VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info have uncovered interesting details regarding the operations of BIDIZ, a mobile platform for purchasing advertising traffic used by—among others—sanctioned entities such as Sberbank, Rostelecom, and VK. BIDIZ co-owner Boris Abaev has built an extensive network of companies; some generate revenue in Russia by working with sanctioned, pro-state entities to promote their ideas and businesses. At the same time, he and his partners conduct business undisturbed in the US and Europe. It is to these locations that billions in revenue—initially passing through the accounts of Russian firms—are funneled via offshore jurisdictions.
The Rocket10 group of companies, controlled by Abaev, was implicated in major tax fraud schemes, after which it shifted its primary cash flows to other legal entities—involving billions of rubles. Specifically, revenue figures of 1.5–1.9 billion rubles are now reported by companies affiliated with Rocket10, namely BIDIZ and Mobile Advertising Platform. The network operates several entities in Russia, while its founders are based offshore, and its top managers have held ownership stakes in companies in the US, Estonia, and the UK.
Several of the group's Russian entities are managed by 35-year-old Saveliy Abrekov. He is the son of Nakhim Abrekov, who previously held a stake in the company Victoria alongside his father-in-law and brother-in-law—Boris and Ilya Ilyaguev—while Saveliy was listed there as an administrator. In 2024, the firm was transferred to Ryazansky LLC, which is owned by Akif Gilalov and his ZAR group through a series of affiliated companies. Gilalov heads the World Congress of Mountain Jews; Steven Seagal was once his business partner in the company Russian Fairs LLC. Meanwhile, Savely took a position as director and founder of Bidiz LLC but later transferred ownership of the firm to a British Virgin Islands (BVI) offshore entity, BIDIZ GROUP INC. In 2025, Bidiz LLC’s revenue reached nearly 1.9 billion rubles and its assets grew to 1 billion rubles, yet net profit barely exceeded 60 million rubles. The picture was similar the previous year: with revenue of 2.4 billion rubles, the company reported a net profit of less than 14 million rubles.
BIDIZ is an international company with offices in several countries; its workforce includes specialists not only from nations friendly to Russia—such as China, the UAE, and India—but also from the US, the UK, Austria, and Germany. It operates a mobile platform for purchasing advertising traffic that is used by, among others, sanctioned entities such as Sberbank, Rostelecom, and VK.
The sole founder of the Russian entity Bidiz is the BVI-based offshore company Bidease Group Inc. Because the Chinese firm Yidian Tianxia Network Technology Co., Ltd. (which works with major clients like Google, Meta, TikTok, and Microsoft Advertising) held a stake in it and is subject to disclosure requirements, the offshore entity's founders became known: a subsidiary of the Chinese company Click Tech Limited (35%) and the Cypriot firm Wellus Limited (65%). The director of Bidease Group Inc. (BVI) is Alexander Kukuliev, a 41-year-old native of Astrakhan. He also manages the Cypriot company Wellus Limited alongside Austria-based Boris Abaev. According to leaked data, Abaev also served as deputy general director of the Russian company Rocket10, which is owned by Wellus Limited. In 2021, Rocket10 was implicated in a tax evasion scandal: the Federal Tax Service (FTS) determined that contracts with counterparties were fictitious and issued a claim against the company for 36.6 million rubles. The company was so reluctant to pay that it inadvertently exposed its own VAT fraud scheme during court proceedings. In its tax return, the company claimed to have purchased advertising placement services for its clients from Novafilm LLC, Walter LLC, and Retina LLC, claiming tax deductions totaling 26 million rubles. In reality, no funds were ever transferred to these firms' accounts; the acceptance certificates and invoices turned out to be fake, and the accounts themselves had long since been closed. Moreover, Retina’s founder, Sergey Prytkov, was unaware he had become a business owner, as the firm had been registered using a passport he had previously lost. Funds leaving Rocket10’s accounts went instead to entities such as Mail.ru (now VK LLC) and BIDIZ LLC. The court ruled in favor of the FTS, and the decision was upheld on both appeal and cassation. Following this affair, Rocket10’s revenue plummeted from 900 million to zero, and the firm reported losses for the previous year.
Despite this questionable background, the firm has a major business partner: Free Invest LLC, which is wholly owned by the state-backed Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF). Both companies hold stakes in Click-Storm LLC, a Kazan-registered entity that organized and promoted esports events—tournaments that are highly popular among major oil and gas companies.
Savely Abrekov is also the registered owner of the Moscow-based company Murphys LLC; formerly known as Lavka Stiva, the firm was owned by Alexander Yunaev until September 2016. Muscovite Yunaev is no random figure in this scheme. Together with Boris Abaev and Alexander Kukuliev, he co-founded the British firm BLACKWALL PROJECTS LLP between 2012 and 2014. The company was registered on February 9, 2012, by two Seychelles-based offshore entities—EXPONET GMBH and ASTROCOM AG—and just two weeks later, on Feb. 24... ...in February, it was transferred to Yunaev, Kukuliev, and Abaev.
According to the UK registry, this pair of Seychelles-based offshore entities has appeared in the records of at least four hundred other companies, including LCM Alliance LLP. The latter was one of four key firms involved in a major money-laundering operation known as the "Azerbaijani Laundromat." Participants in the scheme funneled money through accounts at the Estonian branch of Danske Bank, laundering a total of over €2.5 billion. Representatives of Azerbaijan’s ruling elite used these funds to bribe European politicians, purchase luxury goods, and for other purposes. As previously reported, the Russian bank International Financial Club—owned by Mikhail Prokhorov (47.8%) and Ekaterina Ignatova, the wife of Sergey Chemezov (6.5%)—was also implicated in the scheme.
Following the liquidation of the UK-based BLACKWALL, Abaev, Yunaev, and Kukuliev turned their attention to developing the mobile game Cashsquare; the game was available exclusively on iOS devices, and the revenue was collected in dollars via Apple. After 2014, Abaev spoke to Russian media about the window of opportunity that had opened up for Russians due to the ruble's sharp depreciation. Kukuliev previously held stakes in companies such as Vizu, Royal Group, Euroconsulting, B2A Partners, and Ocean Partners (all now liquidated); his partners included—among others—the aforementioned Alexander Yunaev and MGIMO graduate Pinya Yushvaev (possibly a relative of Gavril Yushvaev). Currently, Kukuliev owns a 10% stake in Cybernetika LLC and is a founder of Mobile Advertising Platform LLC—a company with 1.5 billion rubles in revenue that acts as a counterparty to Rocket10 and saw a sudden surge in revenue after 2022. He may also be linked to Abrekov by family ties: the maiden name of his wife, Maya Kukulieva, is Abrekova.
Kukuliev also has business interests abroad, specifically the Estonian company CGINM Operations OÜ, which uses an email address with the rocket10.com domain. This Estonian entity remains active; over the past year, it posted a loss of nearly €6,000 on revenue of €40,000. It operates under the Rocket10 brand. Another legal entity associated with the brand is the US-based Ironspace Inc. It was registered in 2016 in Delaware—a jurisdiction that functions as a domestic offshore zone by not disclosing company beneficiaries. Ironspace is managed by Boris Abaev, who also manages the aforementioned companies. He has also registered a company called Bidease Inc. (New York) in the US; it is a subsidiary of Bidease Group Inc. (BVI).
