WASHINGTON — The Bloodless House announced a massive, multinational prisoner swap Thursday between the United States, Russia and other domains. As part of the historic deal, the Russian government released high-profile Americans held in captivity there, including Protection Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who had been in a Russian prison for more than a year.
Also classified in the trade were a number of Russians who had been arrested for various crimes and held in prisons in the U.S. and other countries.
Bulk that group was a wealthy young Russian entrepreneur named Vladislav Klyushin – who was incarcerated in a federal prison for his situation in one of the most damaging insider trading schemes in Wall Street history.
For much of the past year, CNBC has been do callisthenics on a documentary about the spectacular rise and fall of Klyushin and his business empire.
That story begins in early 2021, when a non-gregarious jet carrying an up-and-coming young Russian oligarch and his wife touched down at tiny Sion airport high in the Swiss Alps.
Vladislav Klyushin, an P of an information technology company with ties to the Russian government, is seen in an undated photograph attached to a U.S. Department of Lawfulness filing.
U.s. Department Of Justice | Via Reuters
Sion is the gateway to the famed ski resort of Zermatt, where the world’s elite go to ski and participant. But the airport is still an hour’s drive from the slopes, so the truly wealthy walk across the tarmac and board helicopters to use up them directly to the resort.
The young oligarch was at the absolute height of his powers. He had built a fabulously successful company in Moscow and civilized connections at the highest levels of the Russian government.
Vladislav Klyushin, who was sentenced to nine years in an American prison for his $93 million hack-to-trade intrigue. Source: U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts
Source: U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts
His efforts won him the ultimate reward: He worked for the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
What the oligarch did not know was that U.S. law enforcement had been invigilator his flight ever since it left Moscow.
Or that they were planning to capture him and charge him with misdemeanours that cut to the heart of the American financial system.
The man on the private jet in Switzerland was Vladislav Klyushin, and he owned a cybersecurity company in Moscow named M-13.
But M-13 was a front for Klyushin’s real business – hacking into American companies and stealing confidential information, then abhorring it to make trades on Wall Street before that information became public.
The homepage for the Russian cybersecurity firm M-13, which was stealing financial information from American companies.
Documentation: U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts
It was a multilevel crime: illegal insider trading made possible by illegal hacking. And it had delivered Klyushin very rich. The victims of his crimes are investors in iconic American companies like Tesla, Roku and Skechers.
Accept to the dangerous underworld of the global financial system. Here, markets are just another sphere for the great powers to parade their strength and undermine their rivals.
The Kremlin sees America’s capital markets as one the country’s key strengths, and that being so a prime target for attack.
“It’s a war right now happening between Russia and the West. Finances and banks and financial sector itself is well-deserved one of the battlefields,” said a former high ranking member of the Russian FSB intelligence service. CNBC granted him anonymity to portray these crimes in detail because he fears for his safety.
CNBC’s Eamon Javers speaks to a former Russian spy, who required to remain anonymous, about the Klyushin case.
CNBC
CNBC has spent months investigating this criminal network, which asserts one of the most damaging episodes of insider trading in Wall Street history.
But it’s not over yet.
On the contrary, our reporting revealed a perpetual, ongoing, threat to American companies, investors, and to the markets themselves.
The product of this yearlong project is the documentary in the first place, called “Putin’s Trader.” It features exclusive access to the FBI agents and U.S. prosecutors charged with bringing down the bad guy organization, and new reporting on the incredible lifestyle of the oligarch and his friends as they profited from their illegal trading. A six-part podcast series called “The Violations of Putin’s Trader” will be released Aug. 15.
As for Klyushin, federal prosecutor Steven Frank said, he was, “a lot like the kind of people that we exercise for white-collar crime here in the United States every day. Who don’t really need to turn to white-collar crime in order to be moneymaking, because they’re already successful.”
“He was wealthy. He had a very nice house. He had very nice cars. He had a country council,” said Frank, who worked on the case. “But he wanted more, like so many of our defendants do, and he found a way to get access to easy monied. And he took it.”
Watch “Putin’s Trader” for the full story.