On 15 June 2022 a wedding was held at a five-star hotel with eighteen rooms on the southern coast of Crimea. Four months earlier Russia had invaded Ukraine. Twenty-six days later JuicyFields collapsed, and 645 million euro belonging to 186,000 investors was gone. Several of the men at the wedding appear in that story.
This investigation rests on photographs with intact metadata, public company registers and material the reader can retrieve independently. Svenskhampa is owned and published by Daniel Johansson personally. He is himself affected by JuicyFields and, together with others affected and with the Swedish lawyer Lars J. Olofsson, pursues legal claims in the matter. The reader should weigh that. With the exception of the four men named, the wedding guests are private individuals and are not named. See Ownership and transparency.
The house
Dacha Rakhmaninov stands at 13 Alupkinskoye Shosse in Koreiz, twenty kilometres west of Yalta, inside the old Miskhor park by the lower station of the cable car up to Ai-Petri. It is marketed as a five-star boutique hotel. Eighteen rooms across two buildings, a private sand beach, a Russian banya, a spa, three pools and a restaurant called Vesna.
Eighteen rooms is small. A wedding there means, in practice, hiring the whole house. The hotel has its own tariff for newlyweds.
The date is still in the image files. Of the 143 photographs the photographer published, 109 carry the timestamp 2022:06:15. Nobody scrubbed the metadata.
Holding a wedding in Crimea in June 2022 was not a trip just anyone made. The peninsula had been annexed for eight years, and since February that year it had been a staging area for the war to the south. To Europeans it was closed.
Twenty-six days
On 11 July 2022 JuicyFields stopped paying out.
Since early 2020 the company had sold shares in medicinal cannabis crops to small savers across Europe, promising returns no plantation could deliver. According to Europol, some 186,000 people had paid in around 645 million euro.
On 11 April 2024 police in eleven countries moved simultaneously in what was called Operation Stoner. Nine people were arrested and 38 properties searched.
Two names carry the rest of this text. Sergey Berezin, who built the operation, was arrested later that year in the Dominican Republic and extradited to Spain, where his trial opened in December 2025. And Vitaly Markevich, an IT specialist and Berezin's second in command, who got away. He is in Russia today, wanted but not convicted of anything, and Russia will not extradite him.
Markevich owns several companies in Russia. According to the consortium's investigation, a drone factory can also be attributed to him, and its website carries the emblem of the Russian Defence Ministry. What the drones were intended for the investigation leaves open.
The consortium's investigation does not name the company. Svenskhampa does: «ПКЦСН», the Design and Engineering Centre for Special Purposes, registered in Saint Petersburg on 9 November 2022, four months after JuicyFields stopped paying out. The undersigned established this during the work on the investigation and passed it to the newsrooms that published. The reader should weigh that.
The register, by contrast, is open and can be checked. The company reported nine employees in 2023. For 2025 it reports 235 employees and a turnover of 4.8 billion roubles. A managing director was appointed in June 2024, and since February 2026 the company has been wholly owned by a closed-end investment fund. Who owned it before that is not stated. Its address is 16 Domostroitelnaya Street, letter B, room 221.
In the same building, room 160, is a company that develops software. It was registered on 18 December 2023, and its general director is Vitaly Markevich.
At the first hearing in Spain, Berezin said himself where the money went. According to Novaya Gazeta he told the court that half of the 645 million was moved to accounts belonging to a military drone factory in Saint Petersburg.
The party
The wedding photographs show around fifty guests. Most of them are private individuals with no bearing on the matter, and they are not named here. Four men are.
Markevich
That he was there is not an inference. He is in the photograph, on the front row, as the bride is walked in.
By then the company had been taking money from European savers for two and a half years. Twenty-six days later it was over, and Markevich was on his way to Russia.
The groom
The groom appears in JuicyFields' own promotional material. In a film shot at the company's premises in Seville he stands in a white shirt beside a colleague.
In a list of the people running the platform, published by the Spanish journalist Juan Arjón López in August 2022, he appears under the name Alberto de Leon, citizenship given as unknown. The title recorded is a double one: business development manager for juicyfields.io, and authorised director for Paul Bergholts.
Paul Bergholts was JuicyFields' chief executive to the outside world. He did not exist. The name and the face were a construction, and behind it stood Sergey Berezin.
Alberto de Leon was therefore the formal deputy of a person who never existed. And Alberto de Leon is not the name he was born with either.
The same description turns up elsewhere. In Telegram groups of former JuicyFields employees a numbered list of the company's people has circulated, giving roles and contact details. Entry number nine is the groom. There he is described as «the eyes of Paul Bergholts» and as business development manager tasked with finding new cultivation facilities, the same double role Arjón López recorded. The two accounts come from different directions and did not take it from one another.
Who compiled the list, and when, cannot be established. It is therefore not the company's own record but a document circulating among people who worked there, and what it contains is their account. The contact details it carries are not published here.
One line in it is worth noting all the same. Against his name it says that he disappeared in May 2022. The wedding was held on 15 June, with Markevich on the front row. On 11 July the company stopped paying out.
The man with the microphone
In one of the photographs a large, shaven-headed man in a white suit stands holding a microphone, addressing seated guests. That is the role given to a close friend, a relative, or a master of ceremonies.
His name is Sergey Borzhimsky, spelled Borzhinsky in some of the federation's own documents.
Two and a half years later, on 3 November 2024, he stood on the podium at the Dynamo sports academy in Moscow with a silver medal round his neck, in a black uniform with a tiger on the chest. The contest was part of the sporting and patriotic festival «Победить и вернуться», named after Gennady Zaitsev, commander of the KGB's Alpha Group.
