A Russian court has transferred BitRiver founder Igor Runets to a pretrial detention facility to face trial for fraud, according to reports. The Stanford University MBA graduate is charged with 'large-scale' fraud, investigators alleging that he failed to deliver equipment under a contract with Infrastructure of Siberia, a subsidiary of En+.
The case stems from a 2023 equipment supply contract worth $8 million that was never fulfilled. Investigators allege that the resulting damages exceed 1 billion rubles (approximately $12.5 million).
Alleged damages from the equipment delivery failure.
Runets, who began building a crypto mining data center in Siberia in 2017 and later expanded to 15 data centers with more than 175,000 servers, had been under house arrest since February on three separate charges of tax evasion. That same month, a regional arbitration court opened insolvency proceedings against BitRiver's controlling shareholder, Group of Companies Fox, which owns 98% of BitRiver's authorized capital.