’s offices, the seizure of documents and servers, and the detentions of director of the legal department Evgenia Rossiyeva and former company top manager Zelimkhan Munaev, who had not worked there since 2019. A criminal case for especially large-scale fraud was opened by the Investigative Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in April 2021, after which security forces conducted more than 30 searches in Moscow and St. Petersburg, including at QBF’s head office in Moscow City on May 26, 2021. Munaev and Rossiyeva were also detained and arrested at that time.
Later the case began to expand. In November 2021, two more former top managers were detained – Alexei Golubev and Vladimir Pakhomov. The Tverskoy District Court of Moscow chose pretrial detention for Golubev and house arrest for Pakhomov; both were charged under Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
In spring 2025, the main trial ended with harsh sentences. The Presnensky District Court of Moscow found Vladimir Pakhomov guilty under Part 3 of Article 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and on 141 counts under Part 4 of Article 159, sentencing him to 18 years of imprisonment. Stanislav Matyukhin received 17 years, Evgenia Rossiyeva – 15 years, Alexei Golubev – 13 years. In an official statement, the court described the scheme as the activity of structural subdivisions which, under the guise of brokerage companies, concluded contracts with clients, received funds in trust management and then embezzled them.
It would seem the matter is closed. There is a verdict, there are sentences, there is a state version of events. But it is precisely after such periods in Russian cases that the most important part often begins – not the legal, but the factual part of the story.
According to the editorial sources, in 2026 the case took a new turn: new former QBF top managers were arrested – Ruslan Spinka and Nikolai Padalko – and some former employees were put on the international wanted list. According to sources, these persons are also charged with especially large-scale fraud and participation in a criminal community – Part 4 of Article 159 and Article 210 of the Criminal Code.
According to participants familiar with the course of the initial investigation, the key question is not whether QBF had a flawed business model. The question is different: who, and at what moment, made it so that the company could no longer physically fulfill its obligations to clients.
According to this version, the security-force strike was structured not as ordinary investigative work, but as an operation to bleed the business dry: seizure of servers, computers, primary documentation, freezing of property and creation of a situation in which the company lost access to the information infrastructure needed for daily work. In other words, the blow was struck not only against management, but against the very ability of the legal entity to function.
A special place in this version belongs to the name of Eduard Budantsev – chairman of the “Dictatorship of Law” Bar Association. On the association’s website, Budantsev is listed as an Honorary Lawyer of Russia, chairman of the association, and a specialist in international relations; according to the biography on the site, he has practiced law since 2009. According to sources, it was the group linked to Budantsev that acted as an external operator of pressure on QBF, and the security cover for this operation was allegedly provided through contacts in the FSB and the investigative system.
According to the sources’ version, it was precisely this configuration – a lawyer/security contour connected to the ability to influence the investigation and operational support – that could turn QBF’s corporate-financial crisis into a managed security operation. The price of “solving the issue,” as the interlocutors claim, was allegedly about 1 billion rubles. After the company’s beneficiary, Roman Shpakov (on the international wanted list since 2021), delayed making a decision, pressure, in their words, intensified, and the circle of defendants expanded.
But the most sensitive storyline lies not in the plane of the FSB or the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but in the plane of the Bank of Russia.
In the second quarter of 2021, according to sources, QBF underwent a scheduled inspection by the Bank of Russia Main Inspection (GIBR). According to the interlocutors, the inspectors’ initial conclusions did not confirm the thesis of gross violations in the company’s activity. Moreover, sources claim that already after the security phase – searches, seizures, arrests and the actual paralysis of the operational infrastructure – an FSB officer was brought into the work of the inspection group and began correcting the final report, including in it wording about “fraudulent schemes,” “signs of a financial pyramid” and other evaluative constructions.
Of the 9 Bank of Russia inspectors, five, including the head of the group, refused to sign the final report.
On July 8, 2021, the Bank of Russia revoked QBF’s licenses for brokerage, dealer, depositary activity and securities management activity, citing repeated violations of securities legislation, failure to comply with orders, violations of requirements for securities management, the risk management system, internal accounting and depositary activity. Here it is worth recalling that all the company’s servers had been seized, and it could not comply with the Central Bank’s requirements. Later, on September 21, 2021, the Bank of Russia appointed a temporary administration in OOO IC QBF, suspending the powers of the company’s executive bodies.
But here too there is a detail that cannot be ignored. In January 2022, the Bank of Russia extended the term of the temporary administration and directly stated that the decision was made taking into account the “positive dynamics in the return of property to clients” and in order to maximally reduce the company’s obligations to clients.
