FINANCIAL GEOPOLTICS OCTOBER 2026: A7 roundup – Anthropic IPO – Iran scam

Hello, people. It’s a bumper edition again because geopolitics just keeps on accelerating. We have insight into (yet more) Russian sanctions evasion via the A7 company, exclusive comment on AI, and news on Iran-linked crypto networks that other media missed. Meanwhile, good luck out there to all those not just trying to keep up but making the most of it. As this X account says, “there are picaresque novels everywhere for those with the eyes to see”.

THE BROAD VIEW WITH ZACH TVAROZNA

Tvarozna is an expert in international financial structures across banking, trust and corporate services providers, fintech, crypto and more. He worked at the US government as an analyst before he became an independent consultant and think tank member. He is one of the small handful of people who realised early on the value in the leak from Russian oligarch Ilan Shor’s A7 group of companies in 2025, and patiently picked through it. He has since launched an acerbic Substack which attracts readers among government officials and bankers, and is giving the same cohort presentations about how to spot dodgy behaviour in markets. We linked up with him during our coverage of this story, starting in 2025. As of October 1, A7 has been designated by US Treasury “a significant transnational criminal organization,” which vindicates our journalism and Zach’s research.

BRAG BOX

We are proud finalists in the British Journalism Awards 2026 for our A7 series, alongside giants like Reuters, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, Sky News and The Guardian.

Since then, The Financial Times, The New York Times and others of our legacy media colleagues have been on it – and Zach was there to help every time. But, he says in an exclusive interview, there is still more to learn.

He became Mr A7 by “just being the only person who’d read through the 80,000 PDF documents. 2024 to 2025 was a very lonely and challenging time to be an A7 researcher. reporter.london was among the first to publish a story that got at the core of A7’s shell companies, and to me it exposed a real gap between independent research, software providers and traditional think tanks.”

He continued: “I still think A7 is badly misunderstood across Europe, and there is so much work left on two fronts: the riskiness of correspondent banking relationships, and the historical under-regulation of capital markets. A7 is not a single company or a single payment mechanism. To understand it you have to treat it as a sprawling system with one goal, which is to reach global banks by every available means, and those two fronts are the most wide open. In the coming months I expect we will keep learning about expansion, A7 flags planted abroad to get access to those Western financial systems.”

It surprised Tvarozna as he read through the files “that not much that A7 did was actually new. The Soviet Union spent decades perfecting the art of managing liquidity abroad, and A7 simply redeployed that playbook with many employees already skilled in this art. At its core, A7 is a sales organisation that built parts of itself to be sanctions-fodder. A7 accounted for redundancy and in some jurisdictions it did not bother building anything at all. Opting to just rent payment-agents that were already there.”

A7’s claim to be “sanctions proof” is partially true, he warns. “Russia has learned from the West’s approach to sanctions. By focusing on designating single entities and single shell companies, we made it trivial for the network to spin up replacements in minutes.”

The Western system has “structural” faults which A7 exploits: “SWIFT messaging stops most banks from seeing the true origin of a payment, and the complexity of [foreign exchange] settlement meant that once A7 found one country willing to on-ramp its money, it barely had to hide it.”

The media focuses on A7’s crypto side too much, Tvarozna says. “A7 used [crypto networks] because they were available and lightly supervised. If they had not been, something else would have also worked; Shor basically said this.”

How about Shor personally? Is he iconic? “He is a bit of a villain, a bit of a financial wizard, and very much an opportunistic oligarch. He was raised inside this world [of shady money]. His father, Miron, built the family business in the post-Soviet years, in close collaboration with Russia, and Ilan effectively inherited it and turned it into a network of classic crime and grifts, each one bigger than the last. Is he the most talented financial mind the world has ever seen? Probably not. But he certainly knows how to navigate the system and where to find help.”

Any fashion commentary? “The one thing I am most certain about Shor is his adoration of comically large neckties.”

