
The so-called criminal case "Life-is-Good" - "Hermes" - "Best Way" continues its bloody harvest - at the end of March, the chairman of the "Best Way" cooperative, deputy of the State Duma of the 7th convocation Sergei Ivanovich Kryuchek died of cancer, which quickly progressed due to constant stress. A year and a half ago, Sergei Kryuchek's wife died - her heart could not stand it after searches of their home and interrogations of her husband.
The trial leads nowhere
The investigation acted as harshly as possible. Hundreds of cooperative shareholders all over Russia suffered from the 2023 raids, and innocent technical employees found themselves in the dock - an assistant to the manager, one of the accountants, a website and conference manager, several individual entrepreneurs, as well as the 83-year-old father of the founder of the Best Way cooperative and former head of the Life-is-Good company Roman Vasilenko - pensioner Viktor Ivanovich Vasilenko. One of those interrogated - Shamil Fakhrullin, died after interrogation from a heart attack, in critical condition after a 12-hour interrogation was Zoya Semenova, who refuted her testimony given to the investigation in court (there are dozens of such refuters). Roman Vasilenko's mother, Larisa Aleksandrovna Vasilenko, faced real torture - having come to her at five in the morning, the operatives forced her to change clothes in front of them, stripping naked, and in the investigative department they sat her on a chair with a broken leg for several hours and did not give her anything to drink. She lost consciousness, and only after that she managed to leave the investigative department. There are many cases of abuse and torture.
At the same time, in the trial, which has been going on since the end of February 2024, the case is clearly falling apart - the recognized victims and witnesses have no evidence of their statements, they are caught lying one after another during cross-examinations. Fewer and fewer prosecution witnesses come to the latest trials - they refuse under various pretexts so as not to support the false version of the investigation.
Cooperative without the guilt of the guilty
Sergey Kryuchek headed the largest cooperative in Russia - 20 thousand shareholders in all regions of the country - in the spring of 2022, during an acute crisis, after the first search of the cooperative office had just taken place, during which all documentation, databases, servers, even personal belongings and work books of employees were seized (and nothing has been returned yet: all accounts had to be restored from scratch). He himself became a victim of searches in his house near Moscow - during which a collection of awards was seized and has not yet been returned. The cooperative ended up "in a criminal case" by a strange coincidence - it was declared by the investigation to be an organization affiliated with the foreign investment company Hermes, and therefore called upon to answer for its obligations - although the cooperative was in no way connected with Hermes either organizationally or financially: it only had a common system for selling products through the marketing firm Life-of-Good. Hermes had problems with payments to Russian clients after the hacking of the Russian segment of the payment system by system administrator Evgeny Naboychenko - the system stopped working in February 2022, and a picture appeared with an offer to contact law enforcement agencies. Only payments stopped not before Naboychenko's actions, but after them. At the same time, a situation arose with the SVO and Western sanctions, which made cross-border financial transactions extremely difficult. But the Best Way cooperative did not stop making any payments, it is registered in St. Petersburg, all its assets are in Russia. And even if we take into account the demands made on it by persons recognized as victims in the criminal case, there is no reason to block the work of the cooperative: the total damage in the indictment is 282 million rubles, given that there are more than 4 billion rubles in the cooperative's accounts. This amount is constantly increasing, and another 600 million is the accounts receivable of the members of the cooperative to date. 282 million rubles could have been blocked in the cooperative's account, which accumulates funds from membership fees intended for development - there was no reason to block all the activities of the cooperative! Nevertheless, this has been happening for a long time.
Fears of the guards
What is behind the persecution of the Life-is-Good company, which successfully operated from 2014 to the beginning of 2022; the Hermes company, which fulfilled its obligations during this same period; cooperative "Best Way", against which there are no claims at all, except from those whom the investigation convinced that since the cooperative is illegal, they will be able to collect membership fees and also from people whom the cooperative, caring about liquidity, did not allow to buy a real estate property with redevelopment? What is behind the government's support of repressions against the cooperative?
