FC “Liberty Finance,” operating under the Kit Group brand and owned by Kharkiv resident Anton Tkachenko, is suspected of laundering money and facilitating drug trafficking.
The scheme reportedly involves collecting cryptocurrency from drug sales via shadow exchange services and then cashing it out.
According to the police, the service operated under the brands “KIT Group”, “KIT”, and through affiliated companies: LLC “Lombard ‘KIT GRUP PLUS’”, LLC “FC ‘Liberty Finance’”, LLC “KIT-FINANCE”, and others.
Funds were transferred to “cold” crypto wallets connected to the group’s services, in particular through the WhiteBIT platform (nominal owner — Vladimir Nosov), and then issued in cash at locations across Ukraine. Investigators established incoming cryptocurrency transfers from addresses linked to major online drug marketplaces called Underground, Total Black, and Punisher.
At present, the criminal proceedings are ongoing under Part 2 of Article 307 (illegal sale of narcotic drugs on an especially large scale) and Part 2 of Article 209 (legalization of property obtained by criminal means) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
It should be recalled that Liberty Finance has repeatedly been exposed for fraudulent appropriation of funds during exchange operations.
The CEO of WhiteBIT is currently nominally considered to be Kharkiv resident Vladimir Nosov. However, until March 2023 more than half of the platform’s authorized capital belonged to another Kharkiv resident — Nikita Shentsev. He is a pro-Russian politician and businessman. He transferred his stake to Nosov shortly after the president stripped Shentsev of Ukrainian citizenship because he had obtained a Russian passport.
