The former deputy chief of Luxembourg’s national intelligence agency embroiled in a high-profile money laundering scandal is reported to have absconded from house arrest in France last month.
Authorities confirmed that Frank Schneider had gone missing from his home in Audun-le-Tiche near the Luxembourg border since mid-May in a bid to evade extradition to the United States for his role in a $4 billion cryptocurrency scam led by the infamous Bulgarian fraudster Ruja Ignatova.
Dubbed the so-called “cryptoqueen,” Ignatova mysteriously disappeared in 2017 after her company OneCoin was rumbled as an elaborate Ponzi scheme designed to lure in unsuspecting investors through the promise of a non-existent cryptocurrency.
Schneider’s disappearance is just the latest twist in an evolving espionage saga that has exposed a dark underworld beneath the crypto-world amid speculation that former OneCoin affiliates are being killed off.
Schneider, who served as Luxembourg’s deputy spy chief until 2008, worked as an advisor to Ignatova through his private-sector firm Sandstone. He was arrested in April 2021 for fraud by the French police with the French Prime Minister personally signing off on his deportation order to the United States in February.
American prosecutors say the 53-year-old spy had provided Ignatova and the OneCoin firm with confidential police intelligence he obtained through his connections that enabled her to prolong the pyramid scheme.
Schneider, who is facing up to 40 years in prison, had previously maintained his innocence saying that he would not be able to get a fair trial in America and did not have sufficient funds to defend himself adequately.
His escape comes after OneCoin’s former legal advisor Irina Dilkinska was deported to the United States from Bulgaria in March to face similar fraud charges amid rumours that the company’s CEO Ruja Ignatova had been murdered.
The speculation came after a Bulgarian mobster linked to the OneCoin scam was gunned down along with his wife and two others in Cape Town last month.
According to South African authorities, police recovered documents at the scene of the crime linking the deceased Bulgarian mobster to an assassination plot on Ignatova whose whereabouts have been unknown since she disappeared after boarding a Ryanair flight to Greece in October 2017.
Prior to the OneCoin affair, Schneider was implicated in wiretapping during a 2013 espionage scandal that brought down the then-government of Jean-Claude Juncker over allegations that members of the Luxembourg intelligence services were engaged in illegal surveillance of officials. Juncker’s downfall precipitated his taking the top job in the European Commission in 2014.
Before his escape, Schneider had been involved in a libel suit with the Brussels-based EUobserver publication over allegations that he hired a PR firm to tie the murder of Maltese journalist Caruana Galizia to Russia. Galizia, an anti-corruption journalist specialised in exposing links between the Maltests establishment and organised crime, was killed by a car bomb in 2017. Her murder has been linked to political collusion by powerful elements in the Maltese state.
