“We warn the public once again that the activities of this notorious person and his assistants may pose a real threat to the safety of money of those people who succumbed to their temptations. Financial pyramids do not create any value hence the end of all of them is the same – huge losses for people lured by miraculous profit,” the Bank of Lithuania governor, Vitas Vasiliauskas, said in a press release.
According to the press release, the central bank has not issued a license to any company that would have the letters MMM in its name or would be linked with Mavrodi. Therefore, the bank asked the Prosecutor General’s Office to open a pre-trial investigation into dealing in illegal activities.
The central bank pointed out that the system MMM-2011, which had clear characteristics of a financial pyramid, violated Lithuania’s legislation by offering huge interest for retail deposits. Under Lithuania’s legislation, only banks and other credit institutions have the exclusive right to accept deposits from non-professional market players.
MMM-2011 offers 20-50 percent monthly interest on deposits in euros on its website in the Lithuanian language.
According to media reports, in January 2011 Mavrodi made an announcement about a new financial pyramid project MMM-2011 in Russia. Back in 1988, he founded the MMM Ponzi scheme, which collapsed in the beginning of the nineties. As a result, millions of people lost some 10 billion US dollars.
