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Ilan Shor

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Ilan Shor
Shor in 2019
Leader of the Victory Bloc
Assumed office
21 April 2024
Leader of the Șor Party
In office
19 June 2016 – 19 June 2023
Preceded byValerii Klimenko (as Leader of the Equality Socio-Political Movement)
Member of the Moldovan Parliament
In office
9 March 2019 – 27 April 2023
Parliamentary groupȘor Party
ConstituencyOrhei
Majority17,968 (59.2%)
Mayor of Orhei
In office
1 July 2015 – 9 April 2019
Preceded byVitalie Colun
Succeeded byPavel Verejanu
Personal details
Born (1987-03-06) 6 March 1987 (age 37)
Tel Aviv, Israel
NationalityMoldovan
Israeli[1]
Russian[2][3][4]
Political partyȘor Party
Other political
affiliations		Chance. Duties. Realization
SpouseSara Shor
Children2
OccupationBusinessman, banker, politician

Ilan Shor (or Șor;[5] Hebrew: אילן שור;[6] born 6 March 1987) is an Israeli-born Moldovan oligarch[7] and politician. In 2014, Shor "masterminded" a scam that saw US$1 billion disappear from Moldovan banks,[8] resulting in a total loss equivalent to 12% of Moldova's GDP and the arrest of former Prime Minister Vlad Filat.[9] In June 2017, he was sentenced to 7.5 years of prison in absentia for fraud and money laundering and on 14 April 2023 his sentence was increased to 15 years. All of Shor's Moldovan assets were also frozen.[10] After spending time under house arrest he fled to Israel in 2019, where he lived until 2024.[11] He currently lives in Russia.[12]

On 26 October 2022, the United States sanctioned him due to his working with "corrupt oligarchs and Moscow-based entities to create political unrest in Moldova".[13] The United Kingdom and European Union have also sanctioned Shor.[14] His pro-Russian party, the Șor Party, was banned by the Constitutional Court of Moldova on 19 June 2023 after months of protests organized by his party. According to the court, these protests were designed to destabilize Moldova and foment a coup in order to install a pro-Russian government.[15][16] The same Constitutional Court revoked the ban on 27 March 2024.[17]

Personal life[edit]

Shor was born in Tel Aviv, Israel on 6 March 1987, the son of Miron and Maria Shor,[18] Moldovan Jews from Chișinău who had moved to Israel in the late 1970s.[19] The family returned to Chișinău around 1990, when Shor was either two or three years old, and his father went into business in Moldova.[5][19] His father died in 2005.[20] Shor has been married to the Russian singer Sara Lvovna Shor, who goes by the stage name Jasmin, since 2011.[20][21] In addition to Jasmin's son from a previous marriage, they have a daughter, Margarita, who was born in 2012, and a son, Miron, who was born in 2016.[22]

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 Savings Bank of Moldova.[23]

On 16 May 2024 he received Russian citizenship.[24]

2014 Moldovan bank fraud scandal[edit]

Further information: 2014 Moldovan bank fraud scandal

In the week preceding the 2014 Moldovan parliamentary elections, more than $750 million (~$951 million in 2023) were extracted from the three banks between 24 and 26 November. A van belonging to Klassica Force, a company owned by Shor, was stolen while transporting 12 sacks of bank files and burned on November 27.[25] Records of many transactions were deleted from the banks' computers.[26] On 26 November 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, which will have to be paid for by the Moldovan taxpayer.

Auditors from Kroll 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 Shor, between November 24 and 26.[27][28]

In March 2015, Ilan Shor was suspected by the National Anti-Corruption Center (NAC) for his work in the Savings 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 allowed to move freely, after a period of house arrest. This is because he fully cooperated with the investigation. Despite this, he was allowed to register for electoral race for the mayor of city of Orhei, a contest in which he won 62% of the vote on June 14 local government election.[20][29][30]

In October 2015, Vlad Filat, former prime minister of Moldova and leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, was investigated for his involvement in the fraud and was accused of having taken bribes of about $250 million from Shor. On June 27, 2016, Vlad Filat was sentenced to 9 years in prison.[31]

Shor was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison in June 2017 for money laundering, fraud and breach of trust, in relation to the banks, Shor who was under house arrest pending an appeal, is currently living in Israel, having fled there in 2019.[32]

On 13 April 2023, the appeal court doubled the sentence to 15 in years in prison in absentia on graft charges and froze all his assets.[33][34][35]

Political career[edit]

Mayor of Orhei[edit]

On 14 June 2015, Shor was elected mayor of the Moldovan town of Orhei[36] with 62% of the vote, a post he held until April 2019.

