Ricardo Salinas Pliego likes to say he only backs one company — his own, the Mexican banking-to-retailing conglomerate Grupo Elektra that was founded by his father.

But as bitcoin surged in the spring of 2021, the Mexican billionaire and potential presidential candidate wanted to bet US$400 million on the cryptocurrency. He didn’t have the spare cash, so he instructed advisers to do what the rich often do in such circumstances: borrow against the value of Elektra shares.

A London broker introduced Salinas’s Swiss adviser to a lender called Astor Capital Fund, describing it in an email as “originally set up on the foundations of the wealth” of the storied Astor family and claiming its backers included “top university endowment funds” and “family offices”.

The adviser reassured Salinas’s team that Astor Capital was registered in the Bahamas because it’s a low-tax jurisdiction. On a video call, a man speaking in an American accent introduced himself as Thomas Astor-Mellon, Astor Capital’s chief executive. He appeared to be calling from a yacht. He said he was a descendant of the Astor family and that his firm specialized in stock-lending deals.

The details were negotiated by a second Astor Capital representative, a managing director named Gregory Mitchell. The structure sounded familiar: up to US$150 million in cash, secured against roughly US$416 million of shares in Elektra. The rest of the funding for Salinas’s bitcoin bet came from international banks.

In July 2021, Salinas signed a 31-page stock-loan contract with Astor Asset Management 3, a Canadian-registered special-purpose lending vehicle incorporated after his team requested an onshore lender for fiscal reasons. It stamped the agreement with a crowned, winged-lion seal and the Roman numerals “MVMVIII”. The meaningless date was the first clue that Astor was not as blue-blooded as it seemed.

What followed is a case study of

what can go wrong

in a booming yet

lightly policed corner of finance

. The outstanding stock of so-called Lombard lending, which allows individuals to

leverage their assets for loans

, stands at an estimated US$4.3 trillion, according to Deloitte, and has recently grown faster than the broader credit market thanks to rising stock values.

Lombard lending

Much of that lending

is conducted by registered and regulated lenders, but borrowers can also be steered to unlicensed lenders where protection depends largely upon the interpretation of contract language. The lender often chooses the custodian who holds the collateral and the jurisdiction in which arbitration proceedings are heard if there is a dispute.

Rather than being held as security pending repayment, in this instance the shares were simply sold and the proceeds used to advance the loan itself, and to enrich the lenders. Salinas says it took more than three years for him to understand what had happened. When the news became public, Elektra’s shares plunged and they were suspended from trading.

“

It was the perfect fraud

,” he says. “The guy took my stock, sold it, and gave me the money as a loan — Jesus, that’s as bad as it gets.”

His team later found that “Thomas Astor-Mellon” was Alexei Skachkov, a man of Russian origin who lived in Atlanta, Georgia, and had convictions for forging prescriptions and stealing jewellery.

“Gregory Mitchell” was, in fact, Val Sklarov — a Ukrainian-born American who operated through a shifting roster of names, companies and jurisdictions.

Salinas is pursuing Sklarov through England’s High Court, but acknowledges that the prospects for recovering his Elektra stock are uncertain. For him, it is about the principle. “If this is not stopped,” he says, “I won’t be the last.”

Sklarov argues that what critics regard as fraud is merely hard-edged lending to risky borrowers. “I certainly do not consider myself to be a fraudster,” he says.

“But there’s a saying: ‘It takes one to know one.’”

Sklarov was born Vladimir Sklarov in Kyiv in 1963. He says his family moved first to Israel when he was nine, then to Chicago’s north side, where his father worked as a butcher and his mother as a beautician.

He says he studied criminal justice at the University of Illinois, but abandoned plans to become a lawyer and dropped out in 1985 after reading comments from then chief justice Warren Burger lamenting the quality of the profession. University records show he enrolled in 1980 and stopped attending in 1987, while Burger’s cited remarks about unqualified trial lawyers were reported in 1978.

Sklarov says he then drove taxis, sold medical supplies and tried to start a home warranty company and coffee chain. In 1994, he says that an “overzealous government” shut down a medical supply company he was “involved in”, though press reports from 1998 state he owned the company and pleaded guilty to an US$18 million Medicare fraud.

Complaining of “extensive discrimination” in the United States because of his Russian-sounding name, he changed it from Vladimir to Val in 2006. He built a real estate business across the Midwest that collapsed amid litigation from lenders and municipalities.

After a divorce in 2014, he placed an advertisement in Crain’s Detroit Business magazine offering real estate advice, then worked in finance in Ukraine, before returning to the U.S.

By 2018, he had adopted another name, Mark Simon Bentley, and repurposed an existing company, America 2030, into a

stock-loan business

, having developed an interest in the practice during his time in Ukraine.

It was a business model built as much on image as structure. The paperwork was thick and the branding reassuringly old-school; he set up entities with bank-like names, later facing lawsuits from the Rothschild and Barclays financial groups over trademark infringement.

