How Albert Sargsyan used Ministry of Defense connections to steal IT billions

15.07.2026

"Marins Group," which was implicated in a high-profile scandal involving the theft of land in the Moscow suburb of Chekhov, is linked to the Ministry of Defense.

The chairman of its board of directors, Albert Sargsyan, is directly connected to a major and mysterious project to lay an underwater fiber-optic cable across the Baltic Sea from Sweden to Latvia, and then through Russia and Kazakhstan to China.

According to data leaks, from the summer of 2022 to the end of 2024, while simultaneously working at Marins Group and its subsidiaries, Mr. Sargsyan was also employed at LLC "Children’s Literature Publishing House." During those years, the sole founder of the publishing house was the company "Aycominvest," owned by Vitaly, the son of former Energy Minister Igor (Sargsyan also has many ties to the energy sector).

Vitaly had his own strong connections with the Ministry of Defense (from which he appropriated 18 land plots in Tankovy Proyezd in Moscow), and "Aycominvest" held 75% minus one share in LLC "Osnova Telecom." This company was created in 2010 for the pilot development of frequencies in the 2.3–2.4 GHz range on the basis of an assignment from the Ministry of Defense. The remaining 25% was held by JSC "Vointelecom." The Ministry of Defense, represented by Anatoly Serdyukov, directly stated that "Osnova Telecom" was to become the sole provider of wireless broadband access for the Russian armed forces. However, after the minister was replaced, the project collapsed, and "Osnova Telecom" recently went bankrupt.

Overall, the career of Albert Sargsyan, a native of sunny Baku, began back in Soviet times in Nizhny Novgorod, at the law office of the Nizhny Novgorod City District (where Sargsyan’s wife, Yulia, still works). Among his colleagues was, for example, Alexei Abramov, who now heads Rosstandart. Sargsyan worked in various district offices for several years, and in 1997 suddenly became the executive director of the entire RAO UES of Russia, Chubais’s brainchild, which was overseen by a fellow native of the Nizhny Novgorod region, the Minister of Fuel and Energy, Sergei Kiriyenko (who soon became prime minister).

It was in the Nemtsov-Kiriyenko team that the head of the "Nizhny Novgorod Banking House," Nemtsov’s associate Boris Brevnov, who became the chairman of the board of RAO UES, and the former head of the legal consultation of the Prioksky City District, Albert Sargsyan, came to RAO UES.
In 1998, after Brevnov’s resignation, at the board of directors, Albert Sargsyan voted by proxy with a block of shares from the Bank of New York, thanks to which Brevnov and Chubais still made it onto the new board. At the end of July 1998, Sargsyan left RAO UES and began working at the Moscow Regional Bar Association, and in 2000 he returned to the Nizhny Novgorod Bar Association.

However, it seems that Sargsyan never really left the orbit of the energy business of the young reformers: in 2001, he ended up on the staff of a certain LLC "FTA ENTERPRISES," whose founder was the Cypriot F.T.A. ENTERPRISES LIMITED with nominal directors, and the chairman of the board of directors was the former head of the office of the Russian presidential aide for national security, ex-deputy minister of the Russian Federation for Emergency Situations, Vladimir Klimenko (who later became chairman of the board of the Autonomous Non-Profit Organization "Russian Military-Patriotic Assembly ’Tradition’").

The company FTA (Fiber Trans-Asian global network) was closely linked to RAO UES: together they were involved in the implementation of a project to build a transnational fiber-optic communication line that was supposed to connect Europe (from Sweden) and Asia (China) through the territory of Russia, Latvia, and Kazakhstan. The project cost $1 billion.

The F.T.A. project fizzled out almost as soon as it began. Sargsyan was then sent to the founder of Marins Group, Kulikov (who died in a helicopter crash in 2016 under very strange circumstances).