According to the polls made in 2019 related to the most popular politicians in Moldova, Shor was ranked at the third position among the top politicians in which Moldovans had the highest trust,[37] and by some polls he was ranked at the sixth[38][39] and at the seventh position accordingly.[40]

Opposition figure[edit]

Further information: 2022–2023 Moldovan protests

Whilst in exile, and with an arrest warrant outstanding, Shor was elected to the Parliament of Moldova in 2019 on the Șor Party list. He was re-elected in the 2021 Moldovan parliamentary election as one of six Șor Party MP's.[32] Following confirmation of his conviction, on 27 April 2023 Shor was removed as an MP, an appeal being rejected.[41]

Shor is a pro-Moscow opposition figure in Moldovan politics who has been described as "a leading figure in the Kremlin’s efforts to subvert" the Republic of Moldova, according to intelligence reports.[42] Shor is known by the moniker of "the young one" by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), which, according to intercepted communications, sent Russian political strategists to assist Shor's political party.[42]

Banning of Șor Party and Ilan Shor from Moldovan politics[edit]

On 19 June 2023 the Șor Party was banned by the Constitutional Court of Moldova.[43] The court had declared the party unconstitutional with court chairman Nicolae Roșca citing "an article in the constitution stating that parties must through their activities uphold political pluralism, the rule of law and the territorial integrity of Moldova."[44]

On 31 July, the Moldovan parliament voted in favour of banning the leaders of the dissolved Șor Party – including Ilan Shor – from standing in elections for a period of five years.[45] Shor has claimed he will contest the ban.

Sanctions[edit]

On 26 October 2022, he was sanctioned by the United States Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control as a Specially Designated National under GLOMAG over his association with the Russian government.[46]

On 9 December 2022 the United Kingdom HM Treasury imposed sanctions, considering Shor an involved person under the Global Anti-Corruption Sanctions Regulations, involved in serious corruption with respect to bribery of foreign public officials.[47]

On 31 May 2023, European Union imposed sanctions against him, due to his association with the Russian government and because of his role in the pro-Russian unrest in Moldova.[48]

S.O.R. bloc[edit]

In June 2023 Ilan Shor created a new Moldovan political group, the ‘Chance, Obligations, Achievements’ political bloc whose abbreviation in Moldovan is S.O.R., with Shor inviting all political parties to join the group.[49] A clone party, called “ȘANSĂ” or Chance party, led by journalist Alexei Lungu believed to have been established by Ilan Shor,[50] was deregistered two days before the November local elections amid claims of using illegal funds from Russia.[51]

In September 2023, his political party reportedly gathered support and "seized" the ethnic enclave of Gagauzia via embezzled money.[52]

Corruption[edit]

In 2015, Shor was arrested on charges of money laundering and misappropriation of funds. Corruption investigators allege that Shor legalized more than $335 million of the stolen billion.[53]

In June 2015, while under house arrest, he registered as a candidate for mayor of Orheev, Moldova's fifth-largest population center. He was released to participate in the election campaign and won the election in the first round. After that, prosecutors did not apply preventive measures to Shor. In October 2015, Shor carried out a "confession of guilt". He came to the National Anti-Corruption Center (NCAC), giving prosecutors a 10-page story of "corrupt practices" on the part of former Prime Minister Vlad Filat. According to him, for providing various services and favoring Shor's business, Filat received about $250 million from him over the years. Based on his testimony, Filat was sentenced to nine years in prison. Filat denied any joint business dealings with Ilan Shor.[54]

In 2023, MP Nesterovski, who had been acting in the interests of Shor's criminal group since March, recruited former MP Arina Spataru (a member of parliament from 2019 to 2021), to create a new pro-European party that would act in the interests of Ilan Shor. Arina Spataru contacted the Moldovan intelligence services, reporting a financial offer from Shor in exchange for the creation of a controlled pro-European party. This is how Moldova learned of Shor's plans to finance several parties at once in local elections. According to Spataru, in a private conversation Shor admitted to her that the money to finance the parties comes from Russia. According to political analyst Victor Ciobanu, "for Russia, against the background of the lack of success in the war against Ukraine, it is important to win a geopolitical victory by non-military method in Moldova," and Ilan Shor should help them in this.[55]

