Court papers refer to 190 reports of suspicious financial activity that were flagged by foreign financial intelligence agencies
Prominent Ukrainian grain trader Roman Tereschenko is being probed over allegedly using the OnlyFans platform to transfer over $3 million in untaxed income abroad, the Tsensor.net website has reported.
In late December, a court in the Black Sea port of Odessa upheld a demand by prosecutors to seize the property of Tereschenko’s firms, including hard drives and printed documents, as part of a fraud investigation of him, the outlet said in an article on Monday.
According to court papers cited by the website, Ukraine’s State Financial Monitoring Service had received some 190 reports from relevant agencies overseas of suspicious financial transactions, many of which involved the grain tycoon.
The founder of Trans Trade Holding, which owns a number of enterprises specializing in exports of grains and oil seeds, Tereschenko had allegedly registered as a model on the OnlyFans platform, which is mainly associated with adult content.
After that, over $3 million was funneled into the dedicated account that Tereschenko opened with Paxum Inc.’s payment service. The sum included $1.02 million transferred by Fenix International Limited, the company that owns OnlyFans.
The tycoon has been insisting that the funds in question came from his work on OnlyFans and affiliated traffic payments, the court papers read.
However, during the hearing, the judge ruled that it was “highly unlikely” that Tereschenko could have earned millions of dollars on OnlyFans, “based on the assessment of his gender, age, and actual activities.”
Tereschenko is believed to be the ultimate beneficiary of a firm in Switzerland and one in Poland, to which his Ukrainian companies have been selling their grain, they added.
Tsensor.net noted that some 5,000 people in Ukraine currently work as webcam models, with around two-thirds of them distributing their content through OnlyFans. The average monthly income of a model is around $1,650, it added.
Under current legislation, creators of intimate content in Ukraine face criminal liability. In particular, Article 301 of the Criminal Code on the “Import, production, sale, and distribution of pornographic objects” provides for imprisonment for three to five years. If a producer or seller of pornography is caught more than once, or if the crime involved a prior conspiracy among a group of people and resulted in significant income, they face prison sentences of three to seven years.
