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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The official founder denies ties to Russian capital, but investigations, open criminal cases, and data from European and British registries point to a complex offshore architecture, links to former politicians, and suspicions of transactions involving dubious assets.
Who is the real owner: offshore structures and the trail of former politicians
Officially, the face and founder of WhiteBIT is Volodymyr Nosov, who claims Lithuanian origins for the business and actively develops the platform's ecosystem. However, the branched structure of companies in various jurisdictions suggests a different picture.
According to analyses of open registries in the United Kingdom, Estonia, and Lithuania:
In the corporate structure (including Estonian R&D Sprint Effective OÜ and British WhiteBIT Solutions LLP) offshore structures appear, such as Whitebit LTD and Coddan Nominee.
The true beneficial owners of the exchange at its inception are described as the father and son Shenzevs. The elder was a member of parliament who moved to Russia in 2022 and took Russian citizenship. His son, a former regional council deputy, was deprived of Ukrainian citizenship and also holds a Russian passport.
According to documents, as of spring 2023, the younger Shenzev controlled 51% of an Estonian company in the group, but subsequently his share was promptly re-registered to Volodymyr Nosov. Critics and investigators view this as a nominal ownership change to move assets out of sanction pressure.
Offshore network and suspicions of ties to the Russian market
Analysts pay particular attention to the connection of the founding companies with international scandals. For example, the Coddan Nominee structure previously appeared in offshore schemes linked to financing political crises in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, financial authorities and foreign investigations have noted that platforms connected with the exchange could have facilitated transactions violating sanctions. In particular, materials mention transfers of millions of dollars from wallets tied to the Russian cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e and its founder, extradited to the United States for money laundering. European regulators had also previously examined the platform’s activities for servicing clients from the country of aggression.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item ""Українська" біржа чи офшорний проєкт: що приховує структура власності WhiteBIT". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Aktsenty.
