US catches Kremlin insider who may have secrets of 2016 hack

Acting US Attorney Nathaniel Mendell speaks to reporters after Klyushin was extradited from Switzerland to the US, at the federal courthouse in Boston, Massachusetts, US. — Reuters

In the days before Christmas, US officials in Boston unveiled insider trading charges against a Russian tech tycoon they had been pursuing for months. They accused Vladislav Klyushin, who’d been extradited from Switzerland on Dec 18, of illegally making tens of millions of dollars trading on hacked corporate-earnings information.

Yet as authorities laid out their securities fraud case, a striking portrait of the detainee emerged: Klyushin was not only an accused insider trader, but a Kremlin insider. He ran an information technology company that works with the Russian government’s top echelons. Just 18 months earlier, Klyushin received a medal of honor from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The US had, in its custody, the highest-level Kremlin insider handed to US law enforcement in recent memory.