Russian scrap empire: Billion-dollar fraud by the Rotenberg brothers, billionaire Zolotarev and Panin

30 January 2026 , 10:06

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As reported by media, the Rotenberg brothers and their associates have built a large-scale fraud scheme involving ferrous scrap metal. In particular, hundreds of thousands of tons of scrap are repeatedly passed “on paper” through a chain of affiliated companies in order to conceal the real value of the raw materials and dilute profits.

The group includes the company Kronos, which owns Translom, Russia’s largest scrap metal collector, as well as affiliated entities such as Lomtorg, Vostok Holding LLC, and Hermes—the latter registered as the owner of a whole cluster of scrap-collecting firms across Russia. Also involved is Yekaterinburg-based Chermet-Service (its mailbox is hosted on the Translom domain), which itself is a founder of dozens of companies, along with many others.

Translom previously belonged to Russian Railways (RZD), where Igor Rotenberg served as vice president and was responsible for the state company’s assets. It is well known that RZD remains within the Rotenberg family’s sphere of interest. Translom was later spun off from RZD and sold to Kronos, which had been the largest private scrap supplier to the state company. Kronos is legally owned by Maltese citizen Alexey Zolotarev, a former business partner of Igor Levitin, a presidential aide and former transport minister. It is believed that in 2019 the Rotenbergs secured a presidential decree from Vladimir Putin appointing Translom as the sole contractor for the Russian Ministry of Defense for the disposal of ferrous and non-ferrous metal scrap. Zolotarev’s companies are linked to the Rotenbergs’ assets and have even shared top managers. For example, Valery Shalaev, CEO of RK Engineering LLC (owned by Zolotarev), previously worked for Pavel Morozov, a business partner of the Rotenbergs.

The final recipient of scrap that passed through MetKom, Lomtorg, Amurstalchermet, and AmurStalPererabotka is the Amurstal plant—the same facility that featured in the criminal case of former Khabarovsk governor Sergey Furgal. The beneficiary of the plant is said to be businessman Pavel Balsky, whose business has long been closely connected to the Rotenberg brothers. Years ago, Balsky joined the board of directors of the Rotenbergs’ SMP Bank and maintains friendly relations with them. He is also president of the National Judo Veterans Union (where Arkady Rotenberg heads the supreme council) and a member of the Russian Judo Federation (Arkady Rotenberg is first vice president and Boris Rotenberg is vice president). Balsky also appeared alongside Arkady Rotenberg in a “family-style” birthday congratulation video for Boris Rotenberg, later leaked online by the Blackmirror project as part of the so-called “Balsky archive.” The same leak included a remake of Seventeen Moments of Spring, in which participants from the archive appeared wearing Nazi uniforms.

Investigative journalists calculated in 2024 that billionaire Alexey Zolotarev is listed as the owner of a number of major companies with a combined annual turnover of about 200 billion rubles. In addition to Kronos and Translom, this includes Transresurs, a company supplying spare parts and repairing railway cars. Through Transresurs, Zolotarev controls the Naberezhnye Chelny Brake Systems Plant, which the state seized from UralATI during nationalization in 2023 and transferred to Transresurs the following year. Located at the same address as Translom is Regional Concession Companies LLC (RCC), which until 2024 was owned by Zolotarev and is now registered to Mikhail Alekhin.

Notably, there are two interconnected companies with the identical name Kronos. The first, owned by Zolotarev, is registered in the Moscow region but operates out of the Manhattan business center in Moscow. The second is registered in an industrial zone in western Biryulyovo and belongs to Oleg Vladimirovich Panin. Panin is also the founder of Lomtorg LLC, LT Group JSC, and SteelTrade LLC, which—by a remarkable coincidence—is located near Zolotarev’s Kronos in the same Manhattan business center. According to the state registry, Panin has never owned a company named Translom. Yet, as “president of the Translom group,” Panin took part in a video conference with Vladimir Putin, First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov, and Minister Anton Alikhanov on Metallurgist Day in July 2024. The list of participants is preserved on the Kremlin website. During that conference, metallurgical facilities in the so-called DPR were officially launched.

