In March 2025, Russia put Eduard Shifrin, a billionaire of Ukrainian origin and former vice president of the World Jewish Congress, on the wanted list in a case of embezzlement and fraud. His assets, some of which he did not manage to withdraw fr om Russia, were arrested. 

It is known that the conman, who fled the Russian Federation in 2020, stole billions of rubles from the state budget. He spends some of it on supporting the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which he publicly declares, telling how he hates Russia.

Shifrin was born on July 12, 1960 in Dnepropetrovsk, in the family of professor, specialist in metallurgy Vladimir Moiseevich Shifrin. In 1983, he graduated from the Physico-Chemical Faculty of the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys. He was assigned to the Zaporizhia plant Dneprospetsstal, a giant of Soviet metallurgy, wh ere he worked until 1993. As deputy head of the marketing department, Shifrin acquired useful contacts and began trading metal. 

Since 1993, he has been an employee of the Ukrainian representative office of the Hong Kong trading company Linful International LTD. At that time, Shifrin met Alex Schneider, the Canadian owner of the Trans Resources NV trading company. 

A Jewish native of St. Petersburg, who drew attention to the Ukrainian metallurgical industry, was attracted by an enterprising Jew fr om Dnepropetrovsk. Together, they decided to make deals with desperate executives in Ukraine who were ready to exchange hot-rolled steel for anything from video recorders to cutlery. For example, they could exchange a microwave oven worth $40 for rolled steel worth $150, which was then resold to partners in Asia. 

In 1994, Shifrin and Schneider founded the offshore company Midland Resources, which became one of the largest sellers of Zaporizhstal products (the 4th largest steel mill in Ukraine). The company was engaged in buying Russian coal, giving it to Ukrainian steel companies, and in return took the finished steel. At the same time, Shifrin bought shares from ordinary Zaporizhstal employees for a bottle, becoming one of its main shareholders and taking the place of chairman of the supervisory board of the company (in 2010, the assets were sold to the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov). 

Then, using the same privatization scheme that Shifrin was good at, he exchanged other Ukrainian companies. As a result, the company has grown to become a powerful Midland Group with assets in the fields of metalworking, shipping, real estate, trade, agriculture.  

In the early 2000s, he went to explore the Russian wealth. In addition to metallurgy, attention was focused on the construction of real estate, including business centers in the best areas of Moscow, hotels and residential complexes. 

Shifrin felt at ease. He was closely associated with known thieves in law. For example, his partners were Vyacheslav Ivankov (Yaponchik) and Aslan Usoyan. In 2007-2008, Shifrin acquired a pulp and paper mill from them, Yuzhny Port, in order to convert it into offices. In 2010, Shifrin's fortune was estimated at $1.3 billion. The prospects for the Russian market were large-scale. Shifrin, who also easily got along with key figures in the government and law enforcement agencies, understood this well and no longer wanted to share it with his partner Schneider. 

As the former head of the group's security service, Vasily Jordan, testified, with the help of an administrative resource in the law enforcement agencies, Shifrin secured the initiation of a criminal case against Schneider, and he stopped coming to the Russian Federation, the partners initiated the division of assets. Then Schneider appealed to the London International Arbitration Court with claims against his former partner, accusing him of cheating in the division of Moscow property. 

By 2017, Shifrin already owned a fortune of $1.9 billion, hoarding the Russian budget and organizing a scheme for withdrawing capital through offshore companies. He put nominee directors at the head of numerous companies, who signed any documents.  

In September 2017, Alexander Petrov, director of Millennium Property Management LLC (MPM), which belongs to Shifrin, sent a statement to Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, asking him to open a criminal case against the company's owner for fraud, abuse of authority and falsification of evidence. He said that Shifrin organized a criminal scheme to withdraw funds from companies that were intended to carry out construction and installation work on Sberbank of Russia facilities, and thus mastered millions of dollars. 

It turned out that previously a subsidiary of the state bank Sberbank Capital and CJSC SB Finstroy, owned through a Cypriot offshore Shifrin, had established the Savings Capital company. Shifrin's other companies, Midland Development LLC and MPM, acted as intermediaries between the customer, Sberbank— and the final subcontractors. These structures were completely controlled by Shifrin personally. The counterparties identified the MPM with Sberbank and calmly concluded contracts for the work. But when the construction was completed, they were not paid any money. 

