Designated on 4 December 2024 under Executive Order 14024. The most useful published description of what stablecoin settlement actually looks like in operation — which is not what the phrase suggests.
Who was designated
Individuals: George Rossi, a Ukrainian national; Elena Chirkinyan, a Russian national; Andrejs Bradens, a Latvian national; Khadzi-Murat Magomedov and Nikita Krasnov, Russian nationals.
Entities: TGR Partners in Moscow, TGR Corporate Concierge LTD in the United Kingdom, TGR DWC- LLC in the United Arab Emirates, and Siam Expert Trading Company Limited in Thailand. Pullman Global Solutions LLC, a Wyoming company more than fifty per cent owned by Bradens, was identified as blocked property.
Treasury describes the group as an “extensive sanctions evasion and money laundering network” that obfuscates its clients’ activities “including through the use of digital assets, such as stablecoins like Tether (USDT).”
The mechanism, which is hawala with a new settlement leg
The sentence that matters: Chirkinyan and other members “arranged cash handovers in which USDT was sent to a cryptocurrency address controlled by Zhdanova, and in return cash was received by the TGR Group.”
Read that carefully. Nothing crossed a border. One party transferred a stablecoin on a public ledger; another party handed over physical cash somewhere else; the two obligations cancelled.
That is the structure described on the [hawala page](/techniques/hawala-and-informal-value- transfer/), with one substitution. Traditional settlement between brokers happens later, in aggregate, through reverse flows, trade invoices or gold. Here the settlement asset is a dollar-referenced token, and it settles in minutes.
The advantage over the traditional version is speed and finality. The cash leg still has all the problems cash has — it is bulky, it has to be physically moved, and Magomedov and Zhdanova are recorded as arranging “international bulk cash deliveries and the conversion of bulk currency into cryptocurrency for clients.”
Why stablecoins specifically
A commercial obligation is denominated in dollars. Settling it in a volatile asset gives one side a currency position it did not ask for. A fiat-referenced token removes that, which is the entire reason this instrument, rather than bitcoin, appears in the commercial settlement material.
The corporate and trade layers
The network is not purely digital, and that is the point. TGR Corporate Concierge is a corporate services company, and Treasury records that the group likely used it “to facilitate invoice payments, monetary transfers and/or cash for USDT transactions.” Krasnov and Zhdanova are recorded as using a luxury watch company for trade-based money laundering.
Company formation, invoices, watches, bulk cash and stablecoins, in one network. Practitioners do not specialise the way technique pages do, and this designation is a good reminder of it.
Zhdanova
Ekaterina Zhdanova, who led the Smart Group, was designated separately on 3 November 2023 and coordinated extensively with TGR. The two designations are best read together.