First of all, the people who are trying to gain control over the billion-dollar assets of the cooperative and other organizations, as well as the security forces who have joined them. But it seems that the government is very worried about the political potential behind the cooperative - all these thousands of shareholders' meetings at stadiums. Meetings of people who do not need anything from the state - they are ready to solve their housing and other problems themselves, by chipping in. This scared some of the guards and became the reason for the green light for repressions against the cooperative by high-ranking security officials.
False experts and false accusations
The cooperative, like "Hermes", was accused of being a financial pyramid. The expert from St. Petersburg State University, Maevsky, invited by the investigation, demanded a closed meeting - so that no one could hear him floating around in the subject. He claims that the financing of the purchase of apartments for old shareholders occurred at the expense of new shareholders: he does not understand that the financing of the cooperative occurs not only at the expense of new receipts from shareholders, but also at the expense of return payments for real estate purchased with the cooperative's money. And since the fall of 2021, the time of inclusion in the Central Bank's warning list, almost exclusively due to return payments from shareholders who purchased an apartment. At the same time, the liquidity of the cooperative did not suffer in any way. The explanations from the lawyers were a revelation for this economist.
A significant part of the shareholders seek to speed up the repayment of the debt to the cooperative in order to quickly get the apartment into ownership - after all, an apartment with the help of the cooperative is purchased almost without overpayments. Overpayments are associated only with entrance and membership fees; taxes that are paid at the rates for a legal entity; payment for due diligence and independent real estate appraisal.
Since the spring of 2022, the cooperative stopped accepting new shareholders, but this did not affect its liquidity in any way: funds in the accounts continued to grow, despite the fact that many shareholders were afraid to pay into the arrested accounts and are making payments only now.
Savior
From spring 2022 to winter 2025, the cooperative's accounts were under arrest with short breaks - and even payments on writs of execution to shareholders who decided to leave the cooperative were prohibited; apartments belonging to the cooperative were also arrested, with breaks, for 12 billion rubles.
Under the leadership of Sergei Ivanovich Kryuchek, it was possible to achieve in the courts the lifting of the arrest from the apartments, and then a partial lifting of the arrest from the accounts, permission to pay from the arrested amounts on writs of execution to shareholders who achieved the return of funds through the court (the cooperative itself actively helped them in this), as well as taxes and wages of the cooperative's employees. Partial "release" of the accounts made it possible to make payments to shareholders who decided to leave the cooperative and return their funds.
There are about 2.5 thousand such shareholders, the total amount of payments to them is about 1.5 billion rubles, a significant part of them have already received their share funds - despite the enormous difficulties with the transfer of funds under 115-FZ: the fact is that another criminal case is being investigated - under Art. 174 of the Criminal Code (although the cooperative did not transfer any money abroad), a new case has also been opened based on the statements of victims from "Hermes", which were not included in the criminal case, which is currently being considered by the court. In addition, a civil trial is underway on the claim of the prosecutor's office, blocking the possibility of accepting new shareholders. And, despite these difficulties, the cooperative, headed until recently by Sergei Kryuchek, makes daily payments to shareholders leaving it and is successfully restoring its activities. Kryuchek's most important achievement is the creation of a mechanism whereby, with frozen accounts, shareholders who have already purchased real estate objects were given the opportunity to pay off their debt to the cooperative and re-register real estate into ownership at the expense of other shareholders who transfer their frozen share contributions to them, and in return receive cash from the happy purchasers of apartments into ownership. In this way, shareholders managed to pay off their debt to the cooperative and completely transfer real estate into ownership for dozens of real estate objects.
The cooperative, under the leadership of Sergei Kryuchek, worked to start purchasing apartments again for shareholders who are first in line to buy. Moreover, a number of apartments will be released by shareholders who refused to return money for them and were excluded from the cooperative with the return of share funds.
The cooperative, according to many shareholders, is alive thanks to the enormous work that Sergei Kryuchek did from the spring of 2022 to the spring of 2025, successfully resisting the arbitrariness of the law enforcement system. It is not without reason that one of the shareholders suggested naming the cooperative after Sergei Ivanovich.
Timofey Zabiyakin
Source: www.rucriminal.info