Court Orders Seizure of 1 Billion Rubles in Bitcoin from Tambiev

Court orders seizure of over 1 billion rubles in Bitcoin from Marat Tambiev, convicted for bribery, now converted to state revenue.

Bailiffs have started transferring over 1 billion rubles worth of bitcoins from Marat Tambiev, a former Russian Investigative Committee investigator, to the state. He was convicted in 2023 for taking a bribe in bitcoins. The Ledger Nano X hardware wallet stores the bitcoins.

It is one of several transfers in the context of a court-defined enforcement proceeding. Tambiev’s bitcoins seized by the court are now being converted into state revenue. More than 1 billion rubles amount to the total bitcoins’ value.

The bitcoins are not the only property seized from Tambiev. Further fines were collected in a separate enforcement proceeding started December 20, 2024. Tambiev is being asked to pay 15,000 rubles in enforcement fees by bailiffs. They are part of a broader effort to recover assets seized illegally.

In 2023, the prosecutor’s office in Nikulinsky Court ordered the seizure of 1,032.1 BTC on the grounds of its seizure. The court decided that the bottom line is that the bitcoins were earned with unconfirmed income. They were therefore to be given to the state.

Tambiev Denies Guilt, Despite Evidence of Bitcoin Bribe Payments

Tambiev was also sued again by the Prosecutor General’s Office in November 2024. In this lawsuit, he seeks to transfer additional of his property such as from these real estate properties, a Honda motorcycle, another Bitcoins, to the state. Shagaban Kubanov, Tambiev’s uncle and co defendant in the case, says he was held at a police bureau for 26 days during the investigation and interrogated about uprisings across Russia after Putin’s reelection in March.

Tambiev was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum security prison and a fine of 500 million rubles. Kristina Lyakhovenko, convicted also, was his former colleague. For taking bribes and falsifying evidence, she was given a nine-year prison sentence. Dmitry Gubin, the third defendant, is at large, and on the wanted list.

This is a case of a large-scale bribe from the hacker group Infraud Organization. The bribe was extorted by Tambiev and his colleagues in exchange for halting the group’s prosecution. Russia’s largest bribery case took place in this total value of a bribe was 14 billion rubles.

Tambiev turned down offers to cooperate despite the evidence. However, he continued to assert his innocence and said Lyakhovenko was a victim. The case has continued to make news due to the monstrous size of the bribe and the use of the cryptocurrency in the crime.