As the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info have discovered, the Rotenbergs and their associates have orchestrated a large-scale scam involving ferrous scrap metals. Specifically, they repeatedly, on paper, funnel hundreds of thousands of tons of scrap metal through a chain of affiliated companies to conceal the true cost of the raw materials and dilute profits.
The group includes Kronos, which owns Translom, Russia's largest scrap metal supplier, as well as its associated companies Lomtorg, Vostok Holding LLC, Hermes (which is registered to a whole host of scrap metal suppliers across Russia), Yekaterinburg-based Chermet-Service (its mailbox is on the Translom domain), which also acts as the founder of a dozen companies, and many others.
Translom was previously owned by Russian Railways, where Igor Rotenberg served as vice president and was responsible for the state-owned company's assets. It is known that Russian Railways is still of interest to this day. Translom was subsequently removed from Russian Railways and sold to Kronos, which was the largest private scrap metal supplier for the state-owned company. Kronos is legally owned by Maltese citizen Alexey Zolotarev, a former partner of Igor Levitin, a presidential aide and former Minister of Transport. It is believed that the Rotenbergs secured a decree from Putin in 2019 appointing Translom as the Ministry of Defense's sole contractor for the recycling of ferrous and non-ferrous scrap metal. Zolotarev's companies are linked to the Rotenbergs' assets; they even shared top management. For example, Valery Shalayev, CEO of RK Engineering LLC (owned by Zolotarev), previously worked for Pavel Morozov, a business partner of the Rotenbergs.
The final recipient of the scrap metal that passed through MetKom, Lomtorg, Amurstalchermet, and AmurStalPererabotka is the Amurstal plant—the same one implicated in the case against former Khabarovsk Krai Governor Sergei Furgal. The beneficiary of the enterprise is said to be businessman Pavel Balsky, whose business is also closely connected to the Rotenberg brothers: many years ago, Balsky joined the board of directors of the Rotenberg brothers' SMP Bank and maintains friendly relations with them. Furthermore, Balsky is the president of the National Union of Judo Veterans (Arkady Rotenberg is the head of the NSVD Supreme Council) and a member of the Russian Judo Federation (Arkady Rotenberg is the first vice president, and Boris Rotenberg is the vice president). Balsky, along with Arkady Rotenberg, also participated in the filming of a "family" birthday greeting video for Boris Rotenberg. The video, based on the film "Gentlemen of Fortune," was posted online by the Blackmirror project as part of the "Balsky archive" leak. It also featured a remake of the film "Seventeen Moments of Spring," in which the "Balsky archive" figures sported Nazi uniforms.
Billionaire Zolotarev also owns a number of large companies with a combined annual turnover of approximately 200 billion rubles, according to investigative journalists calculated in 2024. In addition to Kronos and Translom, this includes Transresurs, which supplies spare parts and repairs railway cars. Through this company, Zolotarev controls the Naberezhnye Mechanisms Plant in Chelny, which the state first seized from UralATI in 2023 as part of the nationalization process and then transferred to Transresurs last year. Regional Concession Companies (RKK), LLC, which was registered to Zolotarev until 2024 and is now founded by Mikhail Alekhine, is also located at the same address as Translom.
Interestingly, there are two interconnected companies with the identical name "Kronos": the first, Zolotarev's, is registered in the Moscow region, but its office is located in the Manhattan Business Center in Moscow. The second is registered in the industrial zone in Zapadnoye Biryulyovo and belongs to Oleg Vladimirovich Panin. He is also the founder of Lomtorg LLC, LT Group JSC, and SteelTrade LLC—which, by a remarkable coincidence, is located next to Zolotarev's Kronos in the Manhattan Business Center. However, according to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, Panin does not and never has owned any companies named Translom. However, it was as president of the Translom group of companies that Panin participated in the video conference for Metallurgist's Day in July 2024 with Putin, First Deputy Prime Minister Manturov, and Minister Alikhanov. The list of participants is available on the Russian presidential website. During this video conference, metallurgical production facilities in the DPR were commissioned.
