Since the announcement on March 22 of the death of businessman Alexander Machkevich, who co-founded Eurasian Resources Group (ERG, which includes the assets of the former ENRC) with Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov (who died in 2021), Chodiev thought it was now time to enact his succession plan.
‘The Trio 2.0’ consists of Mounissa Chodieva, her husband Victor Hanna and Amre Youness (who pulls the strings behind the scenes). However, when they arrived in Kazakhstan, they were shocked to see that Shukhrat Ibragimov was already occupying the seat of Chairman and CEO and had the backing of state shareholders who had long grown tired of stories of the missing African money.
It is understood that Ibragimov has been left the formidable task of buying out the other families. In order to benchmark the price, Chodiev arranged a bogus non-binding Russian bid as reported in Bloomberg. The idea is to benchmark his own 33% shareholding at $1.5 billion, ignoring the company’s current value.
It is understood that these articles are being pushed by C&F Partners boss Charlie Carr, who pivoted to black PR last year after sanctions against Russian oligarchs gutted his business [KO 17/12/24].
Chodiev was so furious at having been beaten to the throne, he looked to target Ibragimov’s network in Kazakhstan, disseminating fake news attacking Kenes Rakishev, President Tokayev and other ‘trio’ family members.
Shared hosting
All of the sites listed, with the exception of antikor.com.ua, are hosted by the same entity: KKM IT Ltd, a discreet cybersecurity company registered in Reading in the United Kingdom. According to British commercial records, KKM IT is majority-owned and managed by Israeli businessman Konstantin Kamenetskiy and ran out of the back room of a dog grooming salon.
The plain-looking website is hosted in Russia. Significantly, KKM IT also hosts, alongside these media outlets, the website katehon.com, which belongs to the Russian think tank Katehon, headed by the vocal far-right ideologue Konstantin Malofeev, a staunch supporter of President Vladimir Putin. Malofeev also heads the nationalist, Christian orthodox Tsargrad network. Katehon regularly features articles by nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, another of the network's chiefs [IO, 21/11/24].
The websites all moved to KKM at the same time Charlie Carr briefed Intelligence Online he was pivoting to black pr [KO, 17/12/2024].
Kamenetskiy did not respond to our request for comment. Despite running fake news websites on behalf of Russian oligarchs and other dubious links to Russia, Kamenetskiy has been photographed attending pro-Ukrainian vigils [Get Reading, 07/03/22]. It is unclear why someone with such deep connections to the Kremlin oligopoly would attend such events…
Businessmen who claim to have been targeted by smear campaigns and extortion attempts through these websites are actively looking for private investigators to identify who's behind them. It is understood that police in multiple jurisdictions are preparing raids on various places linked to extortion campaigns.
The website antikor.com.ua and its sub-site antikor.info have been identified by businessmen in legal proceedings as being affiliated with the Teka-Group Foundation. Antikor portal is run by businessman and former Ukrainian parliamentary assistant Konstantin Chernenko, according to Ukrainian media reports.
When asked about the articles on ERG, Chernenko said he had "no connection, direct or indirect, with Eurasian Resources Group (ERG), its management, or its CEO, Mr. Shukhrat Ibragimov". About the recent articles that had been published, he said he had "no involvement in their creation or dissemination". Regarding KKM IT and its director Konstantin Kamenetskiy, Chernenko stated that he had "no connection with them and [does] not participate in the hosting or administration of any platforms".
Long history of fake news
The Chodiev camp has a long and sordid history of fake news campaigns targeting his rivals. One such example is OSI (Open Source Investigations) which was run by fake news ‘journalist’ Mark Hollingsworth.
Chodiev used it as an outlet to attack individuals working on official investigations into ‘Kazakhgate’ and other allegations against him in Belgium, such as Dirk Van der Maelen, who was president of the Belgian Parliament.
Chodiev accused Van der Maelen of offering another oligarch, Mukhtar Ablyazov, who had embezzled billions of dollars from the BTA bank, citizenship in return for testimony against Chodiev. The allegation was completely false, of course, but the noise allowed Choviev to take himself out of the story.
The website was exposed by Clare Rewcastle-Brown, an independent journalist who exposed Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, which came to be known as the 1MDB scandal. Rewcastle-Brown had been targeted by the website and had uncovered that one of the individuals behind the attacks on her was Marc Comina, a Swiss PR guru, who was also trying to place favorable information on Ablyazov in the western press [Sarawak Report, 31/10/15].
Hollingsworth was rumbled when Médor journalist Alain Lallemand raised the red flag after being asked to reach out to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to clarify what information they were holding about Chodiev [Medor, 15/06/2017].
