The gray cardinal of Moldova created and runs a crypto empire that helps Russians circumvent Western sanctions and hide their money — meet Ilan Shor

Shor is a businessman

Ilan Shor began his journey as a businessman in 2002. At the time, the 15-year-old opened a phone shop in Moldova, then a printing house, and later his own advertising agency. His father, Israeli-Moldovan businessman Miron Shor, helped young Shor rise quickly.

In the 1970s, he, the deputy director of the Chekhov Russian Drama Theater in Chisinau, left for Israel, where he went into business and represented the interests of Jews who had come from the USSR.

In the early 1990s, when Jews from post-Soviet countries were leaving for Israel en masse, the Shor family did the opposite — they returned to Moldova. There, the family business, ShorHolding, united a Duty Free chain, clothing and perfume brands, and its owner Miron Shor organized fashion shows and art exhibitions. He took his son with him to business meetings and prepared a great future for him, but in 2005, Myron suddenly died. The business passed to 18-year-old Ilan.

Miron Shor with his son Ilan.

Facebook

Facebook

The guy continued his fatherʼs business and added a bit of chic to his image — he bought a red Ferrari and became a frequent guest of nightclubs. In one of them in 2008, Shor met the future Prime Minister Vadym Filat. Thanks to this partnership, Shor later strengthened the position of his business in Duty Free.

And a few years later, in 2015, he admitted in a plea bargain that Filat had helped his company Dufremol win a lawsuit against its competitor Le Bridge for half a million dollars. This testimony became part of the corruption case, in which Filat was sentenced to nine years behind bars (he was released early three years later).

In the following years, Shor increased his capital: he expanded the Duty Free business to Kyrgyzstan, through front persons he became the owner of three banks, received a concession for the Chisinau International Airport and bought the Milsami football club.

Thanks to his connections with the leadership of the National Confederation of Trade Unions, the businessman privatized the trade union real estate for a small price. Later, it became collateral for most of the loans taken by his companies.

In 2011, Shor married Russian singer Jasmine. The "Wedding of the Year" took place in the Republican Palace in Chisinau, where the parliament was temporarily holding meetings.

Among the 400 guests present were three Moldovan presidents and deputies. The guests were entertained by Russian pop stars and Verka Serdyuchka.

Shorʼs peaceful and prosperous life lasted until November 2014, when it became known that three of his banks had gone bankrupt — $1 billion, or 12.5% of Moldovaʼs GDP, had been stolen from them. A criminal case was opened against the businessman, and the court sent him under house arrest. To avoid punishment, Shor used a proven method — he entered politics.

Shore is a politician

In 2015, Shor became a candidate for the ghost (mayor) of the small town of Orhei, near Chisinau. Lawyers managed to get him released from house arrest and he was able to conduct a full-fledged election campaign.

Shor built an image for himself as a “businessman” — a successful businessman who knows how to improve people’s lives. He promised free public transport and Wi-Fi, reduced utility bills, and road repairs. The populist slogans worked — Shor won in the first round, gaining 62% of the vote.

This victory convinced Shor that politics was the right choice. He became the head of the pro-Russian party "Equality", from which he ran for mayor, and renamed it in his honor — "Shor", and in 2019 he led his party members to the parliamentary elections and moved from the mayorʼs seat to the deputyʼs seat. Among other things, it gave the former businessman the expected and necessary bonus — parliamentary immunity.

Thanks to this, he managed to avoid criminal liability: in 2017, the court of first instance sentenced Shor to 7.5 years in prison in the case of the theft of a billion dollars from controlled banks. This was the money of private depositors, as well as the state, which owned a third of the shares of Bank de Economii and serviced a significant part of the treasury accounts and made social payments through it.

Despite the verdict, after the appeal, Shor remained at large under a recognizance not to leave.

However, this time Shor did not have time to enjoy the victory — the pro-European Maia Sandu became the Prime Minister of Moldova, and the Democratic Party, Shorʼs informal and extremely influential patron, went from being the ruling party to being the opposition.

It was dangerous for Shor to remain in the country without its support. He decided not to wait for the prosecutorʼs office to ask the parliament to strip him of his immunity, and fled to Israel. As it turned out, he was right — in 2019 he was stripped of his immunity, and in 2023 the appeals court doubled his term — to 15 years behind bars.

After leaving Moldova, Shor began to actively cooperate with the Russian FSB. Previously, the main asset of the Russian Federation in Moldova was the Socialist Party and its leader Igor Dodon — he was president in 2016-2020. However, this political force discredited itself due to corruption scandals, and the Russians had to look for a new face.

At first, Shorʼs relations with Russia were not good: in 2015, he was banned from entering the country for six years due to fraud with the diplomatic numbers of the Moldovan embassy. The Russian newspaper Kommersant, citing a government source, wrote that Shor "corrupts everyone he sees" and poses a threat to Russiaʼs national security.