In Sklarov’s telling, the stock-loan world is a game in which borrowers and lenders play each other. Borrowers, he says, are often insiders who cannot sell their “substandard” stock, or who inflate the value of thinly traded shares to access cash. Lenders are justified in selling. “A large share of borrowers get their money and they don’t care,” he says.

Uncle Richi

One of Mexico’s wealthiest and most combative tycoons, Salinas is known in the country as “Tio Richi”, or “Uncle Richi”.

The government of President Claudia Sheinbaum portrays him as a right-wing agitator and has pursued his family conglomerate Grupo Salinas for underpaying tax, reaching a settlement earlier this month). His supporters want him to stand for president in 2030.

Sklarov says that Salinas’s dispute with the government demonstrates his refusal to play by the rules and his capacity for deception. “God help Mexico if he gets elected,” he adds.

According to Sklarov, it was impossible for Salinas not to have understood the terms of the stock-loan contract and their implications. The interest rate in the contract was 1.15 per cent. “Salinas insisted on it,” Sklarov says. “A lender can’t make a profit at that rate — what the hell was he thinking?”

Salinas says the low rate didn’t strike him as unusual because Astor had initially asked for collateral of four times the loan. Other lenders asked for a multiple of three, but charged higher interest.

“I’ve been in business for 45 years and have 200,000 employees,” Salinas says. “Of course, we have disputes. But I don’t take what’s not mine.”

Many lenders in this market are not licensed as banks or brokers. Sklarov argues that conduct regulation does not apply because the deals are private contracts between professional investors.

But lawyer Dean Conway, who prosecuted a stock-loan fraud case for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, says that if there is fraud “[regulatory status] won’t change the calculus of whether a case is brought”.

The Salinas deal exposed another common vulnerability: in private stock-backed lending, the lender often chooses the custodian that holds the pledged shares — in this case, Bahamas-based Weiser.

Salinas’s London broker had initially suggested Tavira, based in Monaco, but Sklarov rejected the idea, saying Tavira was having “internal issues”. The broker replied that a senior Tavira executive had made “some very disturbing comments about Astor” and mentioned “an individual Val Sklavov (sic) as being the ‘brains’ behind your firm”. Mitchell replied that he had “never heard of this ‘brains’ individual, very laughable”.

Later in 2021, one of Salinas’s advisers noticed something odd: Elektra’s tightly held and thinly traded shares were being sold. “I even called up my brother,” Salinas says, “and said, ‘Hey brother, are you selling your stock?’”

Astor Asset Management 3 had instructed Weiser to move stock out of Salinas’s custody account. Salinas says the custodian management agreement he signed gave Astor no authority to instruct custodians to sell his collateral.

Sklarov says the lender had a “power of attorney” over the custodian account and that custodians are “regulated financial institutions” that “follow their own policies”. His new wife and Weiser’s chief executive were involved in a Greek company during this period. Nevertheless, after pressure from Salinas’s team, Astor replaced Weiser with Tavira, although the terms were the same.

By the spring of 2024, after Sklarov had delayed and cancelled meetings citing COVID, Salinas’s team asked Tavira for proof that it still had the Elektra shares. Astor declared that direct outreach to the custodian amounted to forbidden “interference” — and that in any case it had the right to dispose of the shares.

In July, Salinas offered to repay all four lenders, to see who still had the Elektra shares. The three banks accepted his proposal. “But when we called this guy, he claimed default.”

Sklarov says the stock-loan contract’s lock-up period prevented early repayment for the loan’s entire five-year term. Three weeks after Salinas’s offer, Astor served him with a notice of default listing 11 alleged breaches, including failure to pay interest. Salinas says he paid interest and that there was never a default.

Another alleged breach was the Mexican government probe into Salinas’s businesses. “When we were doing the deal,” Sklarov says, “we didn’t conduct in-depth due diligence on him.”

Salinas’s own checks appear to have been no more robust. “I’m an idiot,” he says. “Because how is it that I didn’t do the due diligence and my team didn’t do the full due diligence? We were careless and of course now we’re paying the price.”

He says proper processes were interrupted by the COVID pandemic and he felt reassured by Astor’s claim it could extend a large loan, as it implied the company had “substantial assets”. His Swiss adviser had told his team Astor was backed by the family that owned the famed Astoria hotels, which are in fact owned by New York-listed Hilton.

Sklarov says the adviser and broker were incentivized to amplify his firm’s credibility, claiming the broker’s firm stood to receive about US$5 million in fees and commissions.

Salinas hired corporate investigations firm StoneTurn to examine what had happened to the shares.

Based on bank disclosures from JPMorgan ordered by a New York court, its March 2025 report estimated that about US$420 million was realized from sales of Elektra shares, of which roughly US$104 million appear to have funded the loan extended to Salinas.

“I know exactly what a Lombard loan is,” Salinas says. “If I wanted to sell my stock, I’d have done it myself.”

Sklarov says it is “nonsense that borrowers didn’t know I’d sell. It’s a lie. Absolutely.” He argues that the contract only promised the pledged shares would not be traded on a public stock exchange, not that they could not be transferred to other entities that might sell them.

