JuicyFields has been linked to Russian organised crime, and the main suspect has himself told a Spanish judge that nearly half of the money went to a drone factory in Saint Petersburg. The lawyer in Spain who by her own account represents the most victims, Emilia Zaballos Pulido, has since 2014 shown herself on her own Facebook in the mantle of a self-styled Order of Malta. The order's protector was a self-styled Russian princely house, whose then crown prince congratulated Putin as "our World leader". How does that fit together? No media outlet has asked the question.
The lawyer
Sergei Berezin, who is named as the principal behind JuicyFields and is held in custody in Spain, was questioned in November 2025 at the Audiencia Nacional. According to elDiario.es he stated there that nearly half of the 645 million euro went to a drone factory in Saint Petersburg. These are his own statements, and they have not been tested in court. As early as 2024 Correctiv, in an investigation with partners including Denmark's DR and Germany's Der Spiegel, had linked a drone factory in Russia to Berezin's closest associate Vitaly Markevich. The factory's website shows the emblem of the Russian Ministry of Defence. Svenskhampa has previously named the factory, ПКЦСН in St Petersburg, in its investigation of how the fraud helped fund the war. Zaballos Abogados attended Berezin's hearing as private prosecutor. The firm's own summary says that a large part of the money went to "personal accounts, cryptocurrencies and hidden partners abroad". The drone factory is not mentioned, and since that summary the firm has published nothing more about JuicyFields. No one has been convicted in the case.
Zaballos Abogados states on its website that the firm represents the "grupo mayoritario de afectados por la estafa del caso Juicyfields" and that it filed the joint complaint at the Audiencia Nacional in 2022. The firm is also counsel for injured parties in the crypto case Madeira Invest Club, where according to THE OBJECTIVE it represents more than 300 victims through an association for crypto investors.
JuicyFields has been covered by media across Europe. Danish DR made contact with the Russian insider who identified the men behind the fraud through Lars J. Olofsson, who represents around 2,200 victims. DR writes that it has had "bekræftet alle de udsagn" that the insider makes about JuicyFields. On 18 April 2023 Olofsson's team published the real names behind the JuicyFields and Recyclix frauds, with a table of aliases. Among them were Sergei Berezin, who was arrested in the Dominican Republic in April 2024 and extradited to Spain, Alexander Sivaks' daughter, who was arrested in Riga the same year and transferred to Spain, and Viktor Bitner, who was arrested in Switzerland in March 2026. None of them has been convicted. About Zaballos' connections, which we go through below, we have found nothing written in the Spanish, Maltese, Russian or Swedish press.
Svenskhampa's investigation began with a tip. On 15 May 2024, JuicyFields' head of security Igor Kekshin told Svenskhampa's Daniel Johansson that Berezin had a female lawyer in Spain who was helping them and whose job was to handle the victims of JuicyFields. He gave no name. According to Novaya Gazeta, Kekshin is a former police officer in St Petersburg who served in the Wagner Group after serving a sentence for kidnapping and extortion. Back in December 2023, Daniel Johansson had contacted Zaballos on LinkedIn to ask whether cooperation for the victims was possible. On 3 December 2023 she replied by encouraging him to follow her foundation and her firm, and invited him to the foundation's gala dinner with more than 400 guests, the cost of which, she wrote, can be deducted as a donation.
We have no evidence that Zaballos is the lawyer Kekshin spoke of, or that she has had contact with the suspects or acted against her clients' interests. All of her Russian contacts that we have found date from 2014 to 2019, before the war in Ukraine and before JuicyFields collapsed in 2022. The association represented by Zaballos Abogados has, according to elDiario.es, asked that the Cypriot payment company ISXPAY, which received a large part of the money, be examined for civil liability.
The mantle
On 25 November 2014 Emilia Zaballos published a photo on her Facebook. A man in a gold-embroidered uniform hands a diploma with an eight-pointed cross to a woman in an order's mantle. The image is watermarked "Orden de Malta O.S.J". On 4 May 2015 came the post "Emilia Zaballos i Malta" with the image from the order's ceremony in April of the same year. Her foundation itself lists among her honours that she became "Dama de Honor" in 2014 and "Embajadora", ambassador, in 2015 of the "Soberana Orden de Malta OSJ". One of the images in the foundation's gallery from the ceremony carries the watermark "Ramoscomunicaciones.com" of the photographer Félix Ramos, to whom we return below.