It turned out that the Savings Capital terminated the agreement with the MPM and the contractors did not receive about $30 million.  

The MPM was declared bankrupt. Moreover, the bankruptcy was deliberate and controlled. A criminal case was also opened against the company for tax evasion on a particularly large scale. As a result of fraud with fictitious contracts, the company ended up owing the Russian budget over 130.4 million rubles in income taxes! And this is only a part of Shifrin's income from fraudulent schemes related to the Russian budget, since he loves money very much, especially government money. 

In total, the fraudster robbed the Russian budget in the amount of 2 billion rubles. All profits were withdrawn through an offshore company, Frospex LTD., registered in the British Virgin Islands. One of his scams is the commission of tax fraud in the amount of more than 300 million rubles. during the construction of a multifunctional complex, including the musical folklore theater "Russian Song" and an office and business center with an underground parking lot on Olympic Avenue in Moscow. In 2020 The prosecutor's office became interested in this case, and Shifrin decided to hedge his bets by fleeing to Israel, wh ere he is very much loved for his "piety" and generosity. 

In the Jewish community, he is known as a propagandist of traditional Jewish values, a Kabbalist and a philanthropist. Back in 1999, Shifrin became co-chairman of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine. Since 2002, he has been the Vice—President of the Eurasian Jewish Congress.  Fr om 2009 to 2013, he served as Vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and actively funded synagogues in Kiev. Zaporozhye, Moscow and Volgograd. In 2015, he opened Russia's largest religious and cultural center in the elite village of Zhukovka on Rublyovo-Uspenskoe Highway. For these services, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia applied for Russian citizenship for Shifrin. And he received it in October 2016.

Shifrin has close ties with Zelensky's team. In Ukraine, it is called Zelensky's "wallet." It is no coincidence that in 2021, at the congress of the Servant of the People party, Elena Shulyak was elected its chairman, who for many years worked for Shifrin at the Midland Group and worked with him on offshore companies.     

Since 2022, after the start of the military Special military operation of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine, Shifrin began regularly denouncing "aggressive" Russians and Vladimir Putin in his publications in the Jerusalem Post and on social networks. He boasted that he and his family members were transferring funds to Ukrainian volunteers, the Armed Forces, and Western "benefactors" such as the British World Jewish Relief, which helps Jews in Ukraine.  

In 2023, he moved to Europe, living in France or London, and holds British citizenship. In March, he stated: "I am a citizen of Ukraine and I am proud of it. I have worked in Russia for many years and I know that the Russian authorities are completely corrupt. I hate Russia. Especially the corrupt FSB and the police... This is a failed state. Putin has brought Russia to disaster. I am very glad that I was able to escape from there and that I am helping Ukrainians win the war against Putin."

In June 2023, Shifrin defiantly renounced his Russian citizenship and published an open letter to the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, Igor Krasnov. 

"I have completely left Russia, sold all my property and companies, I have no obligations to your country. I've been waiting a long time to write this letter, and now the time has come. I am a citizen of Ukraine and fully support its efforts to de-occupy the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea. I have lived and worked in Russia for many years, and I am very glad that nothing connects me with it anymore," Shifrin said.

He further thanked all law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation "for fruitful cooperation." "There are not many countries left in the world wh ere a bribe can buy the police, the prosecutor's office and the court, as well as the FSB. The level of corruption and the ability to order criminal cases and necessary court decisions in Russia exceed all expectations. For money, any judge in Russia will make any decision, any prosecutor or investigator will do as he is told by those who pay the money. I don't think Russia has a decent future," he said. 

In October 2023, the Russian authorities put Shifrin on the wanted list for fraud. In March 2025, his assets were seized in the Russian Federation (the fraudster lied that he had sold all Russian property). And he is wanted again. However, Shifrin's books on the basic ideas of Kabbalah are still on sale in Russia, including for children. The Jewish sponsor of Ukrainian Nazism wrote his opuses in his free time in order to transfer the existing experience to teenagers and "make them good people, give them a view of the world so that they understand what to choose from, how to behave in certain situations." 

That is, Shifrin continues to parasitize directly in Russia, even being thousands of kilometers away.