Yekaterinburg Leninsky District Court keeps looking into the criminal case involving the founder of the financial pyramid schemes Livingston Investment, Global Gaming Expo, and UTG Alexei Kalinichenko; the court heard three complainants today; the accused himself was not present at the hearing.

Kalinichenko set up Livingston Investment, Global Gaming Expo, and UTG in 2003; the companies lured the gullible private investors in by promising an impressive weekly interest (allegedly the money was used for trading on Forex). According to the investigative team, the man used Meta Trader to upload falsified reports on the ‘positive’ results of his financial operations on the Internet and transferred the people’s money into the specially opened private bank accounts.

‘I joined Global Gaming Expo virtually on the eve of its collapse. For a few months, I saw some good-looking reports on my account via Meta Trader, but then the data in the tables stopped changing, and I went to the company’s office only to hear that everything was going well. However, the office closed down later, and I found out that its accounts had been seized and that Kalinichenko had fled abroad,’ one of the complainants said.

Forex trading was done through Bank24.ru (among others), and Alexei Kalinichenko himself was one of the bank’s BOD members and controlled about 20% of the bank’s shares.

Early in 2007, Alexei Kalinichenko fled abroad to avoid prosecution and was placed on the international ‘wanted’ list, with charges of large-scale fraud.

Kalinichenko’s charges are based on Article 159 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code (fraud). According to the Code, the accused might get up to ten years in prison for the offense.