The order is called the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta, OSJ. It has nothing to do with the Order of Malta in Rome, which is the only recognised one. It is led by Basilio Calì, who has his seat in Balzan on Malta, and sells knighthoods. A knighthood costs, according to the order's own terms, 2,500 euro, which is not refunded, plus 240 euro a year. The order's constitution says that it can issue diplomatic passports to its diplomats and that its premises have diplomatic immunity. In June 2018 the order's Italian grand priory published on its website, under the heading "Riconoscimento ONU", that Calì had received a certificate with a medal from the UN, "Firmato Segretario Generale Onu Ban K Moon". Much of the Italian coverage of the order comes from one man. The journalist Antonio Rubino is editor-in-chief of PugliaPress and has himself written several of its reports on the order, published as news rather than as advertising. His consultancy publishes NewsItalyNews, which has praised Calì in the same way. Both sites sit on the same server as a not yet launched portal that calls itself "the independent voice" of the Knights of Malta.
Zaballos' foundation also uses the UN. In the menu on its website it says "Sé órgano de Naciones unidas", become a UN body. The page itself says only that the foundation has applied for consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council, ECOSOC, and that the application is "en trámite", being processed.
The chancery of the Order of Malta warns of "Mimic Orders". The House of Romanov regards all "Russian Orders of Malta" as false.
The protector
OSJ had a protector, a "Protector". It was the self-styled Royal Imperial House of Rurikovich, a princely house that claims descent from Russia's first ruling dynasty. The house was registered as a Danish voluntary association with an address in a flat in Aalborg between 2020 and 2023. Since October 2024 the house's order of knighthood, the Imperial Order of St. John, has been registered as a Danish association with the same flat as its address. Its Spanish branch was led by Jorge Álvarez Sánchez, who calls himself Grand Prince Jorge Rurikovich. The head of the house calls himself Hans Maximus Rurikovich. According to the Danish companies register, he ran floor-sanding firms in the Aalborg area in the 2000s under other names. According to the image files' timestamps and location data, the medal Basilio Calì gave him was handed over in Malta on 24 November 2018, the same evening as an investiture of Calì's order, as shown by the photo on the house's site and the order's own photos. The family tree Jorge presents as the basis of his descent is the same files, byte for byte, as the house's own, and according to the files' own data they were created in November 2008.
Since June 2024 the house order has written on its website that it has been re-established "under Russian protection". In February 2026 it announced that its Swedish grand priory had been "taken over by the Royal House"; no Swedish name has ever appeared on the order's pages.
By October 2013 at the latest the house wrote on its website that it was ready to extend "links and fraternal friendship with The President of The Holy Russian Federation regarding a cooperation within any matter, whether Politic and Diplomatic". Russia's ambassador was called "President Vladimir Putin's Ambassador" there.
On 20 March 2018, two days after the presidential election in Russia, Jorge wrote on his accounts: "Congratulations to our World leader, President of Russia Vladimir Putin". On Russia Day he wrote "Glory to The Russian Government and The House of Rurik". His Facebook page is registered as a non-profit organisation with the location "Moscow, Russia". His newly rebuilt website today states that his work is about defending "the artistic and historical heritage of the Russian Federation worldwide". The wording does not appear in any archived version from 2021 to 2023, either before or after the invasion of Ukraine. The first archived copy is from 2 October 2026. The same website now sells knighthoods: a ceremony in Madrid in November 2026, with "20% OFF" for those who applied before 30 September. A paid press release about Jorge on 8 October 2026 carries the dateline "Moscow, Russia".
Jorge likes to surround himself with royal titles. In a post from one of Calì's investiture ceremonies in March 2014 he presents a Thai woman as "H. Royal Highness The Princess Rajadarasri Jayankura of Thailand", and on his website he calls her a member of Thailand's Chakri dynasty. She holds the title Mom Luang, which according to Tatler Thailand denotes a descendant of the royal house but not a member of the royal family.
She also appears in the US Justice Department's Epstein material. The emails show that she met Jeffrey Epstein at his home in New York in September 2012 and received a representative of his foundation in Bangkok the same year. Nothing in the material suggests she was involved in his crimes. According to Kosovo's foreign ministry, which answered the Kosovo newspaper Koha, her appointment as Kosovo's honorary consul in Thailand was never approved.
She has also moved in Russian circles. At the Chess Olympiad in Baku in September 2016 she was photographed, according to the official gallery's captions, with Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, former head of the Russian republic of Kalmykia and then president of the world chess federation. Since November 2015 he had been on the US sanctions list for supporting the Syrian regime. He was removed from the list in July 2025, when the US lifted its Syria sanctions. The month before, Ilyumzhinov's own news portal wrote that he had met "the princess of Thailand, Her Highness Raja" in Moscow and held talks at the aircraft maker Sukhoi and the conglomerate AFK Sistema. In 2019, according to Bashkortostan's state news agency Bashinform, she led a Thai business delegation to the republic's head Radiy Khabirov, who is today sanctioned by the EU and the US, among others.
From the same ceremonies Jorge also published photos in 2014 of a woman he calls "Princess Tatjana Karadjordjevic" and "Princess Karadjorjevic of Serbia". The office of the Serbian royal house told Svenskhampa that it has no information on whether Princess Maria Tatiana attended the ceremonies or has connections to Jorge or the OSJ, and that the office only represents the main branch of the royal family, not the Crown Prince's cousins.
