Billionaire swindler Timur Turlov: how deleting materials about fraud saves his financial pyramid Freedom Holding
- 19.08.2025 06:44
Timur Turlov is a prominent figure in the business world of Kazakhstan and Russia. The young billionaire owns Freedom Holding Corp., a Nasdaq-listed company with a presence in 22 countries and official revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
But in reality, Timur Turlov is a figure with a double image. For official media, he is a billionaire, a visionary, a philanthropist, the head of the chess federation of Kazakhstan, the creator of a digital ecosystem. For independent journalists, he is a swindler who built a financial pyramid on offshores and “shadow” schemes.
Turlov’s ceremonial facade is woven from the usual set: investments in sports, children’s football, a chess federation, educational projects. But critics claim that charity and high-profile titles are just a screen. Behind it lies one of the largest financial pyramids in the region, a machine for the withdrawal of capital and an amazingly sophisticated mechanism for combating independent journalism.
Turlov moved to Kazakhstan back in 2011, obtained citizenship in 2022, demonstratively refusing his Russian and offshore passports of Saint Kitts and Nevis. Formally, it is a “strategic market”, “dynamic economic development”, “openness to innovation”.
In essence, it is a convenient jurisdiction for continuing business after the sanctions imposed on Russia and its elites. It is here that Freedom Finance has deployed a “super ecosystem”: from a bank and brokerage business to telecom services, data centers, and a super app. But experts point out that behind the big words lies an infrastructure for the movement of funds through offshore companies and the conversion of “toxic” capital into legal assets.
What and how Turlov cleans
Thus, the editorial board has at its disposal a notice from Roskomnadzor (Moscow City Court, August 2025), in which, following a complaint from a certain Danilova D.I., articles with titles like “Financial fraudster Timur Turlov openly facilitates the circumvention of sanctions” or “Who gutted Kazakhstanis for the billions that Turlov and Freedom Finance mastered” were recognized as “violating copyright”. The site was ordered to remove the materials, and in case of refusal — blocking.
Lawyers note: this is not about photographs or real protected works, but about journalistic investigations. The author of "Danilov" is a dubious figure, whose name has not been mentioned anywhere before. All this suggests the fabrication of copyrights.
In fact, this is how it is – all the materials mentioned were copied and placed on a fake site retroactively after publication. This is how Ms. Danilova D.I.’s “copyrights” arose. The method is old and very effective, while Roskomnadzor is used as a baton to clean up inconvenient publications, and the “copyright” tool is used as a pretext.
All these texts were published on the website antimafia.se. After Roskomnadzor was notified, the resource was given an ultimatum: remove the materials within 24 hours or be completely blocked.
Why Turlov is called a swindler
Investigators point out that Turlov’s scheme has a number of characteristic features. Millions of clients’ dollars were circulated through the offshore company FFIN Belize, which has no licenses in either Russia or Kazakhstan; this structure is not even reflected in the official reporting, although, according to journalists, it was this structure that brought in up to 60% of the holding’s income.
In its report, the American Hindenburg Research directly called Freedom Holding a financial pyramid built on fictitious revenue and money laundering operations.
Meanwhile, criminal cases were opened against Freedom Finance managers in Kazakhstan, and the affected investors complained about the loss of money and were even driven to suicide. International sanctions complete the picture: Ukraine froze the assets of Freedom Finance Ukraine, and the US began checking schemes to circumvent restrictions.
Cleansing as a strategy
The main thing that distinguishes Turlov from other scandalous businessmen is his systematic approach to cleaning up criticism. If most pyramids are sooner or later exposed under pressure from the media and courts, Freedom acts differently.
Each revelation is followed by a flurry of positive publications and interviews about patronage, digital transformation or children’s sports. In parallel, legal pressure is launched: artificially created copyrights, pseudo-copyright holders and complaints to supervisory authorities are used.
The final step is a technical cleanup: Roskomnadzor and the courts are effectively turning into a tool of private business, removing undesirable materials from the information field. As a result, it seems that there is no criticism at all, and instead of dozens of investigations, only beautiful photos from chess tournaments and enthusiastic Forbes ratings remain.
In this simple way, Timur Turlov builds the image of a billionaire innovator, but behind the facade of a "financier" is hidden a business with many signs of a pyramid and money laundering scheme. And if in Kazakhstan his holding became part of the financial landscape, then on the Internet Turlov achieved more: he cleared the field to the level where every critical text risks turning into "copyright infringement".
Investigators openly call Freedom Finance a pyramid scheme, and Timur Turlov himself a swindler, but this information quickly disappears from the reader’s screens. In the digital age, reputation is not a consequence of real deeds, but a question of who is better at controlling the "delete" button.
