Igor Mavlyanov

I was a successful entrepreneur for 20 years and I plan to remain in business.

The Importer Who Built His Own Chain #

Almost nothing is known about Igor Mavlyanov before he appears in the mid-1990s as a jewelry importer. His birth date has never been publicly established. His education is undocumented. Even his ethnic background — likely Bukharan Jewish, given his later eligibility for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return — remains unconfirmed. What is documented is his first venture, and what it taught him.

In 1994, Mavlyanov began importing Turkish jewelry into Russia — affordable gold pieces aimed at a consumer market hungry for anything that glittered after decades of Soviet austerity. The goods were cheap. Russian shop buyers told him so and refused to stock them. The quality was wrong, the designs were wrong, and the middleman model meant his margins disappeared into the supply chain before reaching the customer.

The failure contained its own answer. If buyers would not stock his imports, he would build the stores himself. If Turkish quality was unacceptable, he would control manufacturing. If middlemen consumed the margins, he would eliminate every middleman between factory and customer. In 1998, Mavlyanov partnered with Robert Martirosyan to found OAO TPK Yashma in Moscow — not as a jewelry brand but as the infrastructure for one. The company that emerged from that partnership would spend the next sixteen years consuming bank credit to fund an expansion that no competitor could match and no balance sheet could sustain.

By 1996, before Yashma even existed, Mavlyanov had purchased a home in Fresh Meadows, Queens — a modest house in a middle-class neighbourhood. It was the kind of property that attracts no attention when acquired and significant attention when creditors discover it two decades later in a fraud lawsuit.

₽70 Billion in Personal Ink #

The arithmetic of Yashma Zoloto’s growth was built on a single instrument: the personal guarantee. Russian banks would lend to Yashma’s constellation of entities — each store registered as a separate limited-liability company — but they required the founders’ personal signatures as collateral. Igor Mavlyanov signed. Over sixteen years, the cumulative value of bank loans secured by his personal guarantees reached ₽70 billion.

The number is worth pausing over. Personal guarantees transform corporate risk into individual obligation. They exist to align incentives — to ensure the founder who borrows on behalf of the company has personal skin in the outcome. When the borrowing is modest, the guarantee is a formality. When the borrowing reaches ₽70 billion, the guarantee becomes a life sentence waiting for a trigger.

In 2003, Mavlyanov acquired the Kostroma Jewelry Factory, completing vertical integration from mine to counter. The factory-to-consumer model eliminated the middleman problem that had killed his Turkish import venture, and the “factory prices” positioning gave Yashma Zoloto a consumer proposition no competitor could easily replicate. The chain grew to nine production facilities, hundreds of stores, and a presence in over 200 Russian cities. By 2014, peak revenue reached ₽45 billion — more than the next three competitors combined. But vertical integration required capital: factories, gold inventory priced in dollars, logistics networks, retail leases in premium malls. Capital required banks. And banks required guarantees. Each new loan enlarged the personal exposure. Each signature committed a larger share of Igor Mavlyanov’s future to the assumption that revenue would continue to grow, that the ruble would hold, and that the tax authorities would not look too closely at how the gold was procured.

By 2006, the pattern of wealth accumulation had extended beyond Russia. Mavlyanov acquired Beverly Hills land plots and a Manhattan condominium — properties that sat in a different legal jurisdiction from the companies whose credit they were effectively funded by. In 2013, he divorced his wife Stella; his son Illio founded Jasper Venture Group in New York. The same year, an alleged VAT evasion scheme involving 24 shell companies and the Transnational Bank was operating inside the Yashma empire, generating what prosecutors would later quantify as ₽7 billion in unpaid taxes. Whether Mavlyanov directed the scheme or merely benefited from its proceeds, the combination of offshore property transfers and undisclosed tax exposure was building a trap. Prosecutors would later characterize the property transactions as asset-stripping. Creditors would pursue the assets across three countries. The geography of wealth that Mavlyanov constructed during the good years became the geography of litigation that would define the bad ones.

The Decision to Run #

The ruble crash of December 2014 halved the currency in weeks. Gold — priced in dollars — doubled in ruble terms overnight. Banks responded to the macro shock by raising Yashma’s interest rates from 11.5% to 24.33%. Revenue collapsed 63% in a single year, from ₽45 billion to ₽16.8 billion, with a ₽2.7 billion net loss. Over half of all stores became unprofitable.

“In 2015, we experienced the perfect storm that made it impossible to pay our bills,” Mavlyanov later testified to the New York Supreme Court. The metaphor was convenient but incomplete. The storm was real — the entire Russian jewelry sector lost 46% of its production volume, and thirty companies reportedly went under. But weather does not explain the ₽7 billion VAT evasion scheme that prosecutors had identified, operating through 24 shell companies and the Transnational Bank during 2011 and 2012. The storm hit a structure that was already compromised.

In autumn 2015, Sberbank — Yashma’s largest single creditor, with ₽8.6 billion in formal exposure — filed personal bankruptcy claims against both Mavlyanov and Martirosyan. The personal guarantees, signed across sixteen years of expansion, had become binding obligations. Mavlyanov’s total personal liability exceeded ₽23 billion across six banks. Under Russian criminal law, the tax evasion charges carried up to six years in prison. The fraud charges carried up to ten.

