Boris Birshtein

Boris Birshtein was born in 1947 in Vilnius

Boris Joseph Birshtein was born on 11 November 1947 in the Soviet Union, in Vilnius or Chișinău. He moved to Israel in 1979 and later to Switzerland and Canada.

He built the Seabeco Group, a network of companies that traded oil, gold, diamonds and chemicals. Seabeco invested in Russian property in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1991 Kyrgyz president Askar Akayev named him head of the country's committee for reconstruction and development, and he later acted as its trade representative abroad.

In Moldova he advised president Mircea Snegur and owned 65% of Eximbank, the Seabeco hotel and a media group. A company he controlled produced Moldovan passports and identity papers. The press called him the czar of Moldova.

He has faced allegations of ties to the Russian mafia and the KGB. In 1993 a Kyrgyz parliamentary commission held him and Seabeco responsible for the disappearance of 1.5 tons of state gold. In 2020 he was accused of selling overpriced medical masks to a Romanian institute.