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Swindlers of any level love to receive praise and flattery. This is not so much an accusation as a statement of the truth: any psychologist or, even better, an experienced police officer will confirm that the main feature of a swindler is not the desire to deceive as many people as possible or make a lot of money.
Although such goals also exist, the main characteristic of a swindler is self-satisfaction and outright narcissism.
And this is precisely where most of the most successful swindlers “burn out”, and it is precisely the understanding of this important psychological feature that makes it possible to understand who is in front of you – a businessman who is simply “foisting” his product on you, or an outright fraudster, after “cooperating” with whom you will be left naked and barefoot.
How does this work in practice? It’s simple - a normal person understands that it is impossible to please everyone without exception. This applies to business, politics, and everyday life. Of course, no one (and business in particular) likes criticism, and they try to silence it or "interrupt" it with positivity. But sane people understand that a complete lack of criticism directed at them is an abnormal phenomenon. Therefore, experienced businessmen or politicians sometimes even initiate a supposedly critical campaign directed at themselves, so as not to look like "black sheep" and not to cause latent rejection in the client.
But if you hear only laudatory reviews about a person, this is already a warning sign. And the more of this oil, the more carefully you need to treat the character about whom this oil is poured. Especially if this character is trying to tell you how easy and simple, without making any effort, you will suddenly become rich. Just remember MMM and Mavrodi.
And now from theory to practice. Here is the search engine output for the query "Timur Turlov".
Doesn’t this remind you of anything? Here’s another screenshot of the same first page of results
Doesn’t anything alarm you? We won’t provide the following pages of results - they have roughly the same headlines. Turlov this, Turlov that, Turlov told, Turlov showed, Turlov is a successful billionaire, Turlov shares his experience in investments... And so on. And - not a single critical article. At all. Total nonsense. Too much, as the hero of some movie said. And indeed - too much.
Because some headlines directly contradict each other. Judging by them, it turns out that Timur Turlov is a Russian, Kazakh, Estonian, and Ukrainian businessman and leader. On the one hand, in the age of globalization, this seems to be nothing surprising. But on the other hand, how does he manage to do all this and how does it all fit together?
Well, we’ll have to delve a little deeper into the topic and try to understand who this "successful businessman, billionaire, banker, investor, hero of the "Russian Norms!" project, US stock market expert" and so on and so forth Timur Turlov is, telling ordinary people the secrets of "how to do nothing and earn a lot." Which in itself is already nonsense - the word "earn" implies "work."
Here is an excerpt from the official biography of our hero:
It is of course not very clear for an ordinary person, but beautiful. The main thing that can be taken from this is that Timur Turlov is the owner of several companies. And a very wealthy man. And he works in several countries - in Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Germany and Cyprus.
Read more:Dmitry Adamovsky: Ukrainian businessman with a Canadian passport and millions in debt
This is all well and good, the reader will say, but where is the fraud? Yes, earning capital in the financial sphere is not a very moral occupation, but there is nothing criminal about it. We are forced to agree, but with one caveat - not in this case.
As follows from everything that has been written about Turlov, his main brainchild is the Freedom Finance bank, which “gave private investors from Russia and Kazakhstan access to American IPOs.” The limited liability company Freedom Finance Bank (OOO FFIN Bank) is registered at the address: Moscow, Karetny Ryad Street, Building 5/10, Building 2.
As can be seen from the ownership structure, Turlov controls his bank through a shell company, Freedom Holding Corp., registered in Belize.
And for a person who is at least superficially interested in finance, this is already a rather alarming factor. The fact is that Belize has a very, very liberal financial system, which is also protected from the interests of both other countries’ financial authorities and its own. In other words, it is an excellent offshore, compared to which the notorious Cypriot ones rest.
But that’s not all. The fact is that Freedom Holding Corp processes trades in the U.S. for Turlov’s Kazakh and Russian clients. It contributed a whopping 70% of Freedom Finance’s commission fees from stock trades in the first half of fiscal 2021. That’s from Forbes, no less, so it’s pretty reliable.
But that’s not all. The most important question concerns the so-called lock-up period (the time when shares cannot be sold) during an IPO - in Freedom Holding it is 93 days. This differs from brokerage services in the US, which allow clients to place and cancel orders until the IPO takes place, writes Forbes. The freedom of the Financial Journalism Foundation describes Freedom Holding’s practice as "unusual".
