French prosecutors are set to unveil money laundering charges against Dimitry Klyuev, an alleged mastermind of the Magnitsky Affair, the Russian tax fraud that triggered a global anticorruption movement, according to court documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Klyuev, who is believed to live in Russia, will be tried in absentia in a Paris criminal court in a  daylong procedure set for March 30, the same day the charges are unsealed.

ICIJ has obtained both the charging document, filed secretly last summer, and the notice of hearing for the trial.

The documents show that prosecutors last summer secretly charged Klyuev, 58, with “aggravated money laundering” in connection to his role in the Magnitisky case, a $230-million fraudulent tax refund scheme dating to 2007.

The affair is named after Sergey Magnitsky, a Russian tax advisor working for the American investment firm Hermitage Capital who exposed the fraud and died almost two years later after being beaten in a Moscow prison.  Hermitage’s principal, Bill Browder, made the case a global cause celebre and pushed for what became the Sergei L. Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, the landmark 2012 legislation passed by U.S. legislators targeting Russian corruption globally. Klyuev was the alleged mastermind of the scheme, to falsely claim a tax refund using Hermitage subsidiaries and funnel the proceeds through offshore entities, according to U.S. sanctions against Klyuev and others announced in 2014.

The French case stems from Klyuev’s spending of the alleged proceeds of the fraudulent tax refund in France. Prosecutors allege that between 2007 and 2012, Klyuev spent more than $2.4 million, (2.1 million euros) on French soil on luxury goods, including clothing, jewelry and artwork. Investigators say the funds originated from accounts he controlled that received proceeds from the scheme.

If convicted, Klyuev faces a prison term of up to ten years.

French authorities issued a European arrest warrant for him in March 2025.  Klyuev was charged in August last year but the charges were kept under seal by French authorities on the chance the Klyuev would travel to the country.

According to the filings, Klyuev was involved “in the placement, concealment, or conversion of proceeds directly or indirectly derived from organized fraud committed” against the Russian State and Treasury..

Some proceeds of the scheme were allegedly routed through accounts linked to Klyuev’s Universal Savings Bank before moving offshore, including to entities registered in the British Virgin Islands with accounts at the Cyprus-branch of FBME Bank.

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Anti-money laundering authorities in Canada have revoked registrations of nearly three dozen cryptocurrency businesses following an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The Toronto Star.

Last week, Canada’s Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre removed 23 crypto firms from its registry of firms permitted to provide money services in the country. FINTRAC had earlier this month struck registrations of a dozen other crypto companies operating in the country.

The revocations mark a notable uptick in Canadian enforcement actions around money transmitters and an intensifying focus on crypto businesses in particular, according to experts and officials interviewed by the Star.

“This represents a significantly increased pace of action, and our government will maintain this momentum,” Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said in a statement. Champagne vowed to pursue new measures to address risks posed by virtual currency businesses, “which can be used to facilitate money laundering and fraud.”

The actions came after a Star investigation published in November found that dozens of crypto businesses in the Toronto area were not registered with FINTRAC to deal in virtual currencies. Many of these businesses specialize in converting cryptocurrency to physical cash. The Star story, part of ICIJ’s Coin Laundry investigation into dirty money in cryptocurrency, identified a single thoroughfare with 50 businesses advertising crypto services, most of which appeared to be operating unlawfully.

The Star found that two of these operations have used crypto wallets allegedly linked to Iran-backed terror groups.

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The U.S. Justice Department last October announced the largest asset seizure in American history: a cache of bitcoin then valued at $15 billion tied to the Cambodia-based Prince Group that prosecutors alleged oversaw an empire of human trafficking and industrial-scale scamming.

The news offered a rare glimmer of hope for victims of sophisticated cryptocurrency scams. In part due to the ease of laundering cryptocurrencies, these victims have had a notoriously difficult time recovering their lost life savings or even getting law enforcement to begin tracing such funds.

“By dismantling a criminal empire built on forced labor and deception, we are sending a clear message that the United States will use every tool at its disposal to defend victims, recover stolen assets, and bring to justice those who exploit the vulnerable for profit,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a joint statement.

But in the five months since the announcement, questions and frustrations have begun to swirl around the Justice Department’s handling of the historic cache of seized funds. The Justice Department has given little indication of what it plans to do with the 127,271 seized bitcoins, currently worth around $9 billion, as it has swiftly rejected claims on the funds made by attorneys representing hundreds of alleged victims.

Daniel Thornburgh and other attorneys representing hundreds of alleged victims of crypto scams say the government is not providing a viable path for returning seized funds to rightful owners.