Between 2014 and 2017 Jorge was photographed with Russia's ambassador in Madrid, Yuri Korchagin, on at least six occasions. On 8 September 2015 in Málaga's city hall Korchagin stands next to the Russian Orthodox archpriest Dimitri Osipenko. On 4 May 2014 he and Maryia Kubareva hold up OSJ mantles at the embassy next to the ambassador. Kubareva is today presented as a representative of the Rurikovich house and chair of the association Kultura bez granits in Madrid. The association takes part in the work of the union of Russian compatriot associations in Spain, which lists the Russian embassy as a partner. In May 2023, according to the union, the association took part in the all-Russian campaign "To our heroes", in which letters from Russians in Spain were handed to soldiers of a medical battalion in occupied Lysychansk.
In March 2026 Kubareva led, as national coordinator, a Russian children's reading contest in Madrid which according to the union was held with the support of Rossotrudnichestvo, the Russian state agency the EU has sanctioned since July 2022. In September 2026 she represented Spain at the contest's forum in Yekaterinburg. The union calls itself the coordinating council of Russian compatriots in Spain. One of its board members laid flowers in occupied Donetsk on the compatriots' behalf in 2025, and according to the investigative journalism network OCCRP another runs a Russian cultural centre in Alicante that reported to the EU-sanctioned Pravfond foundation.
Jorge has also displayed his contact with the Russian diplomat Sergey Melik-Bagdasarov, who was minister-counsellor at the embassy in Madrid from 2012 to 2017 and became Russia's ambassador to Venezuela in 2020. On Instagram he posted a photo from a train captioned "Grand Prince Jorge Rurikovich travelling with dear Russian Minister Sergey Melik-Bagdasarov". In other posts he sits at Melik-Bagdasarov's table at the event "Bilateral Economic Relations between Russia and Spain" in Málaga.
On 13 June 2014 Jorge posted a picture of himself "with The Russian Colonel Nikolay Aleschenko at The Russian Day". According to two sources cited by SVT's Uppdrag granskning, Nikolai Aleshchenko works for the Russian military intelligence service GRU. He was attaché in Spain from 2014 to 2017 and later military attaché at the Russian embassy in Stockholm.
Today the Rurikovich house's own order of knighthood, the Imperial Order of St. John, describes itself as standing "under sovereign Russian protection". On 6 July 2026 the house announced in an "Official Diplomatic Declaration" on Facebook that after three years it is giving up its role as protector of Giuseppe Madia's Italian OSJ federation. Every knight of the house's own order swears to "always cherish the Order, and never disclose its internal". In Calì's order, the one Zaballos joined, the knights must according to the constitution swear "obbedienza", obedience.
The breakfast
Jorge has named Zaballos on his Instagram at a dinner with a Mexican senator in December 2014, through the hashtag #emiliazaballos in a post from the Fitur tourism fair in 2016 and at a business breakfast around 2021 together with what he calls his business partner.
On 9 April 2019 Fundación Zaballos wrote that "La Presidenta de la Fundación, Emilia Zaballos y la Directora de Relaciones Institucionales, Johana Ríos, asistieron esta mañana al desayuno" with Yuri Korchagin, "Embajador Extraordinario de Rusia en España". The breakfast was organised by the executives' association CEDE, and the ambassador was the speaker. According to the foundation's account, the ambassador said among other things that 90 percent of the information about Russia is false.
Three weeks later, on 29 April 2019, the foundation wrote that it had been invited to "The Fourth Festival Marathon" at the Russian ambassador's residence, "representados por nuestra presidenta, Emilia Zaballos". The event was the Spanish presentation of the Russian "Festival Marathon", a cultural project which according to senator Andrei Klimov's own website was under the patronage of the Russian Federation Council and supported by the Russian Foreign Ministry and Rossotrudnichestvo. Klimov led the tour. Since March 2022 he has been on the EU sanctions list as a member of the Federation Council, and the United States has also sanctioned him. When the festival was held in 2019 he was not sanctioned.
In February 2023 the same foundation gave its international honorary award to the Ukrainian people and President Volodymyr Zelensky, with reference to Russia's invasion. The award was accepted by Ukraine's ambassador. In May 2023 the foundation wrote about Russia's "desgraciado protagonismo" and relayed Javier Solana's view that the country should be punished for the invasion of Ukraine. The foundation's own posts about the 2019 embassy meetings nevertheless remain on its website. They were there before the invasion and after it, and according to the pages' own data they have not been changed since 2020.
