Mavrodi Sergey Panteleevich is one of the most famous Russian swindlers who, with the help of the MMM financial pyramid, illegally appropriated the deposits of several million people in the amount of more than three billion rubles.
Sergey was born in Moscow in 1955. Among his peers from childhood, he was distinguished by a phenomenal memory, showed good abilities in physics and mathematics. After school he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering.
The infamous MMM was founded by Mavrodi back in 1989. Then it was a cooperative that traded computers and office equipment for rubles, while everyone else did it for dollars. On the basis of this cooperative, a financial pyramid was created.
MMM shares went on sale for the first time on February 1, 1994. The essence of the pyramid was simple: shares were bought and sold at prices set personally by Mavrodi and constantly raised. In just six months, the number of depositors grew to 15 million, and the amount of money collected amounted to about a third of the annual budget of the Russian Federation. Share prices during this period have increased 127 times. Daily revenue reached $ 50 million.
On August 4, Mavrodi was arrested for tax evasion, followed by the arrest of property in the firm and the suspension of its activities. The last payment on MMM shares was on July 27th.
Subsequently, Mavrodi managed to be released by registering as a deputy to the State Duma. Having promised depositors to return their money in case of victory in the elections, Sergei Panteleevich is easily elected to the State Duma and successfully avoids criminal prosecution, thanks to parliamentary immunity. MMM offices, after renaming the offices of deputy Mavrodi, also received immunity status.
However, a year later, Mavrodi, on the initiative of the prosecutor's office, was deprived of his deputy mandate. The investigation against him continued, but he was punished only in 2007. The verdict - 10 thousand rubles a fine and 4, 5 years in prison, which he, however, did not serve in full, and the fine was canceled.
MMM was formally declared bankrupt only in 1997. The most interesting thing is that when payments stopped after July 27, 1994, MMM offices were still working. And advertising in the media appeared regularly until the end of the advertising contracts. And among the defrauded investors, a secondary market for MMM shares emerged.
After Mavrodi was deprived of his deputy mandate in 1996 and put on the wanted list, he hid for more than 5 years in a rented apartment in Moscow. During this time, he tried to organize another pyramid - a virtual stock exchange Stock Generation, designed for residents of the United States and Western Europe.
By the time this pyramid ended its activity, the official number of victims was 275 thousand people. The unofficial number is several million. The amount of damage was about $ 70 million.
In 2011, Mavrodi, having received freedom, founded a new pyramid - MMM-2011. Unlike his first project, here he openly stated that MMM-2011 is a real financial pyramid and that depositors can lose all their money at any time.
The main financial instrument of the new pyramid was virtual securities MAVRO. The participants in the system did not buy or sell them, but “provided assistance” to other participants or “received help” from them.
In May 2012, MMM-2011 had problems with payments, as a result of which, by the end of May, the activities of MMM-2011 had ceased. To solve problems with payments of money already invested by participants, a new pyramid was created - MMM-2012. But it did not last long either. In October 2012, MMM-2012 started having its first problems, payments were suspended in December, and in January 2013 the system was actually disbanded.
The peculiarity of MMM-2011 and MMM-2012 was that in reality they were neither legal entities nor public organizations. These pyramids were organized according to the principle of social networks, Mavrodi originally called his project a pyramid and did not promise a return on investment.
In September 2012, Mavrodi even registered his political party with the self-explanatory name "The MMM Party", which, however, did not pass registration with the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation and quickly abolished itself.
Mavrodi also has a family. In 1993, he married a Ukrainian woman, Elena Pavlyuchenko, from whose marriage they had a daughter, Oksana Pavlyuchenko. In 2005, at the height of the MMM trial, the marriage broke up. The Stock Generation exchange was registered in the name of Oksana Pavlyuchenko. Considering that at that time she was a minor, no one was held responsible for the activities of the exchange.
On March 26, 2018, Sergei Mavrodi died of a heart attack and on March 31, he was buried in a closed coffin in Moscow at the expense of former MMM investors.
