The story plays out like a John Grisham novel or a Steven Soderbergh movie.
A Russian conglomerate in the metal trade supplying the nation in its ‘special operation’ in Ukraine.
An American musical maestro. An astute businessman who made millions. And this is the same man.
A three-way legal case spanning the globe from the capitalist West’s New York, centering on neutral Switzerland, with state-run court orders being filed and withdrawn on an almost weekly basis in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
An apparent tale of hacking devices, spying, and intimidation.
Allegations of Russian intelligence officers from the FSB banging down doors of exclusive Moscow apartments and placing innocent tenants face down on the floor as they search premises.
And hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.
The opening scene could easily be taking place this week, as a prestigious Steinway concert grand piano will sit beneath the beautiful Tuscan sky for a concert in the Piazza del Duomo in Pietrasanta, Italy, and a willowy and fit 65-year-old composer will sit down to play an emotive piece of his music.
Igor Raykhelson wrote Adagio after watching, from his bedroom window in Manhattan, the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers fall on September 11, 2001.
Raykhelson is, by any measure, one of the most in-demand composers working today. A Russian-born classical and jazz pianist whose works have filled New York’s most prestigious concert halls, where Adagio premiered at Carnegie Hall in April 2003 as a personal reflection on grief and memory.
That he is still able to play at all, he tells Rolling Stone MENA, is not something he takes for granted anymore. “My diary should be full of commissions!”
Unfortunately for him and for the lovers of his music, his time is spent reading court filings instead of writing his next masterpiece.
That is because for most of the last decade, Raykhelson has found himself locked in a legal war with VSMPO-AVISMA, the Kremlin-controlled titanium giant. In 2023, the United States Commerce Department designated VSMPO-AVISMA as a military end-user supplying “the Russian military and security services.”
No court outside Russia, including those in Switzerland and the United States, has ever found him liable for anything. Yet the case is all-consuming: “The legal case against me is baseless and preposterous, but it has also been a nightmare,” he explains exclusively to Rolling Stone MENA.
However, his opponents argue otherwise.
“VSMPO’s dispute with Mr. Raykhelson stems from Mr. Raykhelson’s misconduct. The investigators in the Russian criminal proceedings have determined that Igor Raykhelson, alongside others, misappropriated funds from VSMPO on an especially large scale of approximately US $83 million (6,595,490,565.94 Russian Rubles). The investigation is not finished and VSMPO does not yet have access to the case file in the case against Igor Raykhelson,” explained Daria Pustilnik, a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP and the spokesperson for VSMPO-AVISMA
“VSMPO-AVISMA repeatedly converts untested allegations made in a Russian investigation into assertions of guilt and even admits themselves that the investigation is not finished,” stated a lawyer acting for Raykhelson. “Mr. Raykhelson has never been tried or convicted, and he categorically denies the allegations.”
Raykhelson was born in Leningrad and moved to the United States as a teenager, studied classical and jazz piano at New York University, and earned a master’s in business administration in 1991 at NYU, demonstrating early on his acumen not just as a musician but as an entrepreneur.
He quickly put his business skills to the test and built his fortune in the metal trade and, until recent events, had secured a favorable place in the history of the Russian titanium industry. He began trading titanium in 1983, founded Interlink, and first opened the door for VSMPO-AVISMA to become an international player after winning a case against the US Department of Commerce in the 1990s that removed an anti-dumping duty of more than 80 percent on Russian titanium. This all happened long before Moscow came calling to offer a multi-million-dollar deal, which was successfully negotiated with VSMPO-AVISMA a decade ago. Yet a few years after the deal was agreed, it turned sour.
Raykhelson firmly denies VSMPO-AVISMA’s core allegation that he colluded with a company executive to overcharge it by millions of dollars, and the dispute now runs on several fronts. The starting point is in Russia, where VSMPO-AVISMA initiated a criminal case against Raykhelson. In Geneva, his former trading company Interlink is seeking $86m in damages for breach of a 2020 settlement. Also, in Geneva, VSMPO-AVISMA’s German subsidiary is suing Interlink for roughly $4m in unpaid invoices, with Interlink’s defense resting on Swiss sanctions law, which it says forbids paying a company controlled by sanctioned persons; VSMPO-AVISMA called none of its own directors to give evidence, and a ruling is awaited. Further proceedings run in parallel.