The crypto case
Zaballos also represents victims in another major fraud. In the crypto case Madeira Invest Club, her firm represents the association for affected crypto investors, AAIC, of which she herself is president. According to THE OBJECTIVE on 4 November 2024, the association was the only one of three injured-party groups that asked the judge to limit the investigation to Álvaro Romillo, who financed Alvise Pérez, the leader of the party Se Acabó La Fiesta. The association also opposed the case being referred to the Supreme Court, called that request "mediático y político" and argued that there was no basis for Alvise to bear civil liability. The firm told the newspaper that it has "ninguna relación de cliente ni afinidad política" with Alvise.
The network
Around the order and the princely house are people with legal histories of their own. None of them is accused of anything concerning Zaballos.
Morel Bolea, whom the Rurikovich house appointed its "legal representative in Romania" and whom OSJ's website still lists as "Ambasciatore at Large" although the order says it expelled him in December 2020, has since 2025 been charged in Iași with trafficking four minors. The Rurikovich house writes in its reply to Svenskhampa that it revoked all his titles and mandates on the same day the allegations became public in 2022, and that he has no connection with the house.
According to the Romanian courts portal, the judge approved the indictment on 23 July 2026, and Bolea appealed the decision on 27 July. According to Romania's Antena Stars, the girls were recruited through a non-governmental organisation and a modelling agency set up in Iași, and then sexually exploited through psychological coercion, manipulation and emotional abuse.
As early as 2008 his association EuroDEMOS received EU money through the Phare programme for a project against human trafficking, "Ce visezi? Unde ajungi?" ("What do you dream of? Where do you end up?"). According to the project page, human trafficking hides behind modelling agencies, and the solution was occupational standards for models that EuroDEMOS had drawn up itself. Associations linked to him have received EU grants since 2015. The most recent, the Erasmus+ project "TALE", ran until June 2026 and was agreed after he had been arrested. According to Libertatea, EuroDEMOS received almost 50,000 lei from Iași City Hall in 2022 for the project "Lideri pentru Europa", aimed according to the association itself at young people aged 15 to 25, while DIICOT was investigating Bolea. The same year Kasta Morrely was one vote short of receiving 70,000 lei. We have found no reaction from the EU or Romanian authorities to the EU money after the 2025 indictment.
Patrick James Hinds, a Canadian, is listed as a count, Staff General of the guard and "Royal and Imperial Advisor" to Hans Maximus, and as Grand Prior for Ireland of the Teutonic order. He was previously Vice President Corporate Relations of Royal Indian Raj International Corp. in Vancouver, which sold stakes in planned satellite towns in India. When 24 investors sued the company in California in 2010, Hinds was one of the defendants; the claims against him were dismissed in 2011 without a ruling. The companies and four members of the owning Benjamin family were ordered in 2012, in a default judgment, to pay the investors USD 2.69 million and USD 500,000 in punitive damages. Today Hinds is CEO of the property company Terra Global Developments.
Hinds writes to Svenskhampa that his titles in the house were ceremonial and that he performed no duties beyond occasionally helping with the website. He has known Hans Maximus since 2009, co-founded the house's Imperial Order of Truth and last spoke with him in 2020. In his first reply he wrote that it had been at least eight years. He says he never held a formal role in Hans's consultancy Empire Consult, which in 2021 presented him as a board member and "Empire Partner" and still had him on its board list in 2024. He says he was unaware of that listing and never authorised it. He does not recall any appointment in the Teutonic order. Terra Global Developments, he says, has no connection, history or relationship whatsoever with Hans Maximus, Empire Consult or any related projects.
Constantin Telegan, a lawyer and politician from Galați in Romania, was listed in 2016 and 2017 as a count of the Rurikovich house and as "Contele de Rurikovich" and "Marele Prior Imperial" of Hans Maximus's own Teutonic order. Since 2014 he has led a Romanian Teutonic order of his own and a private arbitration tribunal in Bucharest. According to Monitorul de Galați, Moldova's border police said in 2021 that he was wanted for human trafficking. He has not been convicted of anything, and he has sued the newspaper.
Félix Ramos is behind Ramos Comunicaciones, whose watermark is on the photos from the order's ceremonies, including those Emilia Zaballos published herself. According to Calì's order, it was Ramos's organisation that presented the order and its terms to Zaballos when she joined in 2014. According to El Español in 2019, he presented himself as the Order of Malta's ambassador in Spain and as press chief of the Rurikovich house, and sold diplomas and medals in the name of, among others, the Guardia Civil orphans' association. He was himself the association's local delegate in Marbella until it removed him in August 2018. According to the society site i-Marbella, which published Ramos' own press releases, he was knighted in the order in Malta in April 2014 with Jorge Rurikovich as sponsor. At the end of 2015 the site presented him as the order's ambassador in Spain and as "Baron von Kronstadt".
