This is the story of how the mastermind behind MMM, Russia’s biggest financial pyramid scheme, managed to get elected to parliament while behind bars, how he declared war on the oligarchs and how he wanted to join forces with Julian Assange.
“It was impossible to count the money, we estimated it by eye, by the roomful,” Sergei Mavrodi, the founder of MMM, recalled in 1994, talking of the scale of his company’s operations.
The Ponzi scheme operated for just a few years, but in that time, it acquired 15 million investors across the country. MMM shares and coupons were circulated as a parallel currency to the ruble and foreign currencies; they were exchanged for food and clothes. And even after the courts declared him to be a fraudster, investors were ready to install him in the Kremlin. In fact, he was even elected a deputy of parliament while he was in prison.
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