Ukrainian man's indictment for bilking billionaire out of $450 million runs through Chicago

A man accused of stealing $450 million from a Mexican billionaire while posing as an associate of the wealthy Astor family was being held in Chicago’s federal jail after being indicted in New York, the Sun-Times has learned.

A U.S. Marshals Service website shows Vladimir Sklarov, 63, is being held in the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago.

Sklarov was named in a federal court filing Monday in a Chicago removal proceeding that’s connected to the federal fraud case filed under seal in New York.

Removal proceedings typically involve asking a court to transfer someone from a place where they were arrested to the jurisdiction where they've been charged.

In the court filing Monday, an FBI agent said he spoke on the phone with a U.S. magistrate judge in Chicago about a removal case involving Vladimir Sklarov, but the document doesn’t provide any information about whether Sklarov was arrested or where.

According to an attached sealed indictment, Sklarov was charged last Thursday with defrauding “Victim A” of more than $450 million through a stock-backed loan scheme from 2021 to 2024. Last summer, The Wall Street Journal reported that the victim of the alleged fraud scheme was Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego.

Sklarlov had posed as Gregory Mitchell, the operator of Astor Asset Group, according to the indictment.

According to the indictment, he falsely said the company was built on the foundation of the wealth of New York businessman John Jacob Astor IV, one of the richest men in the country at the turn of the 20th century, who died in the sinking of Titanic in 1912.

Sklarov, the Wall Street Journal reported, is a “Ukrainian-born American and convicted fraudster” who “did prison time for an $18 million Medicare fraud and later built a real-estate empire across the Midwest that collapsed in a wave of litigation.”

He came to the U.S. as a child and lived in a high rise on Chicago’s North Side, The Journal reported.

“I feel like an absolute idiot,” the Journal quoted Pliego as saying in an interview last year. “How could I fall for this?”

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago couldn’t be reached for comment.