In November 2019 a court in Tangier sentenced him to eight years in prison for sexual abuse of a minor. The verdict, which according to Infomarruecos covered abuse of minors and human trafficking, was upheld in July 2020. He had also been sentenced to three months for defrauding two people in Morocco over Guardia Civil products and membership of the orphans' association. At a retrial in December 2022 the Tetuán Court of Appeal reduced the sentence for the abuse to three years in prison. According to the Moroccan children's rights group Touche pas à mon enfant, which was a party to the case, the Court of Cassation restored the eight-year sentence in March 2023, the Spanish news agency EFE and L'Observateur reported.
According to El Español, the boy met Ramos when he was 14. Ramos offered him work as a cameraman for a YouTube programme and collected him at weekends from the children's organisation "Ningún Niño sin Techo" in Tangier, which the authorities closed in 2019. According to El Faro de Ceuta, Ramos had himself founded an association for displaced children. The relationship lasted at least four years. According to the boy's testimony, as reported by El Faro de Ceuta, Ramos said he owned a TV channel in Marbella and promised to take him to Spain. The Moroccan children's rights organisation that pursued the case says, according to El Faro de Ceuta, that Ramos also took the boy to meetings with famous Spaniards, and that together they promised him a house in Marbella and to make him famous on television. Ramos denied the charges, according to Infomarruecos. About the honours, he told the Moroccan newspaper La Dépêche, according to El Español, that he worked "filantrópica" and that those who paid did so voluntarily. A Spanish brotherhood whose name he used told El Español that in Morocco he claimed they had ties to the royal house, which was untrue.
In March 2014 Jorge Rurikovich wrote on Instagram that he had been honoured by the Guardia Civil orphans, under a photo bearing Ramos' watermark.
Sajimon Parayil, the house's "legal representative in India", is a film producer. In 2024 he went to court to stop the publication of a government report on sexual abuse in Kerala's film industry and then tried in India's Supreme Court to stop the police investigation of the women's testimonies. He lost in both instances. According to a video from 2017 he took part that year in a round-table discussion in the Russian State Duma, organised by the Moscow-based club Amicability, which according to News of Bahrain on 28 February 2017 had also given him a Russian "peace prize" in Bahrain. The round table was opened by Duma deputy Andrei Svintsov, who has been on the EU sanctions list since 2022. A Saudi company named Sparas Arabia, which shares a brand and web address with his Sparas, exhibited in 2024 at the police fair World Police Summit in Dubai. On sparas.com an anti-drone jammer, SECUDOME, from the Indian defence electronics company Aidin Technologies was marketed at the time. The advertising has since been removed.
Ilija Životić, whom the Rurikovich house calls a duke and who is the house order's grand prior for Serbia, founded the International Police Organization. He and IPO's head Mareglen Tomori, whom the house order calls grand master for Albania, were registered participants at the UN crime conference in Vienna in 2022. Životić belongs to the governing side. He was elected to parliament in 2020 for Aleksandar Šapić's party SPAS, which later merged into President Vučić's SNS, and when BIRN wrote about IPO in 2021 he was an SNS member of parliament. In summer 2026 he was chief of staff to the president of the Belgrade municipality of Čukarica.
The Serbian investigative newsroom BIRN described IPO in 2021 as part of a network of parapolice groups that share members with an "Orthodox Templar order". The order's Facebook showed Serbian volunteers on the side of the Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. According to BIRN, Nemanja Ristić is a member of both the Templar order and IPO, and IPO's own website shows that he held a membership card in the organisation valid until May 2020 and later renewed until February 2021. In the card's photo he wears a T-shirt with Vladimir Putin's face. He does not appear in IPO's member lists from 2023 onwards. In December 2016, while wanted by Interpol, he was photographed with Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in Belgrade, the Montenegrin newspaper Vijesti reported. On his Facebook profile he today lists Russia's FSB security service as his employer since December 2014 and describes himself as a fighter against NATO, the CIA and "globalism". These are his own claims and cannot be verified. On the same profile he says he has worked for IPO since 2017, before the organisation existed. He was convicted in absentia in Montenegro in 2019 for involvement in the alleged coup attempt at the 2016 election, but the verdict was quashed, and in February 2026 the Appeals Court upheld the acquittal of all defendants.
On IPO's own site in 2018, DBA, one of the groups BIRN describes, was called "our partner organisation". When IPO was established in Serbia in 2018, DBA wrote on its website that the two organisations had signed a cooperation protocol and that DBA's president Stevan Đokić had become leader of IPO's Serbian section. Đokić later led the Orthodox Templar order, according to BIRN. On IPO's website he described himself as a member of a Russian detective association. The cooperation with DBA was more than an exchange between two associations. On DBA's own website Životić signed texts in 2018 as head of DBA's section for terrorism and counter-terrorism. In 2017 DBA published a text by him that, according to the website, was written especially for News Front, a Crimea-based site that the US Treasury describes as a disinformation and propaganda outlet. The text was about school safety.