In May 2026 he travelled with an eight-person delegation to Tokyo and took a prize at a world championship in bo-shuriken, throwing spikes. The tiger on his chest belongs to the Kobudzyutsu Federation of Russia.
The federation
What matters about Borzhimsky is not his medals. It is what the organisation he competes for actually is.
The Kobudzyutsu Federation of Russia was registered in Moscow on 27 September 2024, two and a half years into the war. Its president is Nikolai Trifonov, a retired police lieutenant general. Its vice-president Iosif Linder sits on the presidium of the veterans' council of KUOS, the training school of the KGB's special forces.
The festival where Borzhimsky took silver is organised together with the international veterans' association of the Alpha anti-terror unit. The federation's competitions are held, among other places, on the base of the 76th Airborne Assault Division at Pskov.
On 16 and 18 June 2026 the federation's leadership sat in the Federation Council's Committee on Defence and Security, that is, in the upper house of the Russian parliament. The second meeting was chaired by senator Konstantin Basyuk and had a stated theme: military-applied sport as a way of preparing young people for military service.
In the federation's internal Telegram group the same milieu appears from below. One member describes moving wounded soldiers from the front into the Ministry of Defence's central hospital in Moscow, arranging funding for a prosthetic leg for a reconnaissance commander, receiving material from the Interior Ministry's Moscow district, and sending aid convoys towards Mariupol.
The ICO executive
The fourth is Ilya Bolshakov. Three years before the wedding he was business development manager for Miracle Tele.
Miracle Tele was a cryptocurrency registered in the Czech Republic. The token sale ran from October 2018 to October 2019 and was meant to fund a mobile operator built on a blockchain. On the industry site ICOholder the project still carries an unusually blunt verdict: verified nought per cent. Not one of the eleven people listed as its leadership could be confirmed.
What ties him to this story is not only that he was at the wedding. In the consortium's investigation, published by CORRECTIV on 8 November 2024, it is stated that part of the group behind JuicyFields was behind Miracle Tele in Prague, a telephone network built on a blockchain. The same investigation describes a second project, Recyclix, run in Warsaw between 2015 and 2017, which sold false investments in plastic recycling. The loss there is given as 39 million euro.
The company records show how thin Miracle Tele was. Miracle Tele s.r.o. was registered in Prague on 3 April 2018 and struck off on 27 September 2024. Its share capital was one thousand Czech crowns, about forty euro. Its sole director and sole owner, for the whole life of the company, was a man named Andrejs Burčiks.
Bolshakov does not appear in the Czech register. He was listed on the project's website as one of eleven in its leadership, not in the company's filings. And a limit belongs here: CORRECTIV does not name him, and nothing that is established gives him a role in JuicyFields. What is established is that he was listed in the leadership of a project the consortium attributes to part of the same group, and that three years later he was at the wedding in Crimea.
The firewood
In January 2023 the Russian rap collective ЗИБА released a music video. The publishers described it themselves in the premiere post: «Before they ban it. Premiere, about firewood for freezing Europeans.»
The song is called «Russian firewood» and is about Europe's energy crisis.
It does not open with music but with what sounds like a read-out official statement: that two organised criminal groups have been detained, and that they were acting under the leadership of one person, a citizen of a foreign state.
Then the winter is drawn. Evening by candlelight, cold in the room, no gas since the autumn. People are burning, it says, furniture and personal belongings. Riots on the Grand-Place, union protests, workers' children. And then the line that recurs:
«Fewer and fewer sources of light and warmth. There are no alternatives. The firewood will help.»
The blame is placed on Europe's own rulers. The lyrics list the chancellor, the ministers and «the Committee of 300», and speak of «the reset» and «the new order» as something carried out while «the human reserves» last.
The refrain is the whole point:
«Empty words they promise everyone from the screen. But what warms our brothers is Russian firewood.»
Towards the end it turns to Russian nationalist mysticism. The eternal struggle against evil is to awaken «the Hyperborean genome», a greeting goes out to Serbia, and something is described flying past every prohibition along a route from Istanbul to Constanța and on towards Brussels, which «causes panic» while «we are celebrating».
The lines are translated from Russian. The transcription was made from the audio, as no lyrics have been published.
«Русские дрова» by ЗИБА, published 17 January 2023.
In a photograph from the set, sent to this investigation by a former JuicyFields employee, the group hold logs of firewood while five-thousand-rouble notes rain down on them. At the top left stands Vitaly Markevich.
And it is in that photograph that the double meaning becomes visible. One of the participants holds his log to his mouth with both hands, in the gesture you make with a joint. The firewood is not only firewood.
Outwardly the song is a tribute to Russian energy and a taunt aimed at a freezing Europe. Inwardly, to anyone who knows where the money came from, the log is cannabis. A former JuicyFields employee states that Berezin described the video as a tribute to the company, and that he took part in writing the lyrics himself. We have not been able to confirm that anywhere else.
The previous video by the same group was published on 7 July 2022, four days before JuicyFields stopped paying out.
Right of reply
Svenskhampa normally approaches the people it names before publication. That was not done here, and the reader should know it.
Vitaly Markevich is wanted and is in Russia. He has no public contact details, and the company that according to Berezin's statement in court received the money publishes none. Sergey Borzhimsky cannot be reached.
There is a further reason that weighs more. In this matter former directors have had their homes firebombed, and the source who spoke to journalists was pointed out in the fraud's own channel fifteen days after a newspaper described him. Saying in advance what is about to be published, and which material has been examined, is in that environment a notification to more people than the recipient. The judgement was made with open eyes, and it is the publisher's.
Anyone appearing in this text who wishes to respond can reach the newsroom via Ownership and transparency. Replies are published in full.
Corrected 2 September 2026: the source link for the Tokyo competition pointed to the Russian Martial Arts Union homepage instead of the federation’s own account of the trip.