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TOP LINES

1. AI CARAMBA: The news this week was dominated by Anthropic’s IPO filing, as questions continued to swirl around the company’s path to profitability. Our (non-financial, non-binding) partners at the Geopolitical Insight and Education Foundation (GIEF) have asked IT and geopolitics expert Andre Franco to provide his view. He is doubtful, calling it a “request for public investors to fund one of the biggest gambles in corporate history.” Franco continues: “The numbers are staggering: the company plans to spend up to $750 billion on compute, with $450 billion already locked into largely noncancellable cloud contracts, against revenue of $16.3 billion in the first half of this year. Its valuation rests on a forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue by 2028, roughly four times the $47 billion run rate it reported in May. Some investors are already talking the price down to $1.5 trillion from the $2 trillion once expected, after third-quarter growth slowed to 45%. What any other company would call an outstanding quarter is just a “meh” one when the expectations are this high. The IPO’s prospectus itself warns that growth may slow further, around a quarter of sales comes from just five customers, and that the cloud providers it relies on could curtail or reprice its compute. The stakes couldn’t be higher: anyone buying in is betting that none of these risks will materialize, something which I’d call wishful thinking. The consequences of it going wrong would not only be felt by the investors but by every ordinary citizen, around the globe.” 

Another item drawing Franco’s attention was speculation earlier in the month that a Ukrainian drone attack silenced Russian bots posting disinformation online by taking Yandex data centres offline, but the evidence is less clear-cut than it appeared, he says. “Throughout my years in SEO, I’ve read enough server logs to recognise YandexBot, the Russian company’s version of Googlebot, so when a Cloudflare chart showing automated traffic from Yandex’s network falling below 1% of its recent peak went viral after Ukraine’s drone strikes of 8 to 11 October on Yandex’s data centers near Moscow, I assumed the search crawlers were down. Zelensky and much of liberal social media concluded the Kremlin’s troll farms had been switched off instead. Three weeks later, I’m not convinced the strikes achieved much on that front, and I suspect the lasting damage to Yandex might be overstated.”

Fog of war: “The strongest data for the bot theory comes from Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, which recorded an 83.6% drop in suspected bot posts on 8 October. Its own figures, though, show those accounts posting more than before within two days. Graphika found AfD-linked accounts posting just 4% below the previous week, and MAGA mentions on X rose 25% in the hours after the strike. It’s also worth remembering that the CCD sits under Ukraine’s security council and has every reason to talk up a win.”

“Yandex has held up better than the footage of burning buildings implied. According to Sergiy Petrenko, who once ran its Ukrainian business, core services were built to run across several sites at once and survive the loss of one of them. Within days most key cloud services were back after workloads moved to other data centres. The supercomputers at Sasovo ran Nvidia A100s that sanctions had already stopped Yandex upgrading, so much of what burned was ageing kit. Shares lost about 7.6%, a dent for a company hit three times in four days,” Franco added, noting: “analysts quoted by Meduza think Yandex has the margin to absorb this, and see the main risk in ongoing spending on protection and backup capacity if the strikes continue. That is a real cost for Russian cloud customers, though it can hardly be considered a strategic blow or a big win for Ukraine.”

2. BABAK IS BACK: Sanctioned Iranian financier Babak Zanjani and his crypto exchange Zedxion have been in the news again, with more companies linked with him being targeted in the UK and US for allegedly enabling the survival of the Islamist theocracy in Tehran. Calling him “legendary,” The Wall Street Journal unpicked how his companies, including Zedcex, which was registered at the same UK address as Zedxion, were using the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance. Zedxion has been inactive (on the known wallets it controlled) for at least a year, according to a lookup we did on a mainstream crypto analysis tool. However, in total it moved over $650 million in different cryptocurrencies, including regular interactions with other problematic exchanges such as Russia’s Garantex. The media coverage missed this but we can reveal here for the first time that Zedxion was mentioned in several US court cases as the conduit for millions of dollars worth of crypto, resulting from “pig butchering” fraud – with our analysis showing at least $2.5 million being transferred in two separate cases. Amusingly, in the Texas case, which ended last year, one of the named defendants alongside Zedxion was Elizabeth Newman, a person later revealed by our friends at OCCRP as fictitious. It’s not much money but we think those in power should learn that if you watch the companies doing relatively petty money laundering such as moving pig butchering scam funds early on, and stop them in time, they may not graduate later into big strategic threats to the whole Western alliance. Another issue to further complicate things: At the centre of Iran’s sanctions-busting via crypto, awkwardly, sits the cryptocurrency Tether, according to an official US investigation cited by the WSJ. Tether is itself very well plugged into the White House. Zanjani, for his part, is merely one element in what is probably the world’s most complex and experienced underground smuggling network, allowing Iran to evade global sanctions as well as the physical blockade imposed by the US, as a recent Reuters investigation showed. Cyberpunk alert: Aforementioned crypto exchange Binance, meanwhile, suffered a hack of over $6 billion allegedly at the hands of North Korea, just yesterday.