One of the speakers at an IPO conference in December 2020 was Siniša Pepić from Republika Srpska, who today appears as a commentator on the Russian state's RT Balkan and has been a guest on the channel's programme "Relativizacija". Two months earlier IPO had presented him as Životić's "senior advisor" at the UN conference against transnational organised crime in Vienna. In 2024 the Rurikovich house's guard listed Pepić as a captain on the same page as Lieutenant Colonel Životić. His membership card in IPO's Serbian section was valid until June 2025. On RT Balkan he has, among other things, called EU plans to use frozen Russian assets a dangerous precedent, and on the channel he said he once posed as a Ukrainian intelligence officer in phone calls to an Austrian activist. In May 2026 he defended Republika Srpska's delegation visit to Vladimir Putin in a column on Argumenti, a portal that names neither its owner nor its editors and which the fact-checker Raskrinkavanje in September 2026 described as an anonymous portal openly favouring Dodik's party SNSD.
The head of the house has also been an IPO member. In 2021 the organisation had a membership card for "Maximus Rurikovich" in its Danish section, with the profession "Grand Prince & Granduca", and in 2023 a new card with the profession "Investigation Consultant" and validity "Unlimited". The house lists him as grand prior for Serbia in the house order and as a member of the house's Kings Council, and on a website for his own princely house Hans Maximus is listed as "Special Advisor". According to the image files' metadata, his portrait on the house order's and the house's websites was prepared on 4 December 2020 on a computer with Danish language settings.
The House recognised his ducal title, he says, because a final court decision established that he descends from Duke Dragoj Ozrinić of medieval Zeta. The court decision he refers to, a ruling in non-contentious proceedings from the Basic Court in Stara Pazova in 2024, establishes, according to the certified translation he has published himself, that he descends from Duke Dragoj Ozrinić and has a legal interest in initiating proceedings on the right to use the name and title. The titles of prince and duke were awarded to him in 2025 by an arbitration panel attached to a private heraldic academy in Taranto, Italy. On its website the academy offers information on how to "obtain" an arbitral ruling on noble titles, and two of the three arbitrators are the academy's own officers. Životić was appointed in 2023 as grand prior for Serbia in another Templar order, OSMTJ. In spring 2025 his name was removed from the order's board list and the appointment was deleted.
His research on Russia dates from 2022 onwards. In 2024 he published, with the analyst Darko Obradović, a peer-reviewed article on how the Kremlin uses Telegram for influence in Serbia, which calls Russia's war in Ukraine aggression. At the same time IPO has sought out NATO. In July 2022, according to IPO's own post, Tomori attended a conference at NATO's Stability Policing Centre of Excellence in Vicenza and handed the centre's director an official request for future cooperation. In October that year he represented IPO at NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga. In February 2025 Lieutenant General Janusz Adamczak, Director General of the NATO International Military Staff, received IPO's Montenegrin section at NATO headquarters, and in May 2025 IPO's representative in Geneva took part in a meeting with NATO's Special Representative for the Mediterranean.
When IPO's Wikipedia article was reviewed, Wikipedia's own checkers found that several accounts editing it, and removing the material on its ties to the far right, were linked to the organisation. One of them said the person works for IPO, another openly acknowledged the link, and the account that created the article was blocked from it in November 2025 for edit warring and unanswered questions about a conflict of interest. IPO gives an address in Milan as its headquarters, but according to Meta's ad library the Serbian association IPO Srbija is listed as advertiser and payer for the headquarters' Facebook ads.
Životić writes to Svenskhampa that BIRN's article was not objective, that IPO has nothing to do with right-wing organisations, that he himself has never been a member of one, and that Ristić has had nothing to do with IPO for the past five years. He has never met or spoken with Basilio Calì. In a second reply Životić writes that he has never had contact with any Russian group, that he researches Russian influence in Serbia and that he has never been to Russia. Hans Maximus is a friend, he says, but he has no role in any Rurikovich order. He cooperated with Stevan Đokić and DBA on security matters, but not with Đokić's Templar order. The organisation he founded and leads, IPO, is the one BIRN describes as part of the network. Yet the house lists him as grand prior and as a member of its Kings Council.
In a third reply Životić confirms that he held the DBA post until 2018, when he became IPO's president. He writes that he did not write the text for News Front and only found out about it later, and that he changed his view of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Pepić, he says, was an advisor with no political influence in IPO, and he has never asked any member about their political opinions. IPO's headquarters is in Milan, he says, and the Serbian section is one of several, although the organisation started in Serbia in 2018. On BIRN he repeats that the newsroom wanted to harm the ruling SNS party. He did not answer the questions about his titles in the Rurikovich house, the Taranto award, the journal that published it, or Hans Maximus's IPO membership card. The Rurikovich house writes in its reply to Svenskhampa that Životić holds a "recognized dignity" confirmed by the house and is in "good standing".
