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US federal prosecutors have charged a stock-lending operator who claimed to have links to the Gilded Age Astor dynasty with running a $450mn fraud.
An indictment unsealed on Tuesday alleges that Val Sklarov, a Ukrainian-born American, ran an “Astor”-branded company that promised a cash loan to an unnamed victim after inducing the victim to pledge as collateral hundreds of millions of dollars in shares that were then sold.
It comes months after the FT published an investigation into a dispute between Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego and Sklarov.
The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York on April 30, matches Salinas’s allegations to the FT about Sklarov’s business. Astor Asset Management in July 2021 promised Salinas — whose Grupo Salinas has interests spanning media, telecommunications, banking and retail — a cash loan of up to $150mn secured against shares in his company Elektra worth roughly three times that amount.
Prosecutors said the purported lender’s marketing materials invoked the Gilded Age Astor name and wealth of John Jacob Astor — and that Sklarov posed as “Gregory Mitchell”, the company’s managing director. Similar claims were made in materials reviewed by the FT.
Prosecutors allege that “Victim-1” entered into the loan agreement with Astor on the understanding that his shares would not be sold or transferred unless he defaulted on the loan. According to the indictment, Astor transferred the shares to custodial accounts “as dictated” by Sklarov.
“The guy took my stock, sold it, and gave me the money as a loan,” Salinas, who took out the loan in order to buy bitcoin, had told the FT. “Jesus, that’s as bad as it gets.” Sklarov had denied Salinas’s allegations, saying: “I certainly do not consider myself to be a fraudster, but there’s a saying: ‘It takes one to know one’.”
Rather than holding the shares as collateral, prosecutors allege that Sklarov and others sold them shortly after they were deposited with the custodians. Any loan payments to the victim were funded using proceeds from the sale of the victim’s own shares, prosecutors said, while “hundreds of millions of dollars” in remaining proceeds were kept by the scheme.
A forensic report commissioned by Salinas’s legal team, which was shared with the FT, estimated that roughly $229mn in proceeds from the Elektra share sales ended up with Sklarov and connected parties through a network of offshore companies. Some $88mn remains unaccounted for.
Sklarov had told the FT that the forensic report was authored by “some house-mom Salinas found in a back alley”. The report was written by StoneTurn, a firm with offices around the world and staffed by financial and legal professionals.
The US indictment alleges that Astor’s representatives repeatedly reassured the victim that his shares were safe, including at a meeting in Manhattan in November 2023. In June 2024, an unsigned letter from Astor’s “operations” department asserted for the first time that it had an unrestricted right to sell the shares, and a further letter in July 2024 purported to give a notice of default, apparently justifying the share sales.
Prosecutors say the victim then learned that the vast majority of shares had already been liquidated and later uncovered the true identities behind aliases used by Sklarov and others in the alleged scheme. The indictment says the victim never recovered any of the shares.
Salinas is pursuing Sklarov in a civil claim through the High Court in London, but had acknowledged to the FT that the prospects of recovering his Elektra stock were uncertain. “If this is not stopped,” Salinas had said, “I won’t be the last.”
According to publicly available court filings, Sklarov and companies connected to him have been accused of involvement in fraud claims totalling at least $1bn in multiple jurisdictions. He had described this total as “sad fake news”.
The indictment is not the first time Sklarov has been charged with fraud. In the 1990s, he pleaded guilty to an $18mn Medicare fraud.
A spokesperson for Salinas said he welcomed the indictment and had “full confidence in and respect for the US criminal justice process; and will remain fully available to co-operate with the Department of Justice as required”.
Sklarov did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Source:
www.ft.com
