Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the Mexican billionaire behind Grupo Elektra, thought he’d done enough due diligence when he decided to invest $400 million in Bitcoin as the value of the cryptocurrency surged in the spring of 2021. 

Since he didn’t have enough cash on hand to make the wager, he instructed his investment advisers to arrange a stock-backed loan using shares of his company as collateral. When a London broker connected his Swiss adviser to a blue-blooded lender, Astor Capital Fund, Salinas received reassurances that the fund had been established on the “foundations of the wealth” of the Astor family. 

A new report published Thursday by the Financial Times outlines the deal that Salinas would later claim defrauded him out of nearly half a billion dollars in Elektra shares, and took him years to unravel. 

The alleged culprit introduced himself in a video call as “Thomas Astor-Mellon,” an American whose lineage could be traced back to the tycoon John Jacob Astor, the FT said. Astor-Mellon spoke in an American accent and appeared to be dialing in from a yacht, and he assured Salinas that offering stock-backed loans was something Astor Capital specialized in, according to the report. 

Another Astor representative, who identified himself as “Gregory Mitchell,” negotiated the details with Salinas, ultimately landing on a structure that involved Salinas borrowing $150 million in cash in a loan secured against roughly $416 million of Elektra shares, with the remainder of financing coming from international banks, the FT said.

But as Salinas was later to find out, “Thomas Astor-Mellon” was actually Alexei Skachkov, a Russian-born man living in Atlanta with prior convictions for forging prescriptions and stealing jewelry, according to the FT. “Gregory Mitchell” was Val Sklarov, a Ukrainian-born American who had assumed multiple names over the years. 

Nor was the loan what Salinas believed it to be, according to his accounting of the incident to the news outlet. He had leveraged his assets in a so-called Lombard loan, which can allow borrowers to use stocks as collateral, but which can also make the protective terms of a loan a matter of interpretation, the FT said. 

Instead of using the $416 million in Elektra shares as collateral, the two men simply sold the stocks and used the proceeds to advance the loan, according to the report. 

One of Mexico’s wealthiest and most combative businessmen, with political ties that reach as high as the Mexican presidency, Salinas now paints himself as the mark of sophisticated swindle. 

“It was the perfect fraud,” Salinas told the FT. “The guy took my stock, sold it, and gave me the money as a loan — Jesus, that’s as bad as it gets.”

Sklarov disputes the fraud characterization, the FT reported, arguing the deals are private contracts between sophisticated parties and describing what critics call fraud as hard-edged lending to risky borrowers. The parties remain in a contentious litigation in London, the newspaper said.

Read more at the Financial Times