In the past couple of months, there’s been a lot of commotion and talk online about businessman Ivan Montik, and his company SoftSwiss. Videos and articles have come out pointing to a trail of evidence of money laundering and financial corner cutting, essentially accusing Ivan Montik and all of his interconnected businesses and partners of using the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine for illicit purposes. In a web of seemingly endless companies, associates and subsidiaries – Montik and friends have managed to cover a lot of their trail, but not completely, as shown in the video.

The evidence was damning and created SoftSwiss and Montik a lot of headaches and legal battles. It didn’t take long for Montik’s associates to get down to business though. The YouTube videos discussing the matter were flagged, or better put – had been copyright claimed. Artem Shcherbakov, an employee of SoftSwiss who is leading the battle, claiming that the video is violating copyrights, using the picture of Ivan Montik in it. The interesting part is, the complaints are not pointed to the main theme of the videos, which are fraud, scam and money laundering. Not a single complaint there, just copyright infringement. As if the subject of the video has absolutely no case against the content. The evidence is overwhelming, so it seems that Montik is not focused on trying to deny it, he only cares about making sure that those videos will not reach the public.

YouTube themselves didn’t think the videos were worthy of being removed. Interestingly, the complaints written by Artem and his associates to YouTube, were written in Russian, their native language. If the claims in the video had no merit, then it would be easy pickings for anybody to complain to YouTube about false information and have the video taken down. However, it seems that’s that it is far from being their main concern.

The video used some photos of the people implicated in the shady practices, such as the Ivan Montik, but also people like Max Krupyshev, Roland Isaev, Paata Gamgoneishvili and others. If their main concern is taking the photographs down, then it points to a likely desire for the public not to see their faces. This raises a lot of red flags, for two main reasons.

First of all, their names, photographs and online dealings are pretty much public knowledge for anybody wishing to search for them. An expectation of privacy here is nonsensical, as all of it is in the public domain and the video creator had every right to use the images if they so choose.

Secondly, a quick 5 minute google search exercise reveals that a lot of the people implicated don’t have many publicly available photographs to begin with. For such accomplished and successful businessmen, it is weird how there is very little to see in terms of photos. A concentrated effort to keep themselves as secretive as possible or just a lucky set of circumstances? Not sure, but maybe the following fact can answer this question. Some of those individuals are taking the time to put their real names next to false photo online, creating a false mark in order not to make it harder to connect the name to the face.

What is for certain is that the weak attempt at taking the video down for “image copyright” should raise alarm bells. How is their main concern taking the images down, when there are much more serious allegations levied against you in those same videos. They didn’t deny any of the illicit practices. From the looks of it, it seems like an involuntary confession.