FBI's "most wanted" cryptoqueen operated in Panama unnoticed

Between 2014 and 2016, a Bulgarian self-described “queen of cryptocurrencies”, made $4 billion selling a fake crypto with the help of Panamanian nominee shareholders. The scam went unnoticed by local authorities, reports La Prensa.

Ruja Ignatova, the founder of a Ponzi scheme that ‘The New York Times’ described as one of the biggest scams in history, is one of the most wanted criminals by the FBI.

 She raised $4 billion by convincing investors that she was going to create a cryptocurrency capable of burying Bitcoin. Many of them, bet theirs on the supposed creation of ‘OneCoin’, the new currency that promised a lot but achieved little: it never existed, because Ignatova did not have the blockchain technology to create it. After the exploit, the queen of cryptocurrencies disappeared.

 The BBC investigated her and published an 11-part podcast, “The Missing Cryptoqueen.”

The FBI has been searching since 2017. They combed through the labyrinth of fictitious companies in search of billions of investors: they located companies in the Cayman Islands, Dubai, and Guernsey. But something they missed, until now: Panama.

Court documents from the BBC’s The Missing Cryptoqueen podcast shared with La Prensa reveal that Panamanians participated in Ignatova’s monumental scam: there are four nominal shareholders of Panama, people who acted as owners of two key companies in the ‘OneCoin’ scam so that the queen of cryptocurrencies would go unnoticed and evade explanations.

As Ignatova’s cryptocurrency reached the height of its popularity, tens of millions of dollars flowed through bank accounts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the name of a company called OneCoin Limited, according to a suspicious transaction report seen by La Prensa.

Skilled in the art of deception and offshore structures, Ignatova was very careful to leave her name out of everything. To cover her trail, she turned to nominee shareholders, the legal name given to frontmen in the offshore universe. Four of them are from Panama.

César Degracia Santos and Marisela Yasmín Simmons appear as owners of half of OneCoin Limited, the UAE company that owns ‘OneCoin’. Both admitted the link in a lawsuit in the UAE, initiated by a complaint from a member of the Emirati royalty.

Two Panamanian nominee shareholders were present in the United Arab Emirates company that Ignatova used to buy property in Bulgaria. RISG Limited, likely a portmanteau of the names of ‘OneCoin’ founders Ruja Ignatova and Sebastian Greenwood, was owned by two Panamanians: Elva Marga Bolívar de Rodríguez and Eduardo Enrique Harris Robinson.

In 2015, when Ignatova bought a 19th-century house on Sofia’s famous Narodno Sabranie Square, RISG Limited and its Panamanian shareholders were the ultimate owners.

The evidence of the Panamanian route in the Ignatova scam is compelling, but it was never investigated by local authorities. There are affidavits provided by Degracia Santos and Simmons Hay in Dubai in 2021, which suggest that the proceeds of the fraud were shared between that country and Panama. The case in the UAE ended in 2022, but here no one reacted.

Local authorities do not know how Ignatova, who was born in Bulgaria but grew up in Germany, managed to get involved with Panamanians, but it is possible that she established a relationship with a Panamanian law firm or financial services provider.

“Obviously there is a lawyer who sells these services,” said Panama’s attorney general, Javier Caraballo. “These nominee shareholders will not know anyone in Dubai,” he added.