Adnan Imeri, vice president of Imperial Banking Group and appointed by IOSJ as Grand Master for North Macedonia, was thanked in June 2023 by the country's interior minister Oliver Spasovski for his organisation OIDE having paid for the renovation of the Pelince border police station. OIDE is the same organisation that named Zoran Marković Esteves a vice president.
Philippe Soulié, a count of the house, heads the Swiss Prolan Group. According to a Cambodian prince who bid for the football club AS Saint-Étienne in 2021, it was Soulié and Prolan who arranged his bank guarantee of 100 million euro in Deutsche Bank's name. The club called the guarantee forged. Soulié avoided the question but told RFA that nothing false had come from his side. The Paris prosecutor dropped the matter in July 2023, and the company went bankrupt in 2025.
Zoran Marković Esteves, a count of the house, heads Imperial Bank Trust. California's financial regulator ordered the bank in 2019 to cease conducting banking business without a licence.
Since 2014 the group has filed at least 24 such registrations with the same codes and values from just over one million up to 566 billion euros. Among others they name Banka Srpske (2015) and Bangladesh's state trading corporation (2023) as secured parties, which does not mean those institutions are involved. In the filing of March 2026 Imperial Bank Trust books its own token as an asset: "Crypto BCG in wallet 460.000".
Two and a half months after the invasion of Ukraine, on 12 May 2022, Zoran Marković Esteves filed a registration in Florida in which the group assigns two "gold bonds" worth one billion euros to the Russian company SV-Logistik in Bronnitsy outside Moscow. According to the Russian company register, the company has no employees and is owned and run by a man listed on Imperial Banking Group's own website as vice president and director of logistics. Nothing in the documents shows that any money or gold changed hands. In April 2023 Imperial Bank Trust filed two registrations in favour of an "Imperial Invest Group" in Minsk, each for up to 350 tonnes of gold worth 20 billion euros. We have found no company of that name in Belarus. The gold token's white paper is aimed in part at investors in Russia seeking a gold-based asset "without traditional banking intermediaries". IBG's customer login today exists only in English and Russian. Russian was already offered before the invasion, alongside German.
Konstantin-Sergey Vostrikov, a Russian citizen born in 1963, was from 2016 to 2018 president of Zoran Marković Esteves' Florida company TS-TriStar Imperial. He owned 80 percent of the British company Hermitage Investment Group Ltd. The British Company Names Tribunal decided in 2019 that the company must change its name and ordered the company and its two owners to pay Hermitage Capital Management's costs.
In April 2022, a few weeks after the invasion of Ukraine, Vostrikov, whom the organiser calls "public figure Konstantin Yuryevich Vostrikov", took part in two round tables at the Petrovsky Academy of Sciences and Arts in St Petersburg. The participants included people from the Russian-controlled "people's republics" in Donbas. The first, on 2 April, adopted a resolution calling Russia's "special military operation for the denazification and demilitarisation of Ukraine" "highly necessary". The organiser spells the name Kostrikov in that list and Vostrikov in the list from 16 April.
Thierry Isaia, a Frenchman, owned the rest of Hermitage Investment Group Ltd and was one of the two owners ordered to pay the costs. In 2020 he sat on Imperial Banking Group's management. From 2003 to 2010 he sat in several British companies together with Matthieu Isaia, who in 2023 founded the aircraft brokerage MG Aviation in Dubai. The firm sells business jets, fits aircraft for "special missions" such as surveillance and counter-drone work, and exhibited at the IDEX 2025 arms fair. In March 2026 it published a guide on how to sell aircraft "linked to sanctioned owners". We have no evidence that the firm has breached sanctions.
Franco Nicoletti, formerly OSJ's grand prior for Brazil, born in 1947 in Italy, was convicted in 1998 by a federal jury in Florida of attempted money laundering and received 16 years in prison. The verdict was upheld in 2000. Today he administers the plastics recycling company Cycle Green in Brazil, and since 2023 the police in Brasília have been investigating him for having claimed to represent BlackRock. The information about Cycle Green comes from the Brazilian companies register (CNPJ 35.370.224/0001-70).
The pattern
Modelling agencies, charity and Russian contacts form a pattern known from the Jeffrey Epstein case. According to US Senator Ron Wyden, whose investigators were allowed to review Treasury records, many of the women and girls Epstein targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Turkmenistan. According to The Moscow Times, the US Epstein files name Russian cities such as Novosibirsk, Omsk and Samara where girls were allegedly selected, and one of the résumés mentions modelling competitions.
In a letter to the Justice Department, Wyden writes that Epstein used several now-sanctioned Russian banks for wire transfers worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and that the transfers appear to coincide with women or girls being moved around the world. That is Wyden's assessment, and no court has tested it. The emails also show Epstein trying for years to arrange a meeting with Putin. According to NV's review of the emails, he wanted to invite Putin to private dinners attended by figures such as Bill Gates. There is no evidence that any meeting took place.
