The BBC Eye published a journalistic investigation and identified a shadowy network of businessmen who stand behind a global scamming network of robbing European pensioners of more than a billion dollars. Former Defense Minister Davit Kezerashvili is named as the organizer of the scam.
According to the BBC investigation, the network is known to police as the Milton Group, uniting 152 brands, including Solo Capitals, a purported cryptocurrency trading firm based and operating in Georgia.
The scammers contacted the pensioners and offered them easy ways to receive income. They obtained credit card data from the victims and robbed them.
In November, BBC Eye accompanied German and Georgian police on call-center raids in the Georgian capital Tbilisi.
In the telephone conversation, five names repeatedly appeared, listed as directors of the Milton trading platforms or supporting tech companies – David Todua, Rati Tchelidze, Guram Gogeshvili, Joseph Mgeladze, and Michael Benimini.
“We plugged the five names into the Panama Papers, a massive 2016 leak detailing offshore companies, and discovered that four of them – Tchelidze, Gogeshvili, Mgeladze and Benimini – were listed as directors or senior figures within a group of linked offshore companies or subsidiary companies that pre-dated the Milton Group.
“Many of these non-Milton companies led back in some way to one figure: David Kezerashvili, a former Georgian government official who served for two years as the country’s defense minister,” the BBC said.
The BBC investigative story continues as follows:
Kezerashvili was dismissed as defense minister and later convicted in absentia for embezzling more than €5m of government funds. By the time of his conviction, he was living in London and the UK turned down a request from Georgia for his extradition.
There were no publicly available documents linking Kezerashvili to this pre-Milton network, but when we looked at the Panama Papers, his name came up again and again, identifying him as either the founder of the parent companies in the network or as one of their initial shareholders. Behind the scenes, Kezerashvili appeared to be at the center of that network.
When it came to the Milton Group, there was similarly no publicly available documentation linking Kezerashvili to the scam companies, and there was no evidence that he had any direct financial interest in the Milton brands.
But several former employees of Milton-linked companies told us confidentially that they had had direct dealings with Kezerashvili and knew him to be involved in the Milton group.
Kezerashvili has frequently promoted the scam trading platforms on his personal social media accounts. On the business networking site LinkedIn, he has used his account almost exclusively to promote jobs and share posts about Milton-linked companies.
The BBC was able to find a number of other pieces of evidence linking the former defense minister to Milton brands. Several companies owned by Kezerashvili used a private email server on which the only other users were Milton group companies. His venture capital firm, Infinity VC, owned the branding and web domains for companies that provided trading platform technology to the scammers.
Kezerashvili also owns a Kyiv office building that was home to both the scam call-center selling EverFX and the tech firms that provided the software – offices which were raided by police in November. He also owns a Tbilisi office block that contained some of the same tech firms.
When the BBC examined social media profiles belonging to the four senior Milton Group men, it became clear from pictures posted of wedding parties and other social events that they all had close social ties to Kezerashvili. Kezerashvili is Facebook friends with at least 45 people linked to the Milton Group scams, and one of the four senior figures identified by the BBC is his cousin.
The BBC tracked Kezerashvili to his £18m London mansion and asked to speak to him, but we were told he wasn’t available. He told the BBC via his lawyers that he strongly denied any involvement with the Milton Group, or that he gained financially from scams. He said that EverFX was to his knowledge a legitimate business and his lawyers argued other connections we have found to the people and IT behind it “proved nothing”.