He points to another term in the contract: “rehypothecation”, or the right to reuse pledged collateral as the lender’s own asset. In the regulated banking system, rehypothecation is standard practice and is subject to capital rules and supervision.

“Every borrower I have worked with gave permission for the stock to be rehypothecated,” Sklarov says, adding those who then alleged fraud “didn’t read the damn loan documents”.

The 15,500-word agreement is explicit about the lender’s right to sell collateral in the event of default, but Sklarov also points to a clause near the end: “During the Loan Term, all benefits and proceeds of Pledged Collateral inure to Lender.”

Around the same time he was concluding the loan agreement with Salinas, Sklarov was embroiled in litigation with Brent Satterfield, a biotech founder, in a New York court.

Satterfield had signed over US$7 million of restricted stock for a US$3.5 million loan and received just US$67,000. A court found he had been fraudulently induced into an agreement that did not, in practice, require the lender to advance the money or return the shares. It refused to allow the dispute to proceed to arbitration in St Kitts and Nevis, an offshore financial centre in the Caribbean.

When Sklarov failed to comply with court orders, a New York judge held him in contempt and issued a civil arrest warrant. Sklarov missed hearings, saying he was helping family members flee Ukraine following the Russian invasion. He later claimed to the judge that he had been in the Maldives.

Other borrowers describe variations on the same pattern: pledged shares sold and disputes arbitrated in offshore jurisdictions.

Two Singaporean borrowers won a default judgment in St Kitts over a US$25 million stock loan and later registered it for enforcement in the Bahamas. Separate claims by ZS Capital Fund and Fortunate Drift have played out through injunctions and arbitration in Jamaica and Hong Kong.

In Georgia, a U.S. federal judge dismissed an attempt by America 2030 to assert an immediate right to sell pledged shares after the borrower took out a Hong Kong injunction. There are another four cases in Hong Kong against Sklarov and his companies, with Weiser a custodian in each one.

According to publicly available court filings, Sklarov and companies connected to him have been involved in fraud claims totalling at least US$1 billion. Almost half that relates to the Salinas case. Sklarov calls the total “sad fake news” but adds that “disputes are inevitable when borrowers do not adhere to the contract and default”.

According to the StoneTurn report, the proceeds from the Elektra sales were split between two accounts. An Astor Capital account received $60mn. Another, for Cornelius Vanderbilt Capital Management — a Belize-registered entity named after another gilded-age dynasty whose trademark is registered to Sklarov’s lawyer — sold Elektra shares almost daily since 2021, receiving US$359.4 million.

Astor Asset Management 3 received US$11.8 million from the Astor Capital account and US$118.1 million from the Cornelius Vanderbilt account, according to the report.

“I do not own any of these entities and do not control them,” Sklarov says. But StoneTurn identifies transfers of US$3.6 million from the Cornelius Vanderbilt account directly to Sklarov and parties it describes as connected to him. A further US$225.2 million was routed indirectly through Astor Asset Management 3 and Sklarov’s longtime New York lawyer.

Overall, StoneTurn estimates that about US$229 million of the Elektra sale proceeds ended up with Sklarov or related parties. Another US$88 million of the proceeds cannot be accounted for.

A rebuttal report commissioned for Sklarov’s side from Companies Dot Support, a consultancy registered in Greece, where he resides in a luxurious villa, states that particular payments cannot be reliably tied to Elektra sale proceeds because records are incomplete.

The London legal proceedings also produced a twist that underlines the opacity of this market. Salinas’s team admitted it had engaged private investigators linked to Black Cube, an agency founded by former intelligence officers from the Israel Defense Forces, to obtain information from one of Astor’s lawyers.

Over drinks, the lawyer was secretly recorded discussing the perceived strengths and weaknesses of Astor’s position. A High Court judge held that this was “unethical” but also highlighted “culpability” of Astor’s lawyer in divulging this “substantial” information.

Sklarov has seized on the finding to argue that Salinas’s claim should be struck out. “Privilege is sacrosanct,” he says, framing the operation as an attack on England’s justice system and his human rights. The court did not end the fraud claim but blocked a quick liability win, meaning the case will proceed to a hearing.

Black Cube said it will “continue uncovering fraud, corruption, and asset dissipation in all its cases globally . . .  always in a manner which is completely in line with relevant laws and regulations in every jurisdiction it operates in”.

Salinas says he’s disappointed with the outcome. “Do we have to hide the truth?” he asks. “These are true, real-life confessions.” He sounds disappointed to find that courts will police the countermeasures as fiercely as the original alleged fraud.

Sklarov, who is also linked to offshore companies with names including Oppenheim, Dreyfus, and Andrew Carnegie, says the whole case is a “charade” and portrays Salinas as a tycoon having a tantrum over a deal that did not go his way.

He adds that no “reasonable person” would believe the Astor family was behind the deal. “How many pubs in England are named after Churchill? Do you think they’re all owned by the Churchill family?”

Salinas says his answer to these points is simple: “Where is my stock?”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026. All rights reserved.

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