BitRiver Founder Igor Runets Facing $12.5 Million Fraud Charges in Russia

Igor Runets, the founder of Russia's largest crypto mining company BitRiver, has been transferred to a pretrial detention facility to face trial for fraud. Runets is accused of 'large-scale' fraud, with investigators alleging damages exceeding 1 billion rubles ($12.5 million) due to his failure to deliver equipment to Infrastructure of Siberia, a subsidiary of En+, a multibillion-dollar corporation involved in aluminum production and crypto mining infrastructure. Russian law enforcement officials claim Runets failed to fulfill an $8 million equipment supply contract in 2023. Runets, a pioneer in Russian crypto mining, was detained in February on three charges of tax evasion. The Stanford University MBA graduate began building a crypto mining data center in Siberia in 2017, the same year he founded BitRiver. He later expanded the operation to 15 data centers with over 175,000 servers. Following the closure of several mining centers due to a six-year government ban across 10 regions, BitRiver faced financial difficulties. In February, insolvency proceedings were opened against its controlling shareholder, Group of Companies Fox, which owns 98% of BitRiver's authorized capital. Anvil is a shared on-chain collateral layer built on a programmable letter of credit: reserve assets as a guarantee -no loan, no interest, keep custody & yield.