Lawyer calls the expert examination in the Moscow investigator’s bitcoin-bribery case dubious

Online, documents from a handwriting-expertise examination of notes found on the computer of the bribery suspect, the head of the Investigative Department of the Moscow Tverskoy District Committee, Marat Tambiev, were published. This drew the attention of lawyer Vadim Bagaturiya in his Telegram channel.

Having studied the case materials, he found numerous inconsistencies in the documents.

Bagaturiya said that on Tambiev’s seized computer investigators found a note titled ‘Pension’, which contained a photograph of a sheet of paper with a handwritten seed phrase for a wallet.

«On Tambiev they did not find the cryptocurrency itself or a wallet with it! They found some photograph with some handwriting. [Based on this] the General Prosecutor’s Office is building a position that 1032 BTC belongs to Marat Tambiev», — wrote the lawyer.

According to him, since the involvement of witnesses in the disk inspection was not required, the investigator attached to the inspection a photographic chart and process screenshots. However they turned out to be ‘absolutely unreadable due to the scale of a third of an A4 page’. It is also impossible to see the path to that very note ‘Pension’.

«The defendant’s representative asked the plaintiff to present legible documents, to which he received the same ones, but printed in high-contrast mode», — said Bagaturiya.

The second argument of the General Prosecutor’s Office is that the seed-phrase note was written personally by Tambiev. However, according to the lawyer, during handwriting examination the expert was shown samples of Tambiev’s handwriting from his old manuscripts, also written in Cyrillic.

Also in the conclusion of the forensic-expert center there are no usual photographic tables with step-by-step visual comparison of handwriting samples and the objects under study.

Bagaturiya stated that the descriptive part of the handwriting expert’s conclusion was written ‘as if by eye’ and does not inspire confidence in the findings of the examination.

«Any photograph has distortions depending on focal length, lighting and shooting angle. Could this be the infamous Photoshop, since the original note does not exist», — he added.

The ForkLog editorial team checked wallets, whose seed phrases are presented in the case. One of them received incoming transactions totaling 100 BTC in March 2022.

Second in the same month received 932.1 BTC. 17 November 2022, on the day of seizure of Tambiev’s bitcoins by Moscow’s Bauman Court, the main portion of funds was moved to a new intermediate address.

After that on the same day the combined balance of the two addresses — 1032.1 BTC ($26.8 million at the time of writing) — was moved to a separate wallet owned by investigators, where they remain to this day.

Marat Tambiev accused of receiving in April 2022 a bribe from members of the Infraud Organization hacker group, Mark and Konstantin Bergmanov, as well as Kirill Samokutyayevsky for not seizing their assets.

According to media reports, at the time of arrest the hackers provided access to ten crypto wallets, into which proceeds from their activity in December 2021 were received in the amount of 2064 BTC. Subsequently, all assets were withdrawn from the wallets.

The investigation suggests that half of the sum went to Tambiev’s wallets. The remaining bitcoins, according to unnamed media sources, went to a so-called ‘cold wallet’, access to which may be held by employees of Department ‘K’ who participated in the searches.