In 2023, after the Chisinau Court of Appeal heard the case, the European Commission called the sentencing of Ilan Shor, leader of the pro-Russian Moldovan Shor party, an important step for justice and the fight against corruption in Moldova.[56]

Maia Sandu called the Shor political party, whose leader is Ilan Shor, a party that was created out of corruption and for corruption.[57]

The Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova (PSRM) claims that fugitive former MP Ilan Shor, using a "clone party", has started a process of massive corruption and bribery of members of the Party of Socialists. The party in question is the political party "Renaștere - Renaissance", which came into the public eye after several Socialist MPs joined it in May 2023.[58]

Ilan Shor is under EU, Swiss and US sanctions for trying to destabilize the country.[59]

Investigations and links to Russia[edit]

RISE Moldova, a partner of the OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project), reports that the investment program of oligarch Ilan Shor, who fled to Russia from a prison sentence in Moldova, was funded by a former Moldovan law enforcement officer and suspected money launderer on behalf of an organized crime group who now lives in Moscow. In August 2023, ahead of the general election, Ilan Shor announced that he was launching a "Moldovan Village" program, under which each mayor's office would receive 20 million lei (about $1.1 million) over the next three years through his Visul meu ("My Dream") fund. A month later, several mayoralties signed sponsorship contracts, however not with Shor's foundation, but with 61-year-old Israeli citizen Igal Shved. The Information and Security Service (ISS) found out that Shved's money came from Russia and that he holds a Russian passport. According to the ISS, in 2021, the Service for Prevention and Combating Money Laundering suspected that Victor Gutsuliak, from whom Shved received funds, previously worked in Moldovan law enforcement agencies and now lives in Russia. He laundered funds for the benefit of a criminal group led by Ilan Shor: his account received 166 million rubles (about two million euros) from Anastasia Dronova, who was involved in "Russian oligarchic groups linked to high-ranking individuals in Moscow." According to RISE Moldova, after Shved's funds were seized, Ilan Shor began using cash couriers to withdraw the money to Moldova.[60]

According to a Washington Post’s investigation in 2020, the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service) began cooperating with Shor's party. The political technologists bought prepaid SIM cards for disposable phones, advised the party to erase as much information as possible about the politician's "negative past" (WP suggests it was Shor's criminal record) and try to whitewash his image online. They also advised offering journalists "rewards" for deleting articles. Management control of Moldova's two main pro-Russian TV channels was transferred to a close associate of Shor. This became the politician's main platform for pushing an agenda aligned with Moscow. When Shor had a conflict with Moldovan authorities in 2020, the FSB helped him to transfer one of his key assets – shares in the Chisinau airport – to Russian businessman Andrei Goncharenko. Shor has said he does not own the stake, but FSB documents from 2020 refer to the airport as "Shor's asset."[61][62]

In 2024, a number of politicians linked to Shor's group created “the Victory” political bloc in Moscow, which aims to strengthen the opposition, already directly or indirectly united by fugitive MP Ilan Shor's former “Shor” party, against the current government. It also aims to change Moldova's pro-European orientation by restoring relations with Russia, the CIS and the Eurasian Economic Union. Political analysts from Chisinau argue that the creation of the Victory bloc in Moscow marked the beginning of a campaign to destabilize the country. They also claim that this event would not have taken place without the participation of the special services of the Russian Federation and that Ilan Shor is fully under the tutelage of the Moscow services.[63]

The Reset investigation for Wired, published on January 10, 2024, claims that in 2023 Shor spent more than $200 thousand on social network advertising campaigns promoting the Kremlin's interests in Moldova. The publication recalls how last February it became known that Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, allowed Shor to place paid advertisements in social networks calling for protests in Moldova, despite the US sanctions that prohibit US companies from engaging in financial transactions with individuals and groups on the sanctions list. Following this, Meta said it would ban Shor's ads. However, as the publication notes, according to a new investigation, Shor and his party continued to use the social network, launching an even larger advertising campaign to destabilize local elections in Moldova and hinder the country's European integration. According to the investigation, Shor used more than 100 fake pages on Facebook in six months to run hundreds of ads that were viewed more than 155 million times and that generated at least $200,000 in revenue for Meta.[64]

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