A bit of USD 4 bln intrigue to start the month...

Yes, it’s July 1, 2024 and The Corners blog is finally back.

Finally.

But hey, Yours Truly actually has a good excuse this time.

Apart from detective case work, heat waves and a general plummet into the cynical over the war in Ukraine...

No, this time the hiatus has been forced upon us for the simple fact that we have moved. Relocated. Got up and got. Which means your favorite consulting detective, somewhat acidic and very grey CEE crime blogger is now based in the beautiful city of Gdansk.

And for a hard-boiled type who typically gauges risk while accepting Murphy’s Law in full there can only be one conclusion.

Damn, moving is ridiculously painful.

But that was June and this is July, and thus we will plunge refreshingly back into the deep, endlessly black waters of crime. But instead of a full run-down, let’s begin this Monday with a short (yet provocative) taste of somewhat unexpected news--this being that late in June Bulgaria (after being pressured by the US) announced that it would press charges against none other than the four-billion-dollar fugitive herself, Ruja Ignatova.

Yes, you read that right. Four. Billion. Dollars.

This is the estimated haul by Ignatova, also known as the Crypto Queen, whom the FBI apparently believe has been on the lamb for years. Bouncing between jurisdictions. Laundering money. Buying islands maybe. Or some such.

Which also means that Bulgaria, forever hung up by endless elections and failures to form governments—and desperate to somehow join the EU’s eurozone, show support for the war in Ukraine (despite Bulgaria’s president voicing a very loud “nay” to that) and generally wanting to reform its image and make both the EU and the US happy… is ready to profess the same.

But profess what exactly?

In short, profess to be tough on white-collar crime of the highest order. And more specifically, profess that (and this is according to the FBI, which has long ranked Ignatova among its 10 most-wanted) Ignatova conducted fraud on a scale almost unprecedented in human history. And this does include not only money laundering, but a general masking of the truth that in fact she was no crypto queen at all--instead, the co-founder of OneCoin essentially ran a pyramid scheme together with the already convicted Karl G.

Yet unlike G., Ignatova simply vanished.

Just like that.

Without a trace.

Or almost...

Maybe...

But we'll get to that.

That disappearance was back in 2018, which might pose legal complexities for some governments, but now Bulgarian prosecutors have simply said that the missing princess queen will be tried in absentia while the US government posts a reward of USD 5 mln  to anyone with information that leads to the renegade crypster's arrest.

This is a bump up from the original USD 100,000 reward, which sounds like a fairly good plan (and after all, the infamous alleged crypto fraudster Do Kwon was caught in Montenegro with far less effort—although extradition to the US has not quite gone according to schedule).

Yet there are…

Issues.

As noted in the first (of only two full editions) of The Corners magazine (and please feel free to let me know if  you would like to get behind a rebirth), the story of Ignatova’s disappearance is dark, dirty and… complicated.

For the most believable sources do believe that she is dead. (Maybe).

Sounds confusing? Here's the tale in abridged form: in 2023 two Bulgarian investigative journalists working out of the Bulgarian Investigative Reporting and Data (BIRD) group obtained local police findings, citing an unnamed source (which appears to have been a drunken in-law) that claimed that Ignatova was murdered aboard a yacht in the Ionian Sea and then tossed to the fishes—on orders of Bulgarian drug trafficker Christopher A., alias “Taki.”

Not surprisingly, said alleged mafioso denied the murder. Somewhat surprisingly (but maybe not), the infamous Taki has never been charged, and there are questions as to whether his link to the alleged murder has ever been truly investigated. But the investigative trail is intriguing. The journalists in question, Dimitar Stoyanov and Atanas Tchobanov, were reportedly examining police files surrounding not Taki nor Ignatova directly, but instead the shooting of former Bulgarian Police Chief Lyubomir Ivanov. Here they came across a source testifying about the Ivanov shooting who stated (and here we are going to take the liberty of quoting ourselves (as in the plural Yours Truly—i.e. the Royal We) and say that there were some four billion reasons to believe the plausibility of the unknown source’s story.

Yet the FBI wants that missing USD 4 bln—or at any rate it clearly believes differently than do journalists and gumshoes on the ground.

Especially, as Ignatova has been sought since 2017...

More especially as she was allegedly killed, dismembered and thrown into the sea in 2018.

In parts.

Yet... maybe someone is onto something, as in 2023 work by the investigative journalist and the BBC noted that Ignatova was listed as the owner of a London penthouse, put up for sale by a major international real estate agency that delisted the penthouse for sale as soon as the Ignatova link was aired.

Which leads us (again, the Royal We is at play) to ask the following questions:

Is Ignatova alive? Has she pulled off one of the most notorious heists in history--and lived to tell about it?

Or in short...

Does the FBI know something we don’t?

Maybe.

 

Photo credit: FBI on X.

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