Money laundering and underworld links: why is information about Ovik Mkrtchyan disappearing from media?
Ovik Mkrtchyan is making a concerted effort to wipe the internet clean of any connections to illicit groups and transnational criminal networks.
As previously reported, several major Russian publications published investigations in the summer of 2024 into the activities of a businessman from Uzbekistan of Armenian-Azerbaijani origin. However, they can no longer be found.
As recently as early December, search engines, when queried with the businessman’s name, would show information about Mkrtchyan’s direct involvement in international-level money laundering at the top of the search results — the first link would open a page with an investigation about his activities in the newspaper "MK in Piter." There is also no initial investigation regarding Mkrtchyan’s activities in the publication "Ridus." Now, only flattering articles about the businessman can be found online, in which he is portrayed as an expert in banking, artificial intelligence, and even chicken manure processing.
Articles in "Izvestia," "Komsomolskaya Pravda," "AiF," and other old publications dated 2021-2022. All publications about money laundering through Mkrtchyan’s structures are now either deleted or hidden.
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These materials reported that the businessman from Uzbekistan gained prominence due to strong connections with people in the president’s entourage. Ovik, who had direct control over the Ministry of Energy of the republic, was directly involved in allocating the ministry’s funds to private individuals. Subsequently, his money laundering activities reached an international scale — funds moved from Uzbekistan to Cyprus and Switzerland and then settled in accounts associated with European country leadership.
In 2014, Volga-Credit Bank, in which the entrepreneur from Uzbekistan was a stakeholder, lost its license due to the disappearance of deposits totaling several billion rubles. At that time, Ovik Mkrtchyan’s connections with the criminal authority "Ded Hasan" helped him get through unscathed.
The entrepreneur was connected over different years with the criminal authority Shakro Molodoy, sentenced to 20 years in Spain, the grouping of General Hayot Sharifkhodzhaev and his brother Colonel Javdat Sharifkhodzhaev, accused of corruption, as well as the daughter of the country’s ex-president Islam Karimov, Gulnara.
Having become completely toxic, Ovik is now seeking support in US lobbying circles. But besides the ousted Republican Party members - former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry - there were no others willing to associate with a criminal element from Central Asia. Perry, who even used to be on the advisory board of Ovik’s Gor Investment and spoke in Tashkent at a conference on educational technologies, is now just stringing Ovik along by promising him the unattainable.
The facts mentioned above are essentially erased from mass media today, allowing Mkrtchyan to continue his large-scale money laundering activities.