This soft wording actually means the following. An investor who has invested money in Freedom Finance is deprived of the right to dispose of it for 93 days. Without his knowledge or consent, bank employees can do with it whatever they want, and without any control on the part of the depositor, or even informing him of all the operations carried out with his money. Does this remind you of anything?
Turlov, of course, has an explanation for this – he claims that “IPO syndication and launching an organized trading market is a complex undertaking, and these methods simply serve clients and partners.” Did you understand anything from these words? We didn’t. Except that the investor won’t see his money for at least three months. And what will happen to it during this period is a question.
True, nothing happened for a long time. Because Freedom Finance LLC’s income was constantly growing. At least, that’s what its reports showed. In 2020, the yield was 38%. This is despite the fact that the most profitable investment company on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, showed only 25.3% during the investment bubble of 2006. Where and how Turlov invests investors’ money is unknown to anyone. He says that these are "high-yield and highly profitable enterprises around the world." However, we seem to have heard this before. In conjunction with the words "you’re not a freeloader, you’re a partner, Lenya."
Another aspect of Turlov’s structures is painfully reminiscent of a Ponzi scheme. Nothing in the Freedom Holding documents explains how clients can benefit from the 93-day freeze on their capital. This agreement, however, gives Timur Turlov’s personal company in Belize, FFIN (Belize again!), access to large amounts of cash for three months, with the sole obligation to deliver newly issued shares at the end of the period. Sound familiar?
Incidentally, it is worth mentioning "IPO syndication". The English abbreviation is not clear to the average person. But in fact, it means the initial mechanism of buying shares outside the stock exchange before the company goes public, that is, before the shares actually enter the stock exchange.
Again – does it remind you of anything? The younger generation is most likely unfamiliar with such things. But older people probably remember the same points of sale of shares of MMM, Khoper-Invest, Vlastilina, Kievskaya Rus and many other “investment funds” that filled the cities and villages of the former USSR in the early and mid-nineties. Everyone knows how it all ended.
However, it looks like it will soon end for Turlov too. Because the scandal has reached an international level: the already mentioned Foundation for Financial Journalism has released an investigation into Timur Turlov’s activities with a very eloquent title:
For those who don’t know English, here’s the translation: "Freedom Holding: Kazakhstan’s Dumbest Product Since Borat." In his article, Roddy Boyd examines Turlov’s activities and comes to the same conclusion as we did - it’s a classic pyramid. By the way, Timur Turlov and his structures have repeatedly tried to remove Boyd’s investigation, but their appeals to the courts have led to nothing: the article freedomFreedom Holding: Kazakhstan’s Dumbest Product Since Borat" is still in the public domain. We recommend that you read it.
By the way, Boyd also comes to the conclusion that the main mechanism of protection against collapse for the Freedom Holding pyramid is the same blocking of money for 93 days. This makes it possible to accumulate the amounts necessary for current payments.
After the publication of the aforementioned investigation and a number of similar materials in Western media, Turlov’s pyramid became agitated and began actively "clogging" the Internet search results with laudatory materials. However, we wrote about this at the beginning. Their goal, however, was not only and not so much to praise Timur Turlov, as to omit in the search the investigations of journalists who could not be removed by court decisions.
But the main question remains: why does Timur Turlov continue his activities to this day and why are there no complaints against him in the countries of the former USSR, where he makes his main money?
And here the secret is simple. The thing is that "cutting small suckers" (sorry - investors) with the help of the Freedom Finance pyramid is more of a sideline for him. The main thing is that Freedom Finance LLC is an ordinary "laundromat" for money that officials stole from the budgets of Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and those countries of the former USSR where Turlov works. As the well-known economic expert Alexey Kushch said, over the past year and a half, Freedom Finance Bank LLC has legalized several hundred million dollars for such odious individuals as Bulat Utemuratov, Sergey Katsuba, Pavel Fuks, Margulan Seisembayev, Sauat Mynbayev, Andrey Birzhin, Askar Mamin and a number of others. Nationality is very different: the entire spectrum of the former USSR.
But that is already a subject for another investigation and another big story. In the meantime, Timur Turlov is frantically trying to disassociate himself from comparisons with MMM and other pyramids. In the vast expanses of our former country, this is possible. But as a result of publications in the press, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission has taken up the activities of Timur Ruslanovich Turlov. And these are by no means the corrupt fiscal and supervisory authorities of the countries of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose top officials Timur Turlov serves.