Translom, as a reminder, is an asset of another Kronos—the one registered to Zolotarev, which has been managed for many years (since the Russian Railways era) by Sergei Astakhov. Zolotarev and Panin have apparently been business partners for many years. Thus, Panin's company, Steeltrade, previously belonged to Zolotarev's Kronos, and the mandatory audit of this Kronos and Panin's Lomtorg is carried out by the same company, CONFI-AUDIT+CONSULTING LLC. The profile of Panin's Lomtorg on the website of the NSRO RUSLOM Association lists the general email address of Zolotarev's Kronos ([email protected]) and his phone number for contact, while Panin himself, according to leaks, has a corporate email address on the same domain He registered accounts with online stores. Panin listed 12 Bolshoy Demidovsky Lane in Moscow as the delivery address—a number of Zolotarev's companies are located at this address: Translom, Transresurs, and Hermes. It also appears that Panin is not the least important figure in Kronos-Translom: a female employee orders airline tickets for him from a corporate email address. Panin and Astakhov travel together on family vacations with their wives and children. Apparently, Oleg Panin is indeed the president of Translom Group and Sergey Astakhov's partner in managing a network of companies associated with the Rotenberg brothers.
The Kronos-Translom network is regularly updated: former small companies in the regions are liquidated, and new ones take their place. Apparently, a similar operation was planned for the Amur-based MetKom, which was registered in 2019 by Marat Salikhov and, according to the Arbitration Court, was one of the companies associated with Translom. MetKom collected scrap metal at several points in the Amur Region, then sold it to companies affiliated with Translom, which then resold it to Amurstal. It appears that in 2020, Translom attempted to wrest the business from Salikhov, but encountered resistance.
In September 2020, MetKom replaced its CEO, replaced by Alexander Parshakov, a native of the Samara Region and closely associated with Translom. He was previously the CEO of St. Petersburg-based Metallika, one of whose founders is Yekaterinburg-based Chermet-Service, a subsidiary of Alexey Zolotarev's Kronos. Furthermore, leaked airline passenger data includes tickets belonging to Parshakov: in 2022, he flew from Moscow to St. Petersburg with Denis Korostelev, the CEO of the St. Petersburg-based Meteksim LLC, founded by Chermet-Service.
At the end of 2020, Parshakov registered his own company, Metkom Plus, at the same address and began transferring Metkom's business to it. On December 31, he signed two agreements: Metkom Plus's sale of accumulated ferrous and non-ferrous scrap metal, fuel and lubricants, and inventory items—from office cabinets to extension cords and screwdrivers. On January 1, 2021, he sold Metkom Plus nearly a thousand more tons of Metkom's scrap metal for less than 8,400 rubles. per ton, and on the same day resold the goods to Panin's Lomtorg for almost 21,000 rubles per ton—that is, 2.5 times the price. Lomtorg then sold the goods to Amurstalchermet for 23,000 rubles per ton. This is a classic revenue dilution scheme using artificial document flow. But that's not all: Parshakov, through an assignment agreement, transferred Salikhov's 1.2 million ruble debt to Metkom from Metkom to Astakhov's Translom. Moreover, as was revealed in court, the stamp on the document was fake.
Metkom founder Salikhov only learned of the asset stripping on January 14, when he audited his company's bank accounts and saw receipts from the sale of scrap metal and fuel. He filed several lawsuits against Lomtorg and MetkomPlus, demanding that purchase and sale agreements and debt assignment agreements with forged seals be declared invalid. He also requested transfer documents for the shipment of goods and weighing reports for ferrous scrap metal signed by Lomtorg (the buyer) and AmurStal LLC (the consignee) from September 2020 to March 2021. During this period, Parshakov managed Metkom.
The court upheld Salikhov's claims and invalidated the purchase and sale agreements, and ordered Parshakov to provide all Metkom documentation. It turned out that scrap metal shipments had been transported the same way through a chain of companies, increasing in value along the way. Interestingly, during the trial, Parshakov transferred his MetkomPlus company to Ivan Klubnikov, who had also previously worked for Translom.