Three criminal cases were opened in Russia against his partner, Moldovan billionaire Vlad Plahotniuc, and in 2023 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for transferring 126 billion rubles from the Russian economy to offshore accounts.

Despite this, the FSB decided that Shor was the most promising candidate. The Washington Post published a large article about this, citing confidential Russian documents intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence. The FSB report in the spring of 2021 stated that for some Moldovans Shor was an unacceptable figure, but for many he was a real idol and leader. At the same time, the FSB sent political consultants to Moldova to help the Shor party.

Being outside Moldova did not prevent Shor from influencing the countryʼs political life and helping the Russians: in 2021, despite his escape and the first-instance verdict, he again entered parliament — his party took third place and 6 out of 101 seats.

In 2022, he planned to come to Russia to negotiate a gas price for Moldovans, and in early 2023 he was supposed to help the Kremlin organize a coup in Moldova — this is evidenced by a report by the British Royal United Defense Studies Institute (RUSI).

The unrest was supposed to begin with anti-government rallies. For this, pro-Russian fans of the Serbian football club Partizan even arrived in Moldova. The authorities learned about these plans in time, and the attempt failed.

After that, Shor was stripped of his parliamentary mandate, and his party was banned by the Constitutional Court for “threatening the sovereignty and independence of Moldova” (its four successors were banned by the Court of Appeal in July 2026).

The “MeriShor” social store chain, where customers were invited to protests, was closed, and the Chisinau airport, which Shor controlled, was returned to state control. The career of the Moldovan businessman and politics was over for him, but Shor found a new role and a new direction for himself, he flew to Russia.

Shor is the Russian crypto king

In early November 2023, a plane believed to belong to Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich landed in Moscow. On board was Ilan Shor, who had obtained Russian citizenship and started building the A7 financial company. Its goal was to help Russian money bypass international sanctions and allow free trade after Russia was cut off from SWIFT payments.

The Moldovan investigative media outlet Rise was the first to report on A7 and its connection to Shor in October 2024. The journalists discovered that while the country was preparing for the presidential elections and the referendum on joining the EU, Shor had created five companies in Russia that specialized in financial services, lending, and public opinion research.

Among them were A7 and its two subsidiaries, 51% of which were owned by Shor, and the rest by Promsvyazbank, a key bank in the Russian defense industry. At the same time, Moldovan law enforcement agencies reported that $15 million had been transferred from Russia to Moldova through this bank to bribe voters in the interests of the pro-Russian candidate Alexander Stoyanoglou.

They were unsuccessful, including due to the votes of the Moldovan diaspora in European countries: Maia Sandu was re-elected president, and the course for joining the EU was enshrined in the Constitution.

The next time A7 was reported in June 2025 was by the OSINT investigation organization Center of Information Resilience and the Financial Times. They were the first to publicly announce the A7A5 cryptocurrency, a stablecoin pegged to the ruble and designed to circumvent Russian sanctions.

A7A5 was launched in February 2025 and registered in Kyrgyzstan, where Shor had reliable connections from the time of the development of Duty Free there. At the time of publication, the volume of transactions in A7A5 tokens reached $9.3 billion, and the value of all tokens on the exchange was $156 million.

A relatively small group of users used the same tokens daily for many transactions: they bought, quickly transferred, withdrew and re-launched on the exchange.

Stand A7A5 at the TOKEN2049 Singapore blockchain conference, October 2025.

The investigatorsʼ publications yielded results — attention to Ilan Shor and his cryptocurrency increased. On July 6, the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine first imposed sanctions against him and A7.

In August, the United States imposed sanctions against the Kyrgyz exchange Grinex, the main hub for trading in stablecoins, and in October, in the 18th package of sanctions against the Russian Federation, the European Union imposed sanctions against a cryptocurrency for the first time in its history — A7A5.

Despite the restrictions, A7 and the cryptocurrency continued to operate. The company reported that by December 2025 it had processed almost 19% of all foreign trade transactions in the Russian Federation. British blockchain analytics company Elliptic reported that A7A5 transaction volume exceeded $100 billion in the year.

In the fall, A7 opened two offices in Africa — in Nigeria and Tanzania. At the same time, it began printing its own “money”, which it promoted to an audience of Russian tourists who could not take out a lot of cash and had restrictions on card transfers. This money worked like bank checks — abroad, Russians would erase the protective film from the banknote, send a QR code to a Telegram bot, and wait for a courier with cash.

At that time, the service was operating in Istanbul and Dubai. And for trade with China, A7 offered bills of exchange that were supposedly protected by Russian law. Russian entrepreneurs could buy bills of exchange and then transfer them to Chinese partners, and then A7 would take responsibility for settlements outside the banking system.

