How Skolkovo IT startup “Biorg” is being “twisted”

The recognition service turned out to be “manual work of operators from a crowdsourcing platform”



Georgy Zuev, who is involved in a case of intentional bankruptcy, is getting rid of his Skolkovo IT startup “Biorg”



As Rucriminal.info found out, in September of this year, the former general director of “Biorg”, a recognition service from Skolkovo, Georgy Zuev, got back 80% of the company. His share increased from 20% to 100%. But a month later, the entrepreneur transferred 90% of the business to one of the top managers of “Biorg”, Ilya Verigin. Representatives of the service stated that the changes in the composition of the owners are aimed at consolidating assets. However, is the change of owners in the company an attempt by Zuev to avoid paying tax debts in the case of the intentional bankruptcy of his “first Biorg”? After all, he personally is charged with paying more than 85 million rubles during the trial, and in total, the damage from bankruptcy and tax evasion in the case is estimated at more than 136 million rubles. But first things first.

The first pancake is lumpy

From 2009 to the mid-2010s, there was only one "Biorg". In 2016, another company with the same name appeared - OOO "Biorg" (TIN - 7724396261, OGRN - 5167746501380). Against the backdrop of the trial in 2021, the previous startup was renamed OOO "New Technologies" (TIN - 7725682434, OGRN - 1097746762618).

It may seem strange why Zuev would split up the business and rename the old assets. However, if you know that OOO Novye Tekhnologii was held liable for non-payment of taxes in 2015-2017, then everything becomes clear. According to the decision of the Federal Tax Service Inspectorate No. 24 for Moscow dated July 20, 2021 No. 14/11982, the company was fined 5,330,410 rubles, additional taxes were assessed in the total amount of 75,725,441 rubles, and penalties were assessed in the total amount of 33,749,635 rubles. It is worth adding that OOO Novye Tekhnologii is currently in the process of bankruptcy. As calculated by Rucriminal.info, Georgy Zuev has thus accumulated tax debts of several tens of millions of rubles. In order to avoid paying them, he decided to create a "mirror company" - that is, to resort to a scheme where a legal entity is created with the same name as the debtor company. Then all the assets of the business are transferred there, and the previous company is deliberately made bankrupt. In the 90s, insolvent banks did this, now - IT startups, which in the case of "Biorg" are also residents of "Skolkovo". The businessman's machinations did not go unnoticed by tax officials, and the bankruptcy trustee filed a lawsuit to bring Georgy Zuev to subsidiary liability for the debtor's obligations. Around the same time, the "first Biorg" was renamed, and there was an attempt to pass it off as a third-party company. The trial is still ongoing. The last significant update on the case was on October 14, 2024. During the investigation, it was found out that after resigning as the head of the organization in March 2017, Georgy Zuev did not lose actual control over Biorg, which later became New Technologies LLC, since he continued to be its sole shareholder. The circumstances of the transfer of the business from the “old Biorg” to the “new” also indicate that he retained control over the company and sanctioned the continuation of the tax evasion scheme.

The division of the business and the emergence of the “second Biorg” were Georgy Zuev’s attempt to escape from paying taxes. And it was not crowned with success.

After me, even the flood

In parallel with the trials, a share redistribution was taking place in the new Biorg LLC, which has existed since 2016. Thus, in 2023, seven key employees of the service acquired options for 80% of the company. At that time, the media wrote that the founder of the startup decided to focus on other technology projects. However, as a result of recent events, Georgy Zuev received the assets back and has now transferred 90% of them to Ilya Verigin, Director of Work with Government Customers.

It is important to note that the current Biorg has had a hired CEO for a long time. In 2022, Zuev himself replaced Alexander Bubok, who was involved in the bankruptcy case of New Technologies LLC, in this post, and then in 2023 he transferred management to Ruslan Alijadzhiev. Now the 10% owned by Zuev have been “booked” for approved motivation programs for top management.