3. SERBIAN SHAKESPEARE: A student-led reformist movement won the election in Serbia last weekend, on promises of fighting corruption and organised crime, and bringing the country closer to the EU and broader West. Longstanding ruler Aleksandar Vucic conceded defeat, surprising the world with his clean-cut transfer of power as some expected bloodshed. There was jubilation on the streets of Belgrade and less so in the Kremlin, where the Vucic regime has been a close ally. But connoisseurs of Serbian politics have been sceptical about why strongman Vucic, who has had no trouble using violence in the exercise of power in the past, gave up so easily, and speculated that something critical might have happened in the few hours ahead of his concession speech to make him change his mind. The Times of London also covered this. The police, gendarmerie and loyal football hooligan groups were already deployed by Vucic at strategic locations in the capital ahead of the election results, according to local reporting, and then they were stood down and ‘the students’ handed their hard-won victory. Amid jokes that this will be the “most well-read parliament in the world” due to the number of PhDs about to take seats, darker mutterings reached us about how close Serbia came to bloodshed. “I remember watching on TV the gendarmes rolling out across Belgrade as voting was drawing to a close and thinking, ‘fuck, Vucic would rather fight a civil war than give up.’ I was in a pub filled to the rafters with Serbs and nobody could believe he’d just given up like that. Something must have happened behind the scenes in those 90 minutes,” said a veteran Balkans correspondent in London who is a friend of ours. “There’s something very Shakespearean about the whole thing […] There was a bizarre instance of manic denial after he resigned where his senior party members (acting president Brnabic included) were all celebrating and popping champagne like they’d won.” There is no question that even with some eccentrics in their midst, the students will be a breath of fresh air for Serbia for the foreseeable future, the journalist said. Vucic leaves open several strategic economic projects of international interest such as arms and lithium, where controversy has arisen due to environmental and geopolitical concerns.

4. CRYPTO CARD GAMES: Our author had a story out with the FT’s Banker on October 12 (gift link here) exposing growing money laundering and sanctions evasion risks in the US banking sector, due to a loophole known as BIN (bank identity number) sponsorship allowing valid payment cards to be issued online without proper identity checks. Here’s Zach Tvarozna again, who was also quoted in the article: “BIN-sponsored cards take the risk correspondent banking already presents and have supercharged it, making it exponentially harder to track. As neobanks and fintechs have taken on more central roles in our financial systems, so has the need for card access, and a market has grown up for effectively subletting unused card numbers. Like most of what we’ve discussed, it comes down to profit placed ahead of an actual compliance function. In my experience, many institutions and card processors have no idea where these cards end up or how they are ultimately issued or used. I suspect this will be a huge issue going forward. Your work shows it already is!” The investigation was produced with support from Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and their legendary McGraw Business Journalism Fellowship, and it was a part of the ongoing Coin Laundry project from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). On October 8 the UK sanctioned Cryptomus, a “payment gateway” that provided scalable technology to many of the crypto card payment websites.

We are at pains not to have our readers think we are against crypto, because we find it fascinating, innovative and useful in many cases. Bitcoin helped many decent, honest people build or safeguard their wealth in very unstable times, which is a good thing. And stablecoins could provide urgent respite from the debt crisis to Western governments if banks issue sovereign bonds-backed stablecoin, in full visibility of the central banks. Let the central bank audit and underwrite the stablecoins as an exchange of last resort for fiat. Let banks issue mortgages and other secured loans denominated in stablecoin. The mechanical increase in demand for national debt will bring down yields and change the debt equation for the West, allowing us to invest our way back to order, prosperity and modernity. But the spiralling criminality and hostile state activity in these markets is a critical vulnerability and must be brought to an end.

