Vyacheslav Taran: Libertex Co-Founder Killed in a Riviera Helicopter Crash

At about 2pm on Friday 25 November 2022, a Monacair helicopter flying from Lausanne in Switzerland to Monaco was minutes from landing when it flew into a bank of sea mist above the village of Eze, on the French Riviera. It hit the hillside. The pilot, a 35-year-old Frenchman, and his only passenger were killed instantly.

The passenger was Vyacheslav Taran, 53, the Russian-born co-founder and chairman of the Libertex Group, an online trading company. He had lived in Monaco for about ten years. He left his wife, Olga, the founder of the lifestyle site Hello Monaco, and three children.

Who Taran was

Taran studied at the Vladivostok State University of Economics and Service, according to Finance Magnates, and in 1997 co-founded the trading business that became the Libertex Group. Reports at his death also named him a co-founder of Forex Club, a currency-trading broker. Libertex celebrated its 25th anniversary the same month he died.

Libertex is a broker for contracts for difference, or CFDs: bets on whether the price of a currency, share, commodity or cryptocurrency will rise or fall, without the customer owning the thing itself. Its European arm is licensed by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission. Crypto was one product among many, but it is the one that headlines seized on. After the crash, outlets including Yahoo Finance and The Edge Malaysia called Taran a "crypto billionaire". He was a trading-industry veteran with a crypto offering, and no published estimate of his wealth has been found to support the billion-dollar label.

Outside the business he co-founded Change One Life, a foundation that helps children in orphanages find families. Finance Magnates and Monaco Life reported that it had helped more than 30,000 children. In its statement Libertex called him a "true visionary".

A crash in a week of deaths

Taran died two days after Tiantian Kullander, the 30-year-old co-founder of the crypto trading firm Amber Group, died in his sleep, and less than a month after Nikolai Mushegian, a crypto developer, drowned off Puerto Rico. FTX, then one of the world's largest crypto exchanges, had collapsed into bankruptcy two weeks before. Tabloids and crypto sites put the three deaths together as a pattern.

Other details fed the talk. Monacair told the news agency AFP that another passenger booked on the flight from Lausanne had "cancelled at the last minute". Some outlets also added Taran to a list of Russian businessmen who had died in unexplained ways since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the Ukrainian news agency Unian published claims, without citing sources, that he had links to Russian intelligence. None of those claims has been supported by any evidence made public.

What the investigators found

The crash was investigated by the BEA, France's air accident investigation office, the equivalent of America's National Transportation Safety Board. Its conclusions were first reported by Nice-Matin in October 2023, and the BEA published its report in November 2023.

It ruled the crash an accident. The Airbus EC130 had flown for about an hour and a half in good conditions. Near the Col d'Eze, close to Monaco, it met sea haze that suddenly cut visibility. The pilot was not qualified to fly on instruments alone, without seeing the ground, and had not been trained for what to do if he flew into cloud by mistake. He lost his visual references, then control of the aircraft. The BEA said it would have been possible to fly around the cloud.

Then came the finding that made headlines. Tests showed the pilot had taken cocaine within hours of the flight, and had recently used cannabis products and alcohol. Hair samples showed regular cocaine use in the months before. The BEA described him as a hidden user who had got through the operator's checks: Monacair said he had passed two drug tests since being hired, the last in October 2021. The BEA said the drugs may have impaired his judgement as the visibility changed. Taran tested negative for any illegal substance.

The BEA recommended more frequent urine tests for pilots to catch hidden drug users. Monacair's chief executive, Remi Bouysset, said he was "shocked and angry". The company introduced hair tests every six months for pilots, mechanics and other staff with access to its helicopters. No criminal proceedings over the crash have been reported.

What remains

The official record is the one that holds. A man who had built a trading business over 25 years died because the pilot he paid to fly him home was flying impaired, in conditions he was not trained for, a few minutes from the heliport. The speculation that followed was understandable in the autumn of FTX and of a war that had already produced a string of strange deaths among Russian businessmen. In Taran's case the evidence pointed elsewhere: to weather, training and a drug test regime that missed a regular user.