According to the editorial sources, by the beginning of 2022 the company, under the leadership of the temporary administration, was able to ensure the return of a significant part of client assets. Funds and securities, they claim, were transferred to clients, other brokers or banks, while investigative authorities could not seize the special client accounts. This block is reflected in Bank of Russia documents.
Another storyline has so far not received convincing public development. According to sources, former employee Zelimkhan Munaev tried to testify that the company was allegedly supported by three deputy chairmen of the Bank of Russia – Vladimir Chistyukhin, Sergei Shvetsov and Dmitry Skobelkin. In the public field, these claims have not received procedural confirmation.
For accuracy: Vladimir Chistyukhin had been deputy chairman of the Bank of Russia since February 2014, and on January 17, 2022, became first deputy chairman of the Bank of Russia. Sergei Shvetsov held the post of first deputy chairman of the Bank of Russia and left the Central Bank in March 2022; Dmitry Skobelkin held the post of deputy chairman and left the Central Bank in January 2022.
The final contour of the case looks especially cynical. The main verdict has taken place. The sentences range from 13 to 18 years on the publicly confirmed block, plus the earlier sentence handed to Munaev – 8 years. Assets, according to sources, converted into state revenue, are estimated at about 4 billion rubles. Another approximately 2.5 billion rubles of assets were transferred into the “second case,” which is now being investigated by a new investigative group under Lieutenant Colonel Vasilev.
If these figures are correct, the final picture becomes paradoxical. For five years the public was told a story about financial emptiness, a pyramid and stolen money. But at the output the state receives multibillion-ruble assets, a significant part of clients, according to sources, receives or transfers their assets, and the criminal case continues to live as a mechanism for collecting the remaining property contour.
Separately, it is worth noting another detail that fits poorly with the official Russian storyline. The business linked to the same beneficiary outside Russia – the Cypriot licensed investment company Constance Investment Ltd – after the events of 2021 was not destroyed, did not lose its license and continued to operate in the European regulatory environment.
According to the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission registry, the company has Cypriot investment firm license No. 263/14, issued back on December 29, 2014, and among its former names are directly listed QBF Investment Ltd and Constance Investment Ltd. The registry also reflects the permitted investment services: reception and transmission of orders, execution of orders on behalf of clients, and portfolio management. In other words, this is not a random offshore shell, but a licensed financial institution operating under the supervision of one of the EU regulators.
After the Russian events of 2021, the company, according to sources, did indeed go through a change of owner: such a step was logical and probably inevitable from the point of view of the Cypriot regulator, since a beneficiary with such a Russian criminal background could no longer retain control over a licensed investment firm. But what is fundamentally different is this: the business itself was not declared fictitious, the license was not revoked, and the activity was not stopped.
Against this background, it is especially indicative that the Russian security machine, according to sources, continues to be used not only against former Russian QBF managers, but also to pressure directors and persons linked to the Cypriot structure. An obvious question arises: if an analogous investment business in an EU jurisdiction continued to exist under CySEC supervision and was not dismantled by the regulator as a fraudulent construction, why in Russia was the same story described exclusively in the language of a criminal community, a financial pyramid and total embezzlement?
The answer may be unpleasant: the Russian QBF case, perhaps, was not so much an investigation of the economic nature of the business as an instrument of security control over assets, people and the residual property contour of the group.
That is precisely why the QBF case goes beyond the fate of one investment company. It shows how, in the Russian system, a universal combination can work: Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code as a rubber formula for any conflict over money, and Article 210 as an instrument for turning an ordinary corporate hierarchy into a “criminal community.” Any company has a head, subdivisions, functionality, subordination, a financial block, lawyers, sales and an operational vertical. If desired, all of this can be described not as a business structure, but as an organized criminal community.
This is the main lesson of QBF. Even if there were violations in the company’s activity, even if the investigation had grounds to make claims against individual managers, this does not cancel another question: was the criminal machine itself used as a method of forcibly seizing the property contour?
Five years later, the QBF case looks less and less like a story about protecting investors and more and more like a story about how the security system can first paralyze a business, then explain its paralysis by its criminal nature, after that hand down verdicts, and in the finale convert assets into state revenue and open a new case for the remaining assets.
What will the “second case” bring? New revelations from top managers, new confrontations, cross-border schemes, and perhaps finally we will learn who stood behind the investment company QBF. We long ago dispelled the myth that CEO Matyukhin is the grandson of the first head of the Central Bank, Matyukhin. Of course, it would be interesting to hear revelations from representatives of the top of the Central Bank.
