Group-IB founder Ilya Sachkov, who is now in jail on charges of treason, released a video recorded before his arrest in June 2021. He accused Oleg Kashentsov, head of the second operational department of the FSB Information Security Center, and the former head of this department, Sergei Mikhailov, who was convicted in a case of treason, of his persecution. The video was published in Sachkov's Telegram channel.
Sachkov says on the recording: “If you see this video, then something has happened or is happening to me. A hospital, a prison, a disappearance – something that is extraordinary, but something we've probably gotten used to by now."
“I would like to send a special hello to Oleg Innokentevich Kashentsov, who works in the FSB and is responsible for the security of our Internet in some sense of the word. Thanks to such people, there is no security in our country,” Sachkov says in the video.
The previously anonymous Telegram channel of the Cheka-OGPU published a statement allegedly sent by Sachkov to the head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, saying that the charges against him were based on “unfounded allegations” by Mikhailov and “his former subordinate Oleg Kashentsov.”
Sachkov was arrested at the end of September 2021, he was charged with treason on suspicion of collaborating with the intelligence of foreign states. He himself does not admit guilt. According to Bloomberg, the criminal case is likely related to his intention to move most of the business outside the Russian Federation. In April 2021, Sachkov said in an interview with Forbes that Group-IB was going to place shares on one of the foreign exchanges. And in 2020, he claimed that the company plans for the first time to receive half of its revenue outside the countries of the former USSR. In November 2021, Sachkov asked Putin to place him under house arrest during the investigation.
The fact that Sachkov recorded a video in case of his death or arrest and sent it to close friends was previously reported by Forbes, citing three sources close to the businessman. The presence of the video was also confirmed by director Andrey Loshak, with whom Sachkov was filming for a series about hackers.
The Insider found out that Sachkov appeared in the FBI documents, where he is mentioned in connection with the investigation of the US authorities against Russian hackers. The name of the head of Group-IB surfaced in the documents of the US Department of Justice, which were made public in 2020 after the initiation of a case against former employee of the corporation Nikita Kislitsin, whom the US authorities accuse of cybercrime.