"Big Shor"

The most detailed analysis of the activities of A7 and Ilan Shor in June 2026 was carried out by the British analytical organization Open Source Center (OSC) in the investigation: “Big Shor. A7 and the illusion of Russian financial innovations”. In addition to open sources, it is based on a large-scale leak of A7 data that occurred from August 2024 to July 2025.

The OSC found that despite the media’s focus on A7A5, cryptocurrency payments accounted for less than 0.3% of the turnover. Most of the transfers were made via SWIFT through “passerby companies” and correspondent accounts between banks in Kyrgyzstan, the UAE and the world’s largest banks.

The cryptocurrency was primarily used for payments to other sanctioned regimes and terrorist organizations. Investigators found direct and indirect payments to North Korea, Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, and Yemenʼs Houthis.

Kyrgyzstan has become a “gateway state”: in August 2024, the country’s Cabinet of Ministers created the “Trade Company of the Kyrgyz Republic” (TKKR).

Officially, it was a state regulator for monitoring trade flows, but the company became the main payment agent in the A7 system. The company’s website was completely managed by A7 IT specialists from Moscow.

Among other things, TKKR carried out bill payments for the Russian company Rustakt, a supplier of drones for the elite Rubicon Center for Unmanned Technologies and the GRU. From December 2024 to April 2025, Rustakt imported goods worth at least $68 million. Payments were made through Kyrgyzstan to the Chinese supplier “Shenzhen Minghuaxin Technology” Co Ltd and three other Chinese companies that supplied control boards, motors, and plastic brackets for drones under the guise of car polish, LED lights, bracelets, and child car seats.

To circumvent restrictions on the supply of dual-use goods, special software called Invoicer automatically falsified documents and replaced them with permitted goods. The program selected the goods so that their amounts matched the real deal to the cent.

During the same period, the Kyrgyz government and President Sadyr Zhaparov personally used two business jets purchased by Shorʼs associates for flights. In particular, visits were made to Moscow, Budapest, Tokyo, and the last Munich Security Conference on them. On February 10, 2026, the Kyrgyz government liquidated the "Trading Company of the Kyrgyz Republic" due to pressure from Western states.

Another important ally for A7 is Turkey. On its southern coast, Rosatom is building Turkey’s first nuclear power plant, Akkuyu, which is expected to generate 10% of the country’s electricity in the future.

Sanctions put the project at risk, and then A7 organized a closed scheme within the Turkish Emlak Bank: Turkish buyers of Russian gas paid in UAE dirhams to Gazprom’s Turkish structure, ZMB Gaz Depo AS, then these funds were transferred to the Turkish account of the Kyrgyz TKKR and directed to the construction of the nuclear power plant.

This allowed Russia to use the profits from gas exports directly for its foreign projects, bypassing both the Russian banking system and SWIFT. In addition to gas and energy, Turkey became one of A7’s main external treasuries — it stored foreign currency, which was used to make quick payments to international partners.

But despite Shore’s claims that A7’s system was resistant to sanctions, it was still forced to connect to the international banking network (correspondent banks and SWIFT) that it was trying to bypass. This left the company vulnerable—a vulnerability that became apparent in July 2026.

Did the sanctions work?

On July 29, 2026, British blockchain analytics company Elliptic wrote that sanctions had “strangled” the Russian stablecoin. From July 2025 to June 2026, the average daily transaction volume fell by 96%.

Also, since July 2025, the Kyrgyz issuing company “Old Vector” LLC has not issued new cryptocurrency tokens, confirming weak demand for it.

In the second half of last year, three major waves of sanctions from the US, EU and UK attacked A7A5 and its supporting infrastructure. The sanctions could not kill the token itself, but they created problems on exchanges where A7A5 was exchanged for other assets.

Since the end of September 2025, users have started reporting that the Tether (USDT) cryptocurrency for which they exchanged A7A5 was frozen or marked on their crypto wallets. The sanctions have also forced exchanges to remove A7A5 from their platforms — funds that pass through A7A5 transactions arrive on the exchange with a visible history and become problematic.

The latest blow was a hacker attack on the “Grinex” exchange. In April, hackers stole $13 million, and the exchange blamed it on intelligence agencies of unfriendly states that want to harm Russiaʼs financial sovereignty, although the exchange itself is registered in Kyrgyzstan. The platform has been down since then.

However, the collapse of A7A5 is not the end of the story of Ilan Shor and A7, which still exists and continues to work for Russia. Despite the fact that Ilan himself is wanted by Interpol and is waiting in Moldova to be sent to prison.

This publication was produced as part of the Seizing Synergies project, implemented by n-ost and supported by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the BMZ.