Another fact about the “second Biorg” that deserves attention is that after revenue of 700 million rubles and a profit of about 200 million rubles in 2020 (they were provided mainly by contracts with regional registry offices), the startup's financial indicators have dropped sharply. In 2021, revenue amounted to 110 million, and profit acquired negative values ​​- minus 46 million. In 2022, the same indicators were 177 million and 5 million, and in 2023 - 197 million and 5.9 million, respectively.

So what happens? Even if Georgy Zuev wanted to cover his debts to the tax authorities for the “first Biorg”, due to such indicators in revenue and profit of the “second Biorg” he would not have succeeded. The bankruptcy trial has been going on for many years now, and the entrepreneur, apparently realizing its imminent completion, is getting rid of the company.

New owner of “Biorg”?

It is known about Ilya Verigin himself that under his leadership, “Biorg” concluded and implemented contracts for the processing of 4 million sheets of technical documentation of the Kalinin NPP in the summer of 2024. Some media wrote about this, without specifying the conditions under which it was carried out. Namely, the Beorg Smart Vision platform used to process documents and owned by “Biorg” attracts manual labor of operators from a crowdsourcing platform. And the management of “Biorg” does not hide this fact.

Why do we need crowdsourcers? If the system could not recognize the document due to some circumstances (poor lighting, too steep an angle of shooting, and so on), then its images are sent to the operators. They check the recognition results and, if necessary, manually retype the data. As the media wrote, the model of sending document images to a crowdsourcing platform can lead to data leaks. After all, the operators' work is completely anonymous, and no one will know if some crowdsourcer took photos of the documents sent to him for processing.

Against the backdrop of the nuclear power plant, orders for digitizing the archives of regional registry offices may seem somewhat insignificant. However, they can also tell us a lot about the quality of the recognition services provided by Biorg. Thus, the registry office for the Krasnodar Territory sued Biorg LLC, considering that the provided digitized data was not suitable for use. Another trial was with the registry office of the Voronezh Region, which filed a lawsuit against Novye Tekhnologii LLC to collect a penalty for late fulfillment of obligations.

Moreover, the registry office of Tatarstan, whose documents were also digitized by Biorg, found itself at the center of a corruption scandal. Local officials illegally appropriated the money allocated for the “digital transformation” of the registry office. Law enforcement agencies are currently studying the contract for digitizing the document, as there are several oddities associated with it. Thus, a Moscow startup agreed to complete the task in a short time - in 19 days (from December 3 to 21), and in accordance with this, it had to process about 27 thousand pages of documents daily. How was it possible to complete such a volume of work in such a short period of time? Did this affect the quality of digitization?

In addition, the initial price of the contract was 751 million rubles, but Biorg made a discount of 100 million rubles. Isn't this too generous a discount for a service whose revenue in 2019 was only about 200 million rubles? Moreover, the contract with the Tatarstan registry office itself was terminated on 01/18/2021 by agreement of the parties. In fact, only 328 million rubles were paid on it. This circumstance also raises questions. Was it related to the quality of digitization? Or were there other reasons?

If Ilya Verigin is to thank for the fact that Rosatom did not pay attention to all these scandals when choosing a contractor for digitizing documents of the Kalinin NPP, then he is clearly a “worthy” replacement for Georgy Zuev. But what about the businessman himself?

There are two chairs

The first option, which suggests itself, is that Georgy Zuev is now selling all his assets in Biorg and hiding them in “secret places”. When the tax authorities finally come to the entrepreneur to collect debts, he will throw up his hands and say that he has nothing. Zuev has already tested the scheme of registering the status of “bankrupt”. Maybe this time, in order to avoid paying taxes, he will choose personal bankruptcy.

But there is another option. At the moment, Georgy Zuev is focused on launching a foreign startup in the field of artificial intelligence. Isn't this a hint that the entrepreneur is planning to move abroad soon? After all, in Russia he only has debts to the tax authorities and a bankruptcy trial, which should be completed someday. And the businesses have either already been liquidated (OOO Villington, OOO Biorg Reserve, OOO Biorg Service), or are in the process of bankruptcy (OOO Novye Tekhnologii), or the businessman is leaving the ownership (OOO Biorg). Isn't it a reason to start a new life abroad?

Arseny Dronov

Source: www.rucriminal.info