"Serial" Karchev - 90s in action?

According to the correspondent of The Moscow Post, three co-owners of the largest Russian IT distributor Merlion - Oleg Karchev, Vladislav Mangutov and Alexey Abramov, were detained in a criminal case of murder and destruction of property. The same three co-owners of Realist Bank. Earlier, Boris Levin, a former Vice-President of Euroset and now an employee of Merlion, was detained in the same case.

Merlion was founded in 1992 and is a market leader. Such giants of "computer retail" as DNS, E2E4 and others purchase components from it. It also owns retail stores of Citilink and Positronika equipment, the Russian manufacturer iRU, and other well-known brands. Therefore, the news about the detention of Karchev, Mangutov and Abramov stirred the market up. After all, they face up to 20 years in prison - and the Holy place of the giant Merlion is never empty.

According to our information, Boris Levin and Roman Karchev may be the key figures of interest to the investigation. It is not clear what kind of murder it is about. However, back in 2008, same Levin was detained in the case of extortion and kidnapping of former Euroset freight forwarder Andrey Vlaskin. RBC wrote about this.

In the same year, Levin was acquitted by a jury, and the state was forced to pay him 20 million rubles for illegal criminal prosecution. In the same case, the investigation tried to attract the scandalous founder of Euroset, Yevgeny Chichvarkin, as the accused. He chose to escape to the UK rather than prove his innocence in court.

In 2020, Levin was detained on October 23 - three days before Karchev and his associates were "taken". Shortly before that, a series of searches had taken place in Merlion, as RBC wrote. If they could use the methods of the 90's, which, however, still needs to be proved, then their entire empire is questioned.

However, so many ordinary consumers are tired of this empire, and the owners' personalities are so scandalous that there are those who were happy about it.

Comment on the news about the detention of Karchev, Mangutov and Abramov on the website 3Dnews.ru. Taken from open sources.

Meanwhile, already mentioned Karchev is a much more odious figure than Levin and even Chichvarkin. After all, Karchev is not an ordinary retailer, but, as evil tongues have dubbed him, a "serial banker", or even a "bank destroyer".

It was Karchev who previously owned the collapsed Rost group, which included seven credit organizations at once: Rost Bank, SKA-Bank, Tveruniversalbank, Kedr, Uralprivatbank, Akkobank, and Baikalinvestbank. Under Karchev, the hole in the Growth group reached 50 billion rubles. But there were absolutely no complaints about Karchev himself.

Meanwhile, Karchev, who was scandalized on this topic, did not calm down, because the Realist Bank remained in his hands. In May 2020, he joined the breathless Baikalinvestbank to Realist. According to rumours, the measure was intended to absorb what was left of Baikalinvestbank since the collapse of the Rost group.

Isn’t it a waste of time? If we analyze the Bank's financial statements from October 2019 to October 2020, at first glance, everything is fine. Profits are growing, assets are growing. Here are just a few credit coefficients were in the deep red - H2 and H3.

However, if we narrow down the period and look from May 2020 to October 2020, that is, about six months from the very moment when Baikalinvestbank was joined to Rost, we can see an interesting thing. It turns out that during these six months, the Bank's return on assets immediately fell by 40% and its return on capital by more than 45%.

The data of the Bank

What does this mean? The fact that the Bank is likely to have some problems, the assets of Baikalinvestbank did not benefit it and can be banally withdrawn. Where, how? It is unknown. But know the rumours about the fact that Baikalinvestcom could also receive the assets. And the whole operation to join Realist could have passed for a cover-up of such cases.

The tension among Baikalinvestbank's depositors has been growing since 2018. At that time, Baikalinvestbank ranked 211st in terms of assets and 251st in terms of profit among Russian banks. During the period from summer 2017 to summer 2018, the institution lost 710 million rubles of its assets and 93% of its profit (225 million rubles). It is not clear why there was such a negative trend.

Even at that time, in 2018, Baikalinvestbank had a B-rating from the Analytical Credit Rating Agency (ACRA). The rating was affected by ACRA's negative opinion on the business reputation of one of the beneficiaries, who was a shareholder of Rost Bank and a number of related banks, as Vedomosti reported.

Who was this beneficiary? Could it be Oleg Karchev, whose last name appeared in the news about the collapse of the Rost group?

Husband and wife - one business network?

But Karchev is not only alive with Bank assets. Who, by the way, is the founder of more than a dozen companies. He also has an ex-wife, Elena Vlasova, who is also active in business. Today, she and her ex-husband may be behind the offshore company from Belize, Tiaviz Commerce Ltd, which owns the company Alventa Style LLC.

In its turn, the Alventa Style company at the beginning of 2020 owned a plot of land in the South-East of Moscow, where the famous developer Coldy was going to arrange the construction of the residential complex. Unexpectedly, he decided to build 130 thousand square metres of housing with a sports cluster.

This became known in December 2019, but so far there is no information about the completion of the project. Apparently, we are talking about the apartments of Krasnaya Strela, which is already selling housing, as Kommersant wrote.

As evil tongues say, supposedly, it could be a cover for the possible withdrawals from the Baikalinvestcom - just before his accession to Realist. Elena Vlasova was one of the largest shareholders of this structure in the past. The question is, what could Coldy promise to get into a project with such characters? Probably a powerful line of credit.

And what about the Alventa Style, the possession of which detractors attributed to the former wife of Vlasov, who owned the land? On June 20, 2020, the company was declared bankrupt. She is now in the stage of bankruptcy proceedings. It turns out that all the assumptions and rumours that it could leak the money of depositors of Baikalinvestbank may well be true.

This is also shown by financial indicators. At the end of 2019, the company's loss amounted to 17 million rubles with revenue of 13 million rubles, and the value of assets flew to the basement by minus 50 million rubles. At the same time, the offshore that the structure is registered for is the most alive. Is that where the depositors' money ended up?

Of course, all this looks like quite herbivorous things against the background of reports that Karchev and his partners may be involved in the murder. Let the investigators investigate this case, but does anyone know how many people could have gone to their graves when the banks under Karchev's management collapsed?

How many desperate people did not survive the loss of all their savings? So the things Karchev is accused of today may well be only the beginning.