Victims’ advocates and attorneys fear the agency may use the funds to capitalize President Trump’s national Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, a government crypto stockpile advocated by the cryptocurrency industry.

“This would lead to victims being revictimized by their own government,” said Thornburgh.

He is part of a growing number of attorneys and victim advocates who are calling for a special victim fund to take over responsibility for the historic sum of seized assets. They argue that this alternative offers a clearer path to victims receiving restitution.

The Department of Justice declined to comment on the case.

In November, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 36 partner publications released The Coin Laundry investigation that showed how cryptocurrency scam victims face immense difficulty recovering funds due to the rapidly expanding illicit crypto economy. In interviews, dozens of victims told ICIJ and its media partners that they faced financial ruin as criminals rapidly laundered their stolen funds through secretive crypto wallets. In many cases, reports to law enforcement yielded no response at all.

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A blockchain is a digital ledger that stores information across a worldwide computer network. Cryptocurrency transaction data is stored in files known as “blocks,” which are saved chronologically to create a digital “chain.” Each block has a unique identifier, or hash, which is generated by a cryptographic algorithm that also includes data from the previous blocks in the chain. Blockchains are distributed, which means copies are saved across multiple computers and must match across the network to be valid, rather than relying on a centralized third party, like a bank. Blockchain technology is not exclusive to cryptocurrency. It can also be used to store other kinds of data, such as medical information or property records.

The U.S. government filings that ICIJ reviewed do not provide details on how it came into possession of the bitcoin. This lack of an official explanation has created an opening for speculation among experts, interested parties and a rival superpower. A Chinese cybercrimes agency recently suggested that the U.S. government originally stole the bitcoin through sophisticated hacking in 2020.

Last week, lawyers representing Chen demanded that the Justice Department explain how it seized the funds.

The Justice Department’s asset forfeiture filing, which describes the government’s rationale for taking the $15 billion, has also created some confusion about which victims may be entitled to the funds.

After the government announced its seizure in 2025, analysts quickly pointed out that the $15 billion in bitcoin had sat dormant in crypto wallets for years after their reported theft in 2020. Chen’s defense attorneys have argued these dormant assets have had no opportunity to commingle with any money taken from scam victims after 2020. But, in its asset forfeiture filing, some of the government’s most specific descriptions of the Prince Group’s alleged scams involve frauds that took place in 2021 and 2022 — after the seized bitcoin went dormant.

Attorneys for Chen last week criticized the asset forfeiture complaint’s use of these alleged crimes to justify seizing money that had been out of circulation since 2020.

The Prince Group argues that the U.S. government somehow took the coins and then created a story to justify keeping them. “This indictment is simply air cover for a giant cash grab — one that both does a disservice to the victims of these crypto scams and injustice to an innocent man,” a spokesperson for the Prince Group told ICIJ in a statement.

“Prosecutors used exaggerations, deceit, and outright impossibilities to convince a court to retroactively approve their theft of Bitcoin and to convince a grand jury of everyday Americans to indict an innocent man, Chen Zhi,” the spokesperson said. “Not only did prosecutors use salacious rumors and innuendo to make wild accusations completely unconnected to Chen, they made serious errors, generated falsehoods out of whole cloth, and acted with egregious negligence all in an effort to justify their desperate, unfounded allegations.”

In court filings last week, Prince Group lawyers highlighted another possibly problematic part of U.S. authorities’ case against Chen. Several photos that the indictment claimed as evidence of wrongdoing appear to have no ostensible relationship to the Prince Group or its alleged crimes.

One of these photos, offered up by U.S. prosecutors as an example of the Prince Group’s violence, shows a man bound to an overturned plastic lawnchair. But ICIJ was able to confirm that the same photo was featured on a Mongolian-language website six years ago in a post about a man whose testicles became stuck in a lawn chair and had to be extricated from the chair by medical workers. This article contains no mention of the Prince Group or any wrongdoing.

Left, a photo included in the U.S. indictment against Chen Zhi shows a man attached to a lawn chair in a hospital bed; Right, the same image was published in an unrelated article on a Mongolian-language website in 2020.

Another photo in the indictment shows a purported victim of the Prince Group with blood flowing from a head wound. However, on a Zoom call arranged by representatives for the Prince Group, the man, who requested anonymity, told ICIJ that the photo depicted injuries he sustained in a drunken fight in 2015, and that he has never been the victim of violence by an organized crime group.

Hany Farid, a visual forensics expert at the University of California at Berkeley, confirmed that the man ICIJ spoke with via Zoom is the same person pictured in the indictment.

The Department of Justice declined to comment on the photographs.

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