Two people in the network have themselves appeared as protectors of the groups they were later convicted or charged with exploiting: Félix Ramos had founded an association for displaced children and was convicted of sexually abusing a boy he met through a children's organisation, and Morel Bolea received EU money for a project against human trafficking through modelling agencies and is today charged with trafficking minors.
Of those we examined, only the Zaballos foundation and Ilija Životić have outwardly distanced themselves from Russia since the invasion. We cannot tell whether that reflects a real change. Several others in the circle around the princely house have instead kept up or increased their Russian contacts since February 2022. The two who have turned both have roles that point west: Životić's organisation IPO has sought cooperation with NATO, and Zaballos represents victims of a fraud in which the main suspect has himself said that almost half the money went to a drone factory in St Petersburg.
The responses
Hans Maximus Rurikovich replied through the house's chancellery on 15 October. He writes that the house extends its condolences to the victims of JuicyFields and that it is fully independent of the Russian state. The wording about "Russian protection" on the house order's website refers, he says, exclusively to the dynasty's historical, cultural and genealogical origin in 862, and the house has no contact, treaties or financial relationships with Russian state bodies. According to the reply, the house ended its role as protector of Calì's order on 17 September 2022 because the order's leadership could not produce verifiable accounts. The registration as a Danish association was a temporary measure after his brother died in 2020. On the war in Ukraine he writes that the house maintains a "strict non-political, humanitarian stance" and condemns armed violence, that Ukraine and Russia share the same roots, and that nations of shared ancestry should never wage a "fratricidal" war. According to the reply, Sajimon Parayil is in "good standing", Philippe Soulié has a technical advisory role, Zoran Marković Esteves holds a recognized dignity and Adnan Imeri is inactive. The reply also reserves the right to sue if its statements are misrepresented.
The house's press secretary Ana Văleanu writes in a later statement that the house has no involvement in JuicyFields and that the actions of individuals cannot be attributed to the house. The house did not answer the follow-up questions about its Russian ties or about Empire Consult's offer of Russian oil.
Jorge Álvarez Sánchez replied through his lawyers and asks not to be named. According to the reply, he was appointed by the house's then head, Hugo Cabrera Rurikovich, who he says recognised him as his biological son, and after Hugo's death Hans Maximus took over the house without respecting his right of succession. He therefore refers questions about the house's titles and decisions to Hans Maximus, who owns rurikovichdynasty.com. Most of what we asked about, he says, dates back more than ten years and does not reflect his activities today. According to the reply, Félix Ramos was the house's press officer, since he claimed to be a journalist, and it was in that role that Jorge acted as his sponsor. The house expelled him in 2014 or 2015, as soon as it learned of his actions. In February 2016, according to Pasaporte News, Hans Maximus came to Marbella and gave Ramos the title "Barón Von Kronstadt", the house's Grand Cross and a knighthood of the house. Ramos was described there as the house's press officer in Spain for several years. Emilia Zaballos, Jorge says, has never belonged to the house, and they have only met at occasional social and professional events. On the war, he writes that he does not engage in politics, that he wishes for peace between Russia and Ukraine and that he considers the war absurd and unnecessary.
Basilio Calì's order replied through its secretariat. The order writes that it has no contact with the people we asked about and that Félix Ramos, Morel Bolea and Franco Nicoletti were expelled as soon as the order learned of their legal histories. According to the reply, the order was unaware of Ramos's and Nicoletti's convictions when they joined, although under the order's own constitution anyone becoming a knight of the higher grades must be able to show a clean criminal record. That Bolea still appears on the order's website is, according to the reply, a technical oversight. The order writes that it has never issued diplomatic passports or claimed diplomatic status, and has never presented itself as the Order of Malta. The 2018 UN certificate was, according to the order, handed over by a then member introduced by a Kosovan minister, who was later expelled, and the order has never claimed UN recognition. On Emilia Zaballos, the order writes that she never dealt directly with the order when she joined. The information, contacts and terms presented to her came, according to the order, exclusively from Félix Ramos's organisation and other outsiders, and she never paid the order anything for her honours. The Rurikovich house, the order's protector until 2022, is not mentioned in the reply.
Emilia Zaballos, Félix Ramos, Morel Bolea, Mom Luang Rajadarasri Jayankura, Sajimon Parayil, Adnan Imeri, Philippe Soulié, Zoran Marković Esteves, Konstantin-Sergey Vostrikov, Thierry Isaia, Franco Nicoletti, Constantin Telegan, Maryia Kubareva and Nemanja Ristić have not replied to Svenskhampa's questions. Nor have Berkai, which built Imperial Bank Trust's portal, or the aircraft broker MG Aviation.
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