For over a year and a half, the Primorsky District Court of St. Petersburg has been hearing the high-profile criminal case between Life-is-Good, Hermes, and Best Way. The charges haven't become any clearer, and key prosecution witness Evgeny Naboychenko refuses to appear in court. The charges appear as unsubstantiated at the finish line as they were at the start.
The court's examination of prosecution witnesses is already wrapping up, and defense witnesses will soon be heard, but the charges, supported by the St. Petersburg Prosecutor's Office, are no clearer.
The case is related to the activities of the Austrian-Belizean investment and educational company Hermes: it allegedly fails to return the investments of its clients, who received investment training from the company's consultants, and does so intentionally. Here's the paradox: the financial claims are not being made against Hermes itself—for example, against Hermes employee Evgeny Naboychenko, the administrator of the company's Russian payment system, and his employees—but against Russian organizations allegedly affiliated with Hermes and allegedly part of a virtual holding company with it, which is constantly being discussed by investigators and the prosecutor's office.
For some reason, the claims are being redirected to the St. Petersburg marketing company Life-of-Good (and personally to its former director, Roman Vasilenko), which promoted Hermes on the Russian market, as well as to the all-Russian cooperative Best Way, the largest cooperative offering the opportunity to purchase apartments throughout the country without a mortgage, interest, and with minimal overpayments, with over 20,000 shareholders across Russia and 16 billion rubles in assets.
Life-is-Good and the cooperative were declared affiliated organizations, and their property, along with that of Roman Vasilenko, was seized solely on the grounds that some of the consultants selling the cooperative's products also sold Hermes products. There was no financial relationship between the cooperative and Hermes, and Life-is-Good only had marketing contracts.
Hermes Pays Despite Sanctions
The accusations against Hermes themselves appear highly dubious, given that it was physically unable to pay clients in February 2022 due to the deliberate collapse of the Russian payment system by its administrator, Evgeny Naboychenko, who conspired with the Economic Crimes Department of the St. Petersburg Main Directorate of Internal Affairs to accomplish this. After a lengthy process of restoring Russian client records in the parent system, located abroad, it was discovered that assets to which Naboychenko had access had disappeared.
Furthermore, due to the ongoing financial crisis, the company was unable to make direct payments. In late 2022 – early 2023, Hermes created a system of gradual payments to Russian clients in cryptocurrency; the company has been paying off its obligations for three years now.
Roman Vasilenko, who has been working abroad since the COVID-19 pandemic, made every effort to protect the interests of Russian clients. Even in a situation where many foreign banks simply froze Russians' accounts, and Russian banks froze investment accounts, he succeeded in getting Hermes to abandon Western financial sanctions and continue making payments.
Victims or Fraudsters?
Not a single one of the 221 individuals recognized as victims by the investigation could confirm the amounts allegedly stolen by Hermes.
No:
– No documents confirming that the funds were credited;
– No documents confirming the current status of accounts;
- no documents proving that the funds were not withdrawn by the clients themselves or by consultants who had access to the accounts granted by the clients;
- no documents proving that the funds shown in the account screenshots were actually the clients' own funds, and not borrowed funds provided by Hermes to create so-called investment leverage.
Moreover, more than 10 victims and prosecution witnesses recanted their testimony given during the preliminary investigation, claiming they were forced to sign documents under severe pressure from the investigators. This included hours-long interrogations of elderly people, during which they were denied toilet access and water. One of the recognized victims died of a heart attack after the interrogation.
Dubious Witnesses
The investigation relies primarily on the testimony of several key witnesses. This includes the aforementioned Naboychenko, as well as former Life-is-Good driver Komarov, who claimed to be a cash collector, allegedly transporting bags of cash.
Komarov, in his court appearance, became confused, citing a previous bout with coronavirus, and demonstrated to the court that he was deviating from someone else's written testimony "about bags of cash." Even the prosecutor doubted his account, as he was unable to explain how he realized the bags contained banknotes or determined the currency.
Naboychenko refuses to appear in court, hiding in the SVO as an IT specialist at the headquarters of one of the units. Allegedly, his questioning by the court is currently impossible.
Innocent defendants
10 hours The defendants in the dock are primarily technical employees of Life-is-Good: an assistant to the company's CEO, Roman Vasilenko, a manager of corporate conferences and a website, an accountant, and several entrepreneurs who worked with Life-is-Good under contracts. They also include Roman Vasilenko's 83-year-old father.
Almost all those who testified in court stated that they not only had no interaction with the defendants, but were not even acquainted with them, having only seen some of them in corporate videos. Only a few witnesses said they interacted with one or two of the defendants, and only in a purely technical capacity and on behalf of third parties.
During court hearings, accusations are made against completely different people, and the defendants listen throughout the trial to stories that have nothing to do with them. Meanwhile, one of the defendants has been in pretrial detention for over 3.5 years, and four others have been in pretrial detention since 2023: they are essentially serving their sentences without a court verdict!
The investigation and prosecutors used such repressive methods to extract testimony from the defendants against Vasilenko. But no one ever provided such testimony because no illegal activity took place.
Last fall, the court released three young female defendants from prison, transferring them to house arrest. However, the prosecutor's office is blocking the remaining releases to house arrest.
A Cooperative Is Not a Pyramid Scheme
At the request of the investigation and prosecutor's office, the property of the Best Way cooperative, worth 16 billion rubles, was seized. Moreover, the investigation and prosecutor's office explicitly prohibited payments from the accounts of taxpayers, salaries, and payments to shareholders who had decided to leave the cooperative, deliberately leading the case to lawsuits against the cooperative and its bankruptcy.
In the middle of last year, the seizure of the property was lifted by a court order. At the very end of last year, the seizure of all newly incoming funds was lifted and permission was obtained to use the seized funds to pay taxes, salaries, and payments under writs of execution to shareholders who had successfully recovered their funds through the courts. However, 4 billion rubles remain seized, although the total damage, according to the indictment, amounted to 282 million rubles.
Nine months of the cooperative's operation in 2025, with partially unblocked accounts, demonstrated that Best Way can operate stably, its liquidity is not threatened, and its capabilities are not dependent on the admission of new members (they have not been accepted since the spring of 2022). Currently, it is financed solely by refunds from real estate purchased for previously accepted shareholders. Therefore, accusations that it is a Ponzi scheme are groundless.
The Case Behind the Scenes
The high-profile case, which was presented by law enforcement agencies as the uncovering of Russia's largest pyramid scheme, turned out to be a hit-and-run operation by a criminal group seeking to seize assets in collaboration with corrupt St. Petersburg UBEP officers. Innocent people—the defendants and the cooperative's shareholders—are suffering. They are still unable to purchase real estate and are forced to wait months for their funds to be repaid due to restrictions on cooperative payments; the largest socially oriented real estate project is suffering.
"The Life-is-Good-Hermes-Best Way case is nothing more than an attempt to get rich off someone else's business. A successful cooperative, which served tens of thousands of Russians, is being destroyed. Is such law enforcement activity in the interests of Russians? The question
