Former Russian communications minister accused of helping create a pyramid scheme that cost 8,000 investors 5 billion rubles. He lives in the UAE now.
The Russian Interior Ministry’s Investigative Department has charged Nikolai Nikiforov, Russia’s former minister of communications and mass media, in absentia with organizing a criminal syndicate and large-scale fraud, according to the Russian business daily Kommersant.
Nikiforov is now a defendant in a criminal case involving Finiko, a pyramid scheme. The Interior Ministry has been investigating the case for several years. Investigators say the company, founded in Tatarstan, actively recruited investors by promising annual returns of up to 25%.
The company eventually stopped paying dividends, and about 8,000 people suffered combined losses estimated at roughly 5 billion rubles. Investigators believe Nikiforov was among the scheme’s creators.
Investigators say money collected by Finiko was transferred abroad with the involvement of Innopolis Architect, an architectural firm developing Innopolis, a science city and satellite town of Kazan. The firm’s CEO and co-owner, designer Azat Tukhvatullin, has been detained and is being held in a pretrial detention center, according to Kommersant. Nikiforov is the firm’s other co-owner.
According to Kommersant, since resigning in 2018, Nikiforov “visits his homeland only occasionally, living mostly in the UAE.”
Nikiforov served as Russia’s minister of communications and mass media from 2012 to 2018. Before that, he was Tatarstan’s minister of information technology and communications.
In April 2014, members of the Dissernet community found plagiarism in Nikiforov’s academic work. Nikiforov defended his dissertation, titled “An Innovative Model for Managing Information Flows in the Provision of State Electronic Services: The Case of the Republic of Tatarstan,” in 2011. The dissertation council refused to strip him of his academic degree.
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