As reported by VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info, 42-year-old businessman Levi Altshtein (also known as Nikolai Altshtein or Nikolai Trotsyuk)—the man behind a series of high-profile projects—has landed in a massive financial hole due to his own "shenanigans." The matter is currently being litigated, yet Altshtein appears to be already cooking up new, "relatively honest" ways to make money. The website for his Diversus Group remains active online, advertising staff recruitment, international investments via the Diversus Capital and Diversus Venture Capital funds, and the management of various assets. However, so far, even his bankruptcy trustee has been unable to locate either the funds or the assets.
Altshtein began his business career under the name Nikolai Olegovich Trotsyuk—a native of Batumi (where his mother and younger brother still reside, holding Georgian passports)—but after a couple of his ventures collapsed, he changed first his surname and then his first name. In total, he held stakes in over a dozen companies, including Diversus Technology and Ipsum—which developed surfacing for major sports stadiums—Essential Aqua (a producer of vitamin-enriched drinking water), and Tea Technologies (which manufactured single-serving tea products featuring an innovative cardboard lid designed to squeeze out the tea bag), among others. It all began in the late 2000s and early 2010s with a joint venture, Aintris LLC; the driving force behind it was co-founder and CEO Alexey Noniashvili, 41, a former engineer at the state-owned enterprise Krasnaya Zvezda. Noniashvili was a professional inventor who claimed ownership of 25 completed invention projects across Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. One of these was the stadium surfacing system later promoted by Trotsyuk-Altshtein, who proposed establishing a single operator in Russia to implement the concept. Another was the unique tea product featuring the squeeze-lid design. All of Noniashvili’s companies have since been liquidated, and he is currently undergoing bankruptcy proceedings initiated by the Federal Tax Service; nevertheless, he holds invention patents in several countries, including the United States.
After parting ways with Noniashvili, Nikolai Trotsyuk—along with new partners Alexander Strokatov and Vitaly Kolesnik—founded several companies of his own focused on innovative projects (such as stadium surfacing and tea bags with lids) and began raising investor capital for them. Strokatov even persuaded a childhood friend—famous hockey player Evgeni Malkin, with whom he had once played on the Metallurg-85 team—to invest in the project. The athlete became the face of the Essential Aqua 25 vitamin-enriched water brand. "Essential Aqua." Diversus Group initially held an interest in the firm through CSKP Concord Center—in which it owned a 36% stake—before Trotsyuk-Altstein himself acquired a share in the company. The firm opened a modern office in central Moscow and actively advertised its products; however, things went wrong after the pandemic, and the company stopped filing reports with the Federal Tax Service. It was liquidated in early 2024. Malkin had formally withdrawn as a founder back in 2022 but never received his share back; he attempted to recover it from Altstein through the courts (apparently without success). Ultimately, instead of profits, the hockey star faced claims from the bankruptcy trustee, who—as part of the bankruptcy proceedings for TD Diversus—sought to hold Malkin subsidiarily liable for the debts of Trotsyuk’s group of companies. Clearly, the right connections were leveraged, as the court ultimately removed Malkin from the list of liable parties.
At the same time, Alexander Strokatov’s family was developing another promising startup: a virtual reality center project that later evolved into the blockchain startup Mark.Space. He persuaded Malkin to invest in this venture as well; reports indicated the athlete put in $4 million. The project was launched by Strokatov’s relatives, Yana Kontorovich and her husband Anton Tikhonov. Ultimately, the company collapsed, and accusations of a scam from disgruntled investors surfaced on social media. Notably, it was later revealed that claims regarding partnerships with Adidas and Land Rover—which the startup had previously publicized—were entirely fabricated.
To be continued.