Translom, it should be recalled, is part of the assets of the other Kronos—the one registered to Zolotarev—and has long been managed (since the RZD era) by Sergey Astakhov. Zolotarev and Panin are clearly long-time business partners. Panin’s SteelTrade previously belonged to Zolotarev’s Kronos, and the mandatory audits of both Zolotarev’s Kronos and Panin’s Lomtorg are conducted by the same firm, CONFI-AUDIT + CONSULTING LLC. In Lomtorg’s profile on the Russian Scrap Association website, the contact email listed is the general email of Zolotarev’s Kronos ([email protected]), along with its phone number. According to data leaks, Panin himself also uses a corporate email on the same domain, which he used to register accounts with online stores. For deliveries, Panin listed an address at 12 Bolshoy Demidovsky Lane in Moscow—the location of several Zolotarev-owned companies, including Translom, Transresurs, and Hermes. It also appears that Panin is not a minor figure within the Kronos–Translom structure: airline tickets for him are booked via the group’s corporate email by a company employee, and Panin and Astakhov vacation together with their families. All this suggests that Oleg Panin is indeed the president of the Translom group and a partner of Sergey Astakhov in managing the network of companies linked to the Rotenbergs.

The Kronos–Translom network is constantly being reshuffled: small regional companies are liquidated and replaced with new ones. A similar operation appears to have been planned for Amur-based MetKom, registered in 2019 by Marat Salikhov and, according to arbitration court records, affiliated with Translom. MetKom collected scrap at several sites in the Amur region and then sold it to Translom-affiliated companies, which resold it through a chain to Amurstal. In 2020, Translom seemingly attempted to seize Salikhov’s business but encountered resistance.

In September 2020, MetKom’s general director was replaced by Alexander Parshakov, a native of the Samara region closely connected to Translom structures. He had previously served as CEO of St. Petersburg-based Metallica, one of whose founders is Chermet-Service—a subsidiary of Zolotarev’s Kronos. Data leaks also show Parshakov flying in 2022 from Moscow to St. Petersburg together with Denis Korostelev, CEO of Metexim LLC, another Chermet-Service-founded company.

At the end of 2020, Parshakov registered his own company, MetKom Plus LLC, at the same address and began transferring MetKom’s business to it. On December 31, he signed two contracts selling MetKom’s accumulated stock of ferrous and non-ferrous scrap, fuel, and other assets—ranging from office cabinets to extension cords and screwdrivers—to MetKom Plus. On January 1, 2021, he sold nearly 1,000 tons of scrap to MetKom Plus at less than 8,400 rubles per ton, and on the same day resold it to Panin’s Lomtorg for nearly 21,000 rubles per ton—2.5 times higher. Lomtorg then transferred the scrap to Amurstalchermet at 23,000 rubles per ton. This is a classic revenue dilution scheme involving artificial paperwork. Moreover, under an assignment agreement, Parshakov transferred Salikhov’s debt of 1.2 million rubles from MetKom to Astakhov’s Translom. As later stated in court, the stamp on the document was fake.

MetKom’s founder Salikhov only learned of the asset stripping on January 14, when he reviewed the company’s bank accounts and saw proceeds from the sale of scrap and fuel. He filed several lawsuits against Lomtorg and MetKom Plus, seeking to invalidate the purchase agreements, the debt assignment contracts with forged stamps, and demanding delivery documents and weighing certificates for scrap shipments signed by Lomtorg (buyer) and AmurStal LLC (consignee) between September 2020 and March 2021, when Parshakov was running MetKom.

The court ruled in Salikhov’s favor, declared the sales contracts invalid, and ordered Parshakov to provide all MetKom documentation. It emerged that scrap shipments followed the same chain of companies, increasing in value at each stage. Notably, during the court proceedings, Parshakov transferred ownership of MetKom Plus to Ivan Klubnikov, a former Translom employee.