WASHINGTON — The White House announced a massive, multinational prisoner exchange Thursday between the United States, Russia and other nations. As part of the historic deal, the Russian government released high-profile Americans held captive there, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who had been in a Russian prison for more than a year.
Also included in the trade were some Russians who had been arrested for various crimes and held in prisons in the US and other countries.
Among that group was a wealthy young Russian businessman named Vladislav Klyushin – who was imprisoned in a federal prison for his role in one of the most damaging insider trading schemes in Wall Street history.
For much of the past year, CNBC has been working on a documentary about the spectacular rise and fall of Klyushin and his business empire.
This story begins in early 2021, when a private jet carrying a rising young Russian oligarch and his wife crashes at tiny Sion Airport high in the Swiss Alps.
Vladislav Klyushin, owner of an information technology company with ties to the Russian government, appears in an undated photo attached to a US Department of Justice file.
Ministry of Justice | Via Reuters
Sion is the gateway to the famous ski resort of Zermatt, where the world’s elite go to ski and party. But the airport is still an hour’s drive from the slopes, so the really rich walk the tarmac and board helicopters to take them directly to the resort.
The young oligarch was at the height of his powers. He had built an astonishingly successful company in Moscow and cultivated connections at the highest levels of the Russian government.
Vladislav Klyushin, who was sentenced to nine years in a US prison for the $93 million hack-to-trade conspiracy. Source: US Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts
Source: US Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts
His efforts earned him the ultimate prize: He worked for the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
What the oligarch didn’t know was that US law enforcement had been monitoring his flight since it left Moscow.
Or that they planned to arrest him and charge him with crimes that struck at the heart of the American financial system.
The man on the private jet in Switzerland was Vladislav Klyushin and he owned a cyber security company in Moscow called M-13.
But M-13 was a front for Klyushin’s real business – hacking into American companies and stealing confidential information, then using it to make trades on Wall Street before that information became public.
The home page for the Russian cyber security company M-13, which stole financial information from US companies.
Source: US Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts
It was a multi-layered crime: illegal trading of confidential information made possible by illegal hacking. And it had made Klyushin very rich. The victims of his crimes are investors in iconic American companies.
Welcome to the dangerous underworld of the global financial system. Here, markets are just another sphere for the great powers to display their power and undermine their rivals.
The Kremlin sees America’s capital markets as one of the country’s key assets, and therefore a prime target for attack.
“It’s a war going on right now between Russia and the West. Finance and banking and the financial sector itself is just one of the battlefields,” said a former high-ranking member of Russia’s FSB intelligence service. CNBC has granted him anonymity to detail these crimes out of fear for his safety.
CNBC’s Eamon Javers talks to a former Russian spy, who asked to remain anonymous, about the Klyushin case.
CNBC
CNBC has spent months investigating this criminal network, which represents one of the most damaging episodes of insider trading in Wall Street history.
But it’s not over yet.
Instead, our reports revealed a persistent, ongoing, threat to American companies, investors and the markets themselves.
The product of this annual project is the documentary above, called “Putin’s Trader.” It features exclusive access to the FBI agents and US prosecutors charged with taking down the criminal organization and new reporting on the incredible lifestyle of the oligarch and his cronies as they profited from their illegal dealings. A six-part podcast series titled “The Crimes of Putin’s Trader” will be released on August 15.
As for Klyushin, federal prosecutor Steven Frank said, “he looks a lot like the kind of people we prosecute for white-collar crime here in the United States every day. to be successful, because they are already successful.”
“He was rich. He had a really nice house. He had really nice cars. He had a vacation home,” said Frank, who worked on the case. “But he wanted more, like many of our defendants, and he found a way to access easy money. And he got it.”
