Sergey Mendeleev says U.S. sanctions tying him to A7 are “like sanctioning Elon Musk for PayPal transfers”

U.S. authorities described A7 as a network used by Iran to evade sanctions and named Sergey Mendeleev repeatedly in the same context, alongside his projects Indefibank and Exved, the exchange Garantex, and A7’s Russian legal entity head Ilan Shor. Mendeleev says the regulatory logic is “zero percent,” but for PSPs the practical issue is simpler: once a structure is framed as sanctions-evasion infrastructure, the surrounding payments stack tends to get dragged into the blast radius.

1. In the U.S. proposal to ban transfers of any funds “in connection with operations involving A7 network subagents,” Mendeleev says the authorities have misread his role. He says he has never been involved with the people in A7, apart from appearing at the same conferences and arguing with their representatives.
2. Mendeleev says he was once a founder of Garantex, but left the exchange in 2020. He also says the ruble stablecoin A7A5 was later listed on Garantex, which he uses to argue that past association does not equal current control.
3. He dismisses the link between him and A7 as comparable to “sanctioning Elon Musk for PayPal transfers,” noting that Musk created an electronic wallet and later sold his stake. In the same vein, he rejects any suggestion that he financed Iranian proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
4. On Indefibank and Exved, Mendeleev says Indefibank “existed only in my head and never in reality,” while Exved was a centralized platform his team tried to develop in mid-2020 and later shut down. He also says Exved and A7 are direct competitors, not parts of the same structure.
5. He says the latest U.S. action may simply increase the bounty on his head, adding that there is already a $1 million reward from the U.S. State Department for information on each top manager of Garantex. He also says he has not been abroad since September 2021, and that an Interpol red notice based on a French warrant is still outstanding.

For high-risk operators, the useful takeaway is not the exchange of insults. It is that U.S. sanctions language around A7 explicitly reaches beyond one entity and into named projects, counterparties, and associated infrastructure — the kind of drafting that can trigger de-risking, frozen settlement paths, and a long day of explaining your ownership tree to every PSP in sight.