Mavlyanov’s calculus appears to have been straightforward. Russian courts offered no viable defence path. The tax case was built on documented shell company transactions that a re-audit had reversed from a previously favourable finding — which Mavlyanov characterised as politically motivated, though the distinction between political motivation and legitimate prosecution is often academic when the underlying transactions are real. The personal guarantees were legally unambiguous. Pre-trial detention was a near-certainty: his associate Oleg Sukhorukov would later be placed under house arrest in February 2019. The criminal charges carried combined sentences of up to sixteen years. Mavlyanov chose not to wait for the system to close around him.

In 2016, he obtained Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return — likely through Bukharan Jewish heritage, though this has never been confirmed. He legally changed his name to Yitzhak Mavlon. He left Russia through Belarus. By the time the Investigative Committee raided Yashma’s headquarters on Aviamotornaya Street in Moscow in December 2016, the founder was gone. In February 2017, a Voronezh Arbitration Court declared him personally bankrupt. The same month, Russia placed him on its international wanted list. The Presnensky District Court in Moscow issued an arrest warrant in absentia.

“The companies that didn’t pay taxes have no relation to the Yashma group,” Mavlyanov told Vedomosti from abroad. “The criminal case is yet another attempt to pressure the company by its opponents.” He was simultaneously insisting on his innocence and demonstrating, by his absence, that he did not trust Russian courts to agree.

Bankrupt in Two Countries #

Flight solved the immediate problem of criminal prosecution and created a new one: the debt followed him across borders. Igor Mavlyanov had assumed that Israeli citizenship would provide legal shelter. For a time, it did. When Sberbank filed for his bankruptcy in Israeli court in March 2018, the lower court initially rejected the petition on jurisdictional grounds. The bank appealed.

In June 2019, Israel’s Supreme Court delivered a ruling described as “almost the first time in Israeli history” that a foreign bank had been permitted to bankrupt an Israeli citizen. The decision eroded the legal shelter that had made Israel attractive. In November 2020, Lod District Court Judge Irit Weinberg-Notovitz declared Mavlyanov bankrupt, appointed financial manager Michael Hinchin, and imposed a travel ban. His representatives told the court he had nothing left. Banking sources told Kommersant he “continues to live on a grand scale, arranging everything in relatives’ and friends’ names.”

The American front was no more forgiving. In January 2018, VTB won a ₽2.2 billion judgment against Mavlyanov in New York Supreme Court. The bank’s lawyers documented approximately $15 million in US real estate that had been transferred to family members — including the Fresh Meadows house purchased in 1996, now in his son Hanan’s name. The judge compared the pattern of transfers to “a young Donald Trump.” In March 2024, an Israeli court formally recognised Russia’s bankruptcy proceedings — further closing the gap between two legal systems pursuing the same man.

Meanwhile, the man who stayed paid the price the man who fled did not. In June 2021, a Moscow Arbitration Court held former CEO Valery Sheyko personally liable for ₽35 billion in subsidiary liability — the largest individual liability judgment in Russian jewelry bankruptcy history. Sheyko had remained in Russia. Mavlyanov had not.

The result is a form of legal paralysis without precedent in Russian business history. Mavlyanov cannot return to Russia without facing arrest on charges carrying up to sixteen years in prison. He cannot leave Israel without violating a court order imposed by Judge Weinberg-Notovitz. He is bankrupt in both countries. The creditors who lent against his personal guarantees have spent eight years and three jurisdictions trying to recover assets that Mavlyanov says no longer exist — and that banking sources say he continues to enjoy through nominees.

The Symmetry of Guarantees #

The personal guarantee is the most intimate financial instrument in commercial lending. It converts corporate ambition into individual liability, business optimism into personal risk. When a founder signs one, the implicit promise is: I believe in this enough to stake everything.

Igor Mavlyanov signed personal guarantees for ₽70 billion over sixteen years. He used those guarantees to build Russia’s largest jewelry chain — 397 stores in over 200 cities, ₽45 billion in peak revenue, a vertically integrated operation that stretched from the Kostroma factory floor to mall counters across the country. The guarantees funded everything: the factories, the inventory, the expansion into cities where no other jewelry chain would go, the “factory prices” proposition that made Yashma Zoloto a household name. They also meant that when the enterprise collapsed, the collapse was personal. There was no limited liability to hide behind, no corporate veil to preserve. The signature on every loan document was his own.

The universal lesson is arithmetical, not moral. The founder who treats corporate debt as personal commitment — who signs his name as collateral for billions — and who simultaneously treats corporate enrichment as personal prerogative — acquiring properties in Beverly Hills, Manhattan, and Queens — discovers that the law treats these relationships as symmetrical. The guarantees that funded the empire are the same guarantees that make the empire’s debts inescapable. The cross-border properties that diversified personal wealth are the same properties that creditors pursue across three jurisdictions.

Mavlyanov remains in Israel. Wanted by Russia. Bankrupt in two countries. Banned from leaving. He told Vedomosti he planned to remain in business. The business no longer exists. The debt, however, remains.

Last updated: April 5, 2026