“Instead of writing music, and I have a lot of requests from all over the world, I have not been able to focus. I do not have the time because I am involved in several legal proceedings myself and I assist Interlink in its legal proceedings. This is like a full-time job, and it has impeded my ability to create new music, which is in demand.”
Several legal proceedings will stem anyone’s creativity, yet Raykhelson is at pains to insist the dispute has not extinguished his creative gift outright. “I’m never going to give VSMPO the total satisfaction that at the very least they have killed a composer in me, because that is not true,” he said. “What is true is that this litigation has taken a serious toll on my ability to create, and at the end of the day that is the only real thing they have achieved. The rest is simply noise.”
He names one man as chiefly responsible for that noise: Mikhail Shelkov, the Russian billionaire and formal majority owner of VSMPO-AVISMA. “I believe I have evidence that private investigators have hacked and put me under surveillance. This has been passed on to the relevant authorities. It’s all pressure tactics, but I will not be intimidated,” Raykhelson said. He goes further still, alleging that the Russian state ultimately controls the company and that Shelkov is not a controlling figure, but a strawman installed to help it skirt Western sanctions.
The claim is not his alone: the investigative outlet iStories has reported that Shelkov, a former head of Rostec’s investment arm, acquired his stake in 2012 with little capital of his own, quoting a source close to the company’s founders who described him as “a proxy for Chemezov.” Sergey Chemezov is the sanctioned head of Rostec, who Raykhelson says chairs VSMPO-AVISMA’s board.
“Neither VSMPO nor anyone affiliated with VSMPO is trying to intimidate Mr. Raykhelson,” refuted Pustilnik. “Mr. Raykhelson’s claims and reporting from iStories about the alleged ‘strawman’ are not supported by any facts. Furthermore, there are no published shareholder records and no published records of every board election since 2012.”
Raykhelson’s former trading company Interlink has recently banked a significant win. In July, the Cantonal Court of Fribourg threw out an attempt by VSMPO-AVISMA’s German subsidiary to freeze Interlink’s Swiss accounts, ruling that the subsidiary failed to prove it was free of Chemezov’s controlling influence, who is sanctioned in Switzerland, the EU, the UK, and the US. The court found that attaching Interlink’s money in favour of the subsidiary would itself have amounted to a prohibited indirect provision of assets to a sanctioned enterprise. VSMPO-AVISMA did not appeal. In August, the same court in a different proceeding referring to the July decision stated that VSMPO-AVISMA’s German subsidiary is subject to Swiss sanctions.
Undeterred, VSMPO-AVISMA has gone to court in New York seeking twelve years of banking records on 51 people and companies linked to Raykhelson, including his sons, his wife’s music charity, and an ex-wife he divorced in 2011, two years before the alleged scheme began. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York objected, telling the court the application rested on “speculation and surmise.” Morgan Stanley called it “an overreach.” JPMorgan described the demands as “disproportionate to the needs of the case.”
“They didn’t complain at the time, and they are also ignoring a legal agreement the companies all signed back then not to sue each other,” Raykhelson said. “To say this criminal case is far-fetched is an understatement, and I will fight this for as long as it takes.” That legal agreement Raykhelson references is from 2020, when the involved companies committed to refrain from initiating, expanding, or continuing criminal proceedings against one another and their “associated parties”. But court records show that in September 2024, a VSMPO-AVISMA representative asked a court in Yekaterinburg to reclassify a case against a former director as fraud, and to draw Raykhelson into it. The case against him followed directly.
“VSMPO continually refuses to comply with the 2020 settlement agreement containing releases and restrictions that are central to the parties’ dispute,” added a lawyer acting for Raykhelson.
Raykhelson points, too, to an expert opinion he commissioned from Matthew Schmink, an American titanium industry specialist, who concluded that VSMPO-AVISMA was making at least a 40 percent margin on the business in question, a figure he says is borne out by the company’s record profits during the period under investigation. “This is scapegoating instigated by Shelkov to deflect attention from Rostec and the total collapse of VSMPO’s business after the war started,” Raykhelson said. “Given the ongoing repressions and the ever-shrinking roster of the ‘untouchable,’ his concern is well justified.”
He rejects the underlying charge just as firmly. “The charge of misappropriation of funds entrusted to a VSMPO employee is incongruent with my role as a consultant to a Swiss company,” he said, adding that he knows of no parallel case anywhere in the West in which a consultant of a company has been prosecuted for assisting in procuring goods or services at too high a price, rather than too low.
