Ilan Shor

Ilan Shor (or Șor;^[1] born 6 March 1987) is a controversial Moldovan businessman and politician, who is currently under house arrest for fraud while simultaneously serving since 2015 as the elected mayor of the Moldovan city of Orhei.^[2] He owns several Moldovan businesses, including a company named Dufremol (Duty-free) and the FC Milsami football club. In 2014, he became the chairman of the board of the Saving Bank of Moldova. He has reported in an interview that he started his own business at 13 in a mobile phone shop. He is good friends with another Moldovan millionaire, Gabi Stati.

Personal life

Ilan Shor was born in Tel Aviv, Israel on 6 March 1987, the son of Miron Shor and his wife, Moldovan Jews from Chișinău who had moved to Israel in the late 1970s.^[3] The family returned to Chișinău around 1990, when Shor was either two or three years old, and his father went into business in Moldova.^[1][3] His father died in 2005.^[4] Ilan Shor has been married to the Russian singer Jasmin (who is 10 years older than him) since 2011.^[4][5] In addition to Jasmin's son from a previous marriage, they have a daughter, Margarita, who was born in 2012. Jasmin was pregnant again in 2015.^[5]

The $1 billion bank fraud scandal

Ilan Shor and his group of companies benefited from the fraudulent transactions conducted at the three banks involved in the Moldovan bank fraud scandal. On November 26, 2014 the banks went bankrupt and were later placed under special administration of the National Bank of Moldova. On 27 November, the Moldovan Government, headed by Prime Minister Iurie Leancă, secretly decided to bail out the three banks with $870 million in emergency loans, covered from state reserves. This created a deficit in Moldovan public finances equivalent to an eighth of the country's GDP.

In the week preceding the 2014 Moldovan parliamentary elections, more than $750 million were extracted from the three banks between 24 and 26 November. A van belonging to Klassica Force, a company owned by Shor, while transporting 12 sacks of bank files, was stolen and burned on November 27.^[6] Records of many transactions were deleted from the banks' computers.^[7]

On 28 January 2015 the National Bank of Moldova hired the U.S. investigative consultancy Kroll to conduct an investigation of the fraud. The auditors reviewed transactions at the three banks with missing funds in November 2014. The report documents how companies tied to Shor gradually took control of the banks and then allegedly issued massive loans to affiliated companies. It concluded the three banks transferred at least 13.5 billion lei to five Moldovan companies affiliated with the Shor group, controlled by Ilan Shor, between November 24 and 26.^[8]

In March 2015 Ilan Shor was suspected by the National Anti-Corruption Center (NAC) for his work in Saving Bank. On 17 March 2015 he was questioned for 8 hours and Anti Corruption officers seized his personal property. On May 6 2015 Shor was placed under house arrest. As of 2015, Shor was still at large, after a period of house arrest. Despite this, he was allowed to register for electoral race for the mayor of city of Orhei, a contest in which he was successful at the June 14 local government election.^[4][9][10]

References