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5. KUSHNER CRUNCH: An incendiary and devastating marmalade dropper from Vanity Fair landed October 22. A financial geopolitics story with lurid corruption allegations, strong and clear denials from Jared Kushner, and high political drama ahead of the US midterm election. But being the irredeemable geeks that we are, one thing caught our eye above all: is it possible to hold an account in a foreign country’s central bank, as Kushner is accused of doing? 

Tvarozna is a sceptic: “I guess the short answer, structurally, has to be no. Central banks exist to bank governments, other banks and each other. The Bank of Israel is pretty explicit under the legal framework, account holders are the Government and specified financial entities. Foreign central banks, monetary authorities and foreign banks are admitted only with approval. Private individuals are not really meant to be eligible.”

“What strikes me most is that a dual-key government account at a central bank would be a very paper-heavy way to move a billion dollars. Every step would leave a trace, and a lot of witnesses. If someone wanted that money hidden, I have to wonder why they would choose that mechanism. If they were able to launder that much money through that method, that opens up a whole lot of interesting questions.”

6. HIT THE GAS: Another mind-blowing exclusive from the FT which got broad pickup this month, on a key gas project in Alaska where high-ranking executives have quit due to fears about secret Russian involvement, which would have violated sanctions. The implications of the story are extremely complex, leading to questions over “business deals” discussed in private by Trump White House emissaries (including the aforementioned Kushner) and Russian president Vladimir Putin during Ukraine peace talks. The same newspaper also did a very cerebral analysis on the question of whether the world is sleepwalking into World War 3, well worth reading. It would also be remiss not to share the most recent Steve Eisman (of The Big Short fame) videocast with Financial Twitter legend Doomberg, putting the WW3 talk into a very useful industrial-economic perspective. Meanwhile, in Europe, the US has been pushing an LNG policy that will have seen countries importing massive amounts of gas from the very same Alaskan project in order to diversify away from Russia – how’s that for a twist? Our friend Aura Sabadus dives deep into this aspect here.

7. HIDDEN TREASURIES: China has been buying US treasuries secretly via proxies to keep its financial sector afloat while Beijing official publicly claimed they were dumping US assets to pressure Washington over growing political and trade disagreements, according to Bloomberg. The story is partly speculative but if confirmed it will require a reassessment of the true strength of the US dollar, especially in Europe, which has not been far behind China in pushing the dedollarisation narrative.

8. NARCO STATE: More good media coverage and independent blogging about the African country that got taken over by a Dutch drug baron, who is also accused of orchestrating mass armed violence on the streets of Europe. Drug syndicates are evolving into zaibatsu-style conglomerates with supranational powers and sovereignty, which weakening Western governments are struggling to keep in check. These groups are already entering opportunistic alliances with hostile states and carrying out sabotage, terrorism and assassination on Western territory, in addition to their everyday criminal activities, which are bad enough already.

9. LEGAL VIEW: Crypto analysis firms are on edge as their work is being increasingly questioned in legal cases where people’s livelihoods and sometimes their very freedom are on the line. A recent UK High Court appeal set aside part of a previous judgment on the basis of flaws identified in the way a crypto tracing investigation was carried out, and the conclusions it presented. Something to keep an eye on, especially as rumours increase that governments and law enforcement agencies are starting to work on bringing data tools in-house under the concept of “analytical sovereignty”.

10. GREEK VESTIGES: A Greek bank, as yet unnamed, has been caught up indirectly in the latest round of US sanctions on Iran, notes the eagle-eyed expert George Voloshin, on his LinkedIn account, with potentially severe implications down the line not just for this firm but the wider sector in Europe.

Alright, that’s it. See all you lifers again at the end of November!

Special thanks once again to B.M. who patiently edited this email.

Any comments or errors? email matei@reporter.london.

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