Even the charge itself has proven unstable. In May this year, Russian investigators dropped the original fraud case for lack of evidence, then refiled it as embezzlement, quietly abandoning their earlier claim that Raykhelson controlled the Russian companies at the center of the alleged scheme. The claimed loss, meanwhile, has climbed from 1.5 billion Russian Rubles ($17.3m) to more than 6.5 billion Russian Rubles ($75.1m).
Raykhelson also questions the testimony underpinning the case, centered on a witness named in the papers as Evgeny Lysenko, who he alleges gave evidence under duress after being held in jail and then moved to house arrest as part of a deal with prosecutors. He notes that Lysenko’s own company still owes several million dollars to one of Raykhelson’ s former trading firms and has never repaid it. Beyond that testimony, he argues, there is no evidence of bribery at all, only confirmation that the pricing reflected an arm’s-length business relationship. “I will be relentless in proving my innocence, bringing the culprits of this fabricated, sham investigation to justice, and assist Interlink in making VSMPO pay dearly for its brazen breach of the settlement agreement,” he said. “For as long as it takes.”
Now based in Europe, Raykhelson says prosecutors have pushed to have him blacklisted by Interpol and that $31m of Moscow property belonging to his wife has been illegally confiscated. FSB officers raided his wife’s Moscow apartment, breaking down the door and forcing those inside face-down onto the floor. Raykhelson declines to spell out what he believes that should mean for VSMPO-AVISMA and Shelkov, but he is unequivocal about how he sees it: “That is a red line they have crossed.”
Since then, Russian courts have ordered the seizure of his wife’s Moscow flat, her land outside the city, and property owned in Italy, despite her being accused of nothing. Switzerland suspended judicial cooperation with Russia in 2022, and its Federal Criminal Court has since held that the country offers no guarantee of an independent judiciary. “The real estate arrested in Moscow isn’t mine. It belongs to my wife, and she has nothing to do with this investigation, not to mention the prenup we signed in 2022, when the war started. I have zero dollars in these properties,” Raykhelson said. “Expropriation is the name of the game in Russia these days.”
“The allegation that VSMPO has the ability to control a Russian investigation and prosecution on behalf of the state is absurd,” insisted Pustilnik.
Raykhelson’s ties to Russia have been not only commercial but also philanthropic. Raykhelson founded and directed T-Fest, a music festival still running today at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, Russia’s answer to New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and donated a concert grand Steinway worth £150,000 to the gallery. For several years he also ran an annual children’s music competition in Salda, home to the VSMPO-AVISMA plant, to which he donated a second grand piano worth £20,000. “There’s been a tremendous contribution by me to the cultural scene in Russia,” he said. “And the thank you from them is now being expressed in this ludicrous, fabricated investigation. That’s really the reality of Russia. It’s pretty sad.”
Raykhelson says VSMPO-AVISMA’s western business has evaporated. Boeing, Safran and Rolls-Royce have all stopped buying. Revenue roughly halved in the first half of 2025, the company has moved to a shortened working week, and Russian ministry data show its output now flows predominantly to the naval and aerospace defense sector.
When asked about this, Pustilnik replied: “VSMPO is a global leader in sales to the aerospace sector, including to its valued Western customers. While VSMPO does not disclose the amounts of export sales by customer, VSMPO can confirm that these sales exceed hundreds of millions of US Dollars. The manufacturing cycle was never interrupted, and VSMPO’s manufacturing staff continue working full time to meet existing demand. VSMPO has been supplying titanium for civil aviation, medical and industrial uses and is an essential part of the supply chain for commercial airplanes, medical and dental tools and implants, and similar products around the world.”
Which brings us back to the scene in Tuscany at the historic Piazza del Duomo in Pietrasanta for the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The free, open-air concert, titled “Armonie di Pace” (“Harmonies of Peace”), pairs Raykhelson with Ekaterina Astashova performing her violin, for an evening billed as a meeting point of classical repertoire and contemporary sensibility.
Although Raykhelson will revel in his ability to perform again, harmony, peace, and sensibility seem a long way away in his continued fight for justice and hundreds of millions of dollars against the Russian titanium giant, VSMPO-AVISMA.
