The Rotenbergs and their associates orchestrated a large-scale scrap metal fraud. In particular, they repeatedly processed hundreds of thousands of tons of scrap on paper through a chain of affiliated companies to hide the real value of the raw materials and dilute profits.
The group includes the company Kronos, which owns Russia’s largest scrap collector Translom, as well as affiliated firms LomTorg, LLC Vostok Holding, Hermes—to which a whole bouquet of scrap-collecting companies across Russia is registered—Yekaterinburg-based Chermet-Service (whose email is on the Translom domain) that is also the founder of a dozen companies, and many others.
Translom previously belonged to RZD, where Igor Rotenberg was vice president responsible for the state corporation’s assets. It is known that RZD remains within the Rotenbergs’ sphere of influence. Later, Translom was spun off from RZD and sold to Kronos, which became the largest private scrap collector for the state company. Kronos is legally owned by Maltese citizen Alexey Zolotarev, a former partner of Igor Levitin, a presidential aide and former Minister of Transport. It is believed that the Rotenbergs were responsible for obtaining Putin’s 2019 decree appointing Translom as the sole contractor for the Ministry of Defense for processing ferrous and non-ferrous scrap. Zolotarev’s firms are linked to the Rotenberg assets—they even shared top managers. For example, the CEO of LLC RK Engineering (owned by Zolotarev), Valery Shalaev, previously worked with Pavel Morozov, a business partner of the Rotenbergs.
The final recipient of scrap, which passed through MetKom, LomTorg, AmurstalChermet, and AmurStalPererabotka, is the Amurstal plant—the same one involved in the case of former Khabarovsk Krai governor Sergey Furgal. The beneficiary of the enterprise is said to be businessman Pavel Balsky, whose business is also closely tied to the Rotenbergs: many years ago, Balsky joined the board of SMP Bank (Rotenbergs) and maintains friendly relations with them. Balsky is also president of the National Union of Judo Veterans (Arkady Rotenberg is head of the Supreme Council of NSVD) and a member of the Russian Judo Federation (Arkady Rotenberg is first vice-president, and Boris Rotenberg is vice-president). Balsky participated with Arkady Rotenberg in filming a “family” birthday greeting video for Boris Rotenberg—a video based on the film Gentlemen of Fortune, which was posted online by the Blackmirror project as part of the “Balsky Archive” leak. That archive also included a remake of Seventeen Moments of Spring, in which the subjects posed in Nazi uniforms.
Several large companies with a total annual turnover of about 200 billion rubles are also registered to billionaire Zolotarev, according to investigative journalists in 2024. Besides Kronos and Translom, these include Transresurs, which supplies spare parts and services for railway cars. Through this firm, Zolotarev controls the Chelny-based Brake Mechanism Plant, which the state initially seized from UralATI in 2023 during nationalization, and last year transferred to Transresurs. At the same address as Translom, there is also LLC Regional Concession Companies (RCC), which was registered to Zolotarev until 2024; its current founder is Mikhail Alekhin.
Interestingly, there are two interrelated companies with the identical name Kronos: the first—Zolotarev’s—is registered in the Moscow region, but its office is in the Manhattan Business Center in Moscow. The second is in the industrial zone of Western Biryulyovo and belongs to Oleg Vladimirovich Panin. He is also the founder of LLC LomTorg, JSC LT Group, and LLC SteelTrade—which, by a remarkable coincidence, is located near Zolotarev’s Kronos in the Manhattan BC. According to the Russian Unified State Register of Legal Entities (EGRUL), Panin’s assets have never included any company named Translom. Nevertheless, as president of the Translom group, Panin participated in the video conference with Putin, First Deputy Prime Minister Manturov, and Minister Alikhanov on Metallurgist’s Day in July 2024. During this conference, metallurgical production facilities in the DPR were commissioned.
Translom, recall, is part of another Kronos—the one registered to Zolotarev—and has been managed for many years (since RZD) by Sergey Astakhov. Zolotarev and Panin have clearly been business partners for years. For example, Panin’s SteelTrade previously belonged to Zolotarev’s Kronos, and mandatory audits of both Kronos and Panin’s LomTorg are conducted by the same company—LLC CONFI-AUDIT + CONSULTING. On the NSRO RUSLOM Association website, Panin’s LomTorg lists Zolotarev’s Kronos contact email (Этот адрес электронной почты защищён от спам-ботов. У вас должен быть включен JavaScript для просмотра.) and phone; Panin also reportedly uses a corporate email on the same domain for registering accounts in online stores. For delivery, Panin used 12 Bolshoy Demidovsky Lane in Moscow—an address shared by several of Zolotarev’s companies: Translom, Transresurs, Hermes. It seems Panin is not the last word in Kronos-Translom: corporate flight tickets are booked for him by a GC employee, and Panin and Astakhov go on family vacations together with their wives and children. Panin appears to be genuinely the president of GC Translom and Astakhov’s partner in managing the network of companies tied to the Rotenbergs.
The Kronos-Translom network is regularly updated: smaller regional companies are liquidated and replaced with new ones. A similar operation was apparently planned for Amur’s MetKom, registered in 2019 by Marat Salikhov, and, according to the Arbitration Court, affiliated with Translom. MetKom collected scrap in several points in the Amur region, then sold it to companies affiliated with Translom, which in turn sold it to Amurstal. In 2020, it appears Translom tried to seize the business from Salikhov but faced resistance.
In September 2020, MetKom got a new CEO—Alexander Parshakov from Samara Oblast, closely linked to Translom structures. He previously headed St. Petersburg’s Metallika, one of whose founders is Yekaterinburg’s Chermet-Service, a “daughter” of Zolotarev’s Kronos. Passenger data leaks also show Parshakov flying in 2022 from Moscow to St. Petersburg with Denis Korostelev. He is CEO of St. Petersburg LLC Metexim, founded by the same Chermet-Service.
At the end of 2020, Parshakov registered his own LLC Metkom Plus at the same address and began transferring MetKom business to it. On December 31, he signed two contracts: the sale by MetKom to MetKom Plus of scrap stored in warehouses, as well as fuel and materials—from office cabinets to extension cords and screwdrivers. On January 1, 2021, he sold almost a thousand more tons of MetKom scrap to MetKom Plus at under 8,400 rubles per ton, then resold it the same day to Panin’s LomTorg at nearly 21,000 rubles per ton—2.5 times higher. LomTorg then sold it to AmurstalChermet at 23,000 rubles per ton. This is a classic scheme of revenue dilution with artificial documentation. But there’s more: by an assignment agreement, Parshakov transferred Salikhov’s 1.2 million ruble debt from MetKom to Astakhov’s Translom, using a falsified seal, according to court proceedings.
MetKom founder Salikhov discovered the asset removal only on January 14, when he checked his company’s bank accounts and saw payments from scrap and fuel sales. He filed several lawsuits against LomTorg and MetKom Plus, demanding the sales contracts be invalidated, challenging the debt assignment with a fake seal, and requesting shipping documents and scrap weighing acts signed by LomTorg (buyer) and LLC Amurstal (recipient) from September 2020 to March 2021, when Parshakov was managing MetKom.
The court satisfied Salikhov’s claims, invalidated the sales contracts, and ordered Parshakov to provide all MetKom documentation. It turned out the scrap shipments followed the same chain through multiple companies, inflating the price along the way. Interestingly, during the court proceedings, Parshakov transferred his MetKom Plus to Ivan Klubnikov, also a former Translom employee.
