Before he was accused of fleecing a Mexican billionaire of more than $450 million, Vladimir Sklarov lived in the north suburbs of Chicago and was previously convicted of fraud.
Sklarov was arrested Saturday and is being held in the federal lockup in Downtown Chicago on charges he defrauded Mexican corporate magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego.
A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday to determine whether Sklarov will be transferred to New York, where an indictment against him was filed.
Back in 1998, when he was living in Illinois, Sklarov and two others were convicted in a federal court in Pittsburgh for defrauding Medicare of $18 million.
Prosecutors said he plotted with men from Colorado and northwest suburban Grayslake to bill the federal insurance program for surgical dressings and a skin cleaner the government didn’t cover.
Sklarov, whom prosecutors called the ringleader, got a one-year prison sentence and was ordered to pay $14 million in restitution.
Sklarov came to Chicago as a child when his family moved here from Ukraine, according to news reports. He reportedly lived on the North Side.
In 2014, Sklarov bought a 7,000-square-foot brick home in Lake Forest, but he stopped making payments and First Bank of Highland Park sued him, according to public records.
Sklarov fought foreclosure proceedings on the property. But in 2019, an Illinois appeals court sided with the bank, noting that Sklarov was living in Europe and not in his Lake Forest home, now estimated to be worth $2.2 million. The court awarded the home to the bank.
Over the years, Sklarov was involved in a series of failed real estate deals, according to a story last year in The Wall Street Journal.
Then in 2021, Salinas, the Mexican tycoon, was allegedly duped by Sklarov in a mega-deal.
An adviser pointed Salinas to a man who called himself Gregory Mitchell, who said he was connected to a company tied to the fabulously wealthy Astor family.
The Astors’ patriarch, fur trader John Jacob Astor, was the richest man in the country when he died in New York in 1848. And his great-grandson, John Jacob Astor IV, was also considered one of America’s wealthiest men when he died in the sinking of the
Titanic in 1912.
Mitchell offered to lend $115 million to Salinas, who wanted the money to increase his cryptocurrency holdings. As collateral, Salinas put up $400 million in stock in Grupo Elektra, a financial and retail conglomerate founded by his father in 1950, court records show.
But prosecutors said Mitchell — who was actually Sklarov — illegally took control of Salinas’ stock. In an indictment unsealed Monday, the government said Salinas suffered a loss of more than $450 million.
Last year, The Wall Street Journal quoted Salinas in an interview as saying he felt like an “idiot” for entering that deal with Sklarov.
An attorney representing Sklarov in Chicago didn’t return a request for comment Tuesday.
Salinas’ company released a statement saying: “We welcome the recent action taken by U.S. authorities to bring an international criminal to justice. We have full confidence in and respect for the U.S. criminal justice process and will remain fully available to cooperate with the Department of Justice as required.”