The former head of the Novosibirsk travel agency ABV-Tour, who operated the company as a pyramid scheme and defrauded 33 clients in six months, has been sentenced to two and a half years in a penal colony.
24-year-old Evgeny Kodnichansky was sentenced yesterday by the Leninsky District Court of Novosibirsk to 2.5 years in prison for "fraud." According to the case file, this spring, the former director of ABV-Tour defrauded 33 Novosibirsk tourists of over 1.3 million rubles by selling them fictitious vacation packages to foreign countries.
Kodnichansky structured the ABV-Tour travel agency as a pyramid scheme: the proceeds from sold tours were used to pay off outstanding debts on previously sold travel products. Since ABV-Tour sold trips to Egypt, Turkey, Thailand, and other popular destinations from well-known Russian tour operators (Biblio-Globus, Pegas Touristik, Coral Travel, Tez Tour, and others), business initially went well. However, after selling another batch of last-minute tours in the spring of 2014, ABV-Tour suddenly closed.
The injured tourists contacted the investigative authorities Only after they initiated an investigation did they discover that they had been sold invalid tours. It's worth noting that the court's verdict in the ABV-Tour case could have been much harsher, but Yevgeny Kodnichansky turned himself in, fully admitted his guilt during the trial, and actively cooperated with the investigation, which influenced the sentence.
