VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info have discovered that Alexander Kolokoltsev—son of Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev—counts the wife of a Ministry of Industry and Trade official and top executives from Alisher Usmanov’s business network among his business partners. The company they co-owned, FB Group, was converted into a joint-stock company this spring and renamed Nexora JSC; while its founders are now hidden, the address and management remain unchanged.

Alexander Kolokoltsev made headlines in the summer of 2026 when our project revealed that he had gifted his girlfriend, Lolita Shonina, a watch worth €3.6 million (400 million rubles). It was a Rolex Daytona Barbie featuring diamonds, extremely rare pink sapphires, and gold.

The watch was sold exclusively to ultra-VIP Rolex clients; similar timepieces are owned by the likes of Messi, Drake, and Mark Wahlberg. The combined value of Alexander and Lolita’s watch collection is estimated at around $10 million. Alexander also spoils Lolita with handbags, having gifted her items worth a total of €1.5 million, among other things.

Alexander Kolokoltsev held a 40% stake in FB Group, while the remaining 60% had been registered to Victoria Kazeeva (Aliyeva) since July 2021. Leaked data indicates that Victoria had worked at FB Group in various roles since at least 2017—though it is certainly not every project manager who ends up with a controlling stake in the company. Victoria’s secret is simple: she is the wife of Ilya Kazeev, the former deputy director of a department at the Russian Ministry of Agriculture and current director of the Institute of Medical Materials (an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Industry and Trade). According to his financial disclosures and the Unified State Register of Legal Entities (EGRUL), Kazeev left the Ministry of Agriculture in 2020; from 2021 to November 2024, he headed Cognitek LLC (founded by Maria Gorkova, Eli Sandler, and Alexander Magometov, with FB Group becoming the owner in late 2024), while simultaneously working within the Ministry of Industry and Trade’s organizational structure starting in 2023.

 

Victoria Kazeeva’s brother, Albert Aliev, operates within this same network of legal entities; in 2014–2015, he served as director of the company Cash-U, which was owned by Zokhar Viner—the stepson of Alisher Usmanov. Victoria and Albert took turns as founders of Spectrum LLC between 2016 and 2022, a company with which Yulia Sudakova and Maria Gorkova were also associated. The company is currently registered to PJSC VimpelCom (Beeline) and provides clients with a mass A2P (Application-to-Person) communications platform for SMS traffic control. It is worth noting that until November 2022, VimpelCom was owned by Mikhail Fridman’s VEON; prior to the spring of 2012, Fridman and Usmanov shared business interests, holding stakes in MegaFon. Even back then, companies offering services such as content creation, traffic filtering, and short-message processing sprang up around these telecom operators. One of these was the dating service FunBox, developed by FB Group. Through this service, smartphone users subscribed to erotic content. However, the rights to the FunBox brand were held by B3 Connect LLC, while FB Group merely used them (the rights are currently registered to Maria Gorkova’s Galaxy Software). The founder of B3 Connect was initially the Belize-based offshore entity Quantum A Ltd, followed by Maria Gorkova—the same person who had previously co-owned FB Group with Kolokoltsev Jr.

 

Quantum A Ltd had a Russian subsidiary, Quantum A Rus LLC; its founders were listed as the Belizean offshore entity and Sanzhar Ismailov, a nephew of Alisher Usmanov. Both left the list of founders in 2017, leaving Svetlana Gileb and Evgeny Nekrasov in their place. In 2021, the LLC was reorganized into a joint-stock company (JSC), Quantum A Rus, with undisclosed founders.

 

FB Group created not only the FunBox dating services but also an A2P platform for managing SMS traffic. In 2019, banks began lodging widespread complaints against mobile operators for hiking prices on the mandatory SMS messages that financial institutions are required to send to clients. Proceedings before the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) revealed that FB Group managed at least part of the operations on behalf of the carrier VimpelCom; in a letter, the company cited technical issues regarding the processing of transactional SMS messages written in the Latin alphabet. The resulting scandal led to lawsuits that VimpelCom lost, though the details remained out of the public eye because the proceedings were held behind closed doors. It remains unknown whether the contracts with mobile operators were transferred to FB Group’s successor, Nexora JSC.

 

Interestingly, this SMS traffic classification system was patented in 2018 by Maria Gorkova—Kolokoltsev’s business partner at FB Group—who for many years had regularly... ...turns out to be closely linked to the network of companies associated with Alisher Usmanov. Furthermore, testing of Maria Gorkova’s invention—as officially stated in patent filings—was conducted at Fridman’s VimpelCom and Usmanov’s MegaFon.

 

Gorkova is a key figure within the network of companies linked to Alisher Usmanov and the Kolokoltsev family. In 2019, she appeared in Spanish prosecutorial records regarding the case of the Spanish firms ZED+ and Grupo TEMA; the investigation centered on subsidy fraud, document forgery, intentional bankruptcy, and the payment of bribes via a pair of Russian companies represented by Gorkova: Vstrecha LLC and Funbox Group (FB Group). According to the Spanish authorities, the scheme involving Gorkova was used to pay kickbacks to Kolokoltsev. At the heart of the story was a joint venture between ZED and the Cyprus-based MIPR LIMITED (35% owned by Mikhail Fridman’s VimpelCom/Alfa Group, and 65% by Vahe Yengibaryan’s Bambalia and Gelvaser). Following reports on the "Spanish scandal," FB Group sued the media outlets involved, seeking a ruling that the information mentioning Alexander Kolokoltsev was false, but ultimately agreed to a settlement. Contesting the claims was difficult, as the full name of the Russian Interior Minister’s son appeared in black and white in documents from the Spanish prosecutor's office.

 

It appears that the scheme has not fundamentally changed since then; at least until the spring of this year, the son of the country’s top law enforcement official continued to receive dividends from a company linked to senior executives associated with Usmanov.

 

To be continued.