K. Sokolov Archive

Tag: Vahe Sarkissian

  • Sokolov’s Shadow: The Register That Pulls All TBOL Members Into the Light

    October 01, 2026

    We began investigating Bank of London’s business and corporate structure a few weeks ago. Our starting point was the bank’s connection to Konstantin Sokolov, traced through his affiliated Swiss financiers — Alfred Moeckli and Ariel Sergio Davidoff — and through the Q2 2026 corporate resolution signed by TBOL members, including Sokolov himself and his mother.

    TBOL Holdings Jersey Limited, registration number 151277 was identified as the sole upper holding company — the entity whose board members are the ultimate decision-makers for the entire TBOL group, including the operating bank.

    At first, the shareholder structure of the Jersey-registered company was unavailable to us. Jersey — for those unfamiliar — is a Crown Dependency in the Channel Islands, not part of the United Kingdom, with its own company law and its own registry. We did not know where to look, or whether the information was accessible at all. Then our lawyers read the local legislation. And here is what they found – obtaining a shareholder register from a Jersey-registered company is remarkably easy.

    Under Article 45(1) of the Companies (Jersey) Law 1991, the register of members must be open to inspection by any person during business hours, on payment of a fee not exceeding the published maximum.

    45      Inspection of register

    (1)     The register of members shall during business hours be open to the inspection of a member of the company without charge, and of any other person on payment of such sum (if any), not exceeding the published maximum, as the company may require.

    (2)     A person may –

    (a)     in the case of any company, on payment of such sum (if any), not exceeding the published maximum, as the company may require; and

    (b)     in the case of a public company, on submission to the company of a declaration under Article 46,

    require a copy of the register and the company shall, within 10 days after the receipt of the payment and (in the case of a public company) the declaration, cause the copy so required to be available at the place where the register is kept, for collection by that person during business hours.

    (3)     If inspection under this Article is refused, or if a copy so required is not made available within the proper period, the company is guilty of an offence.

    (4)     In the case of refusal or default, the court may by order compel an immediate inspection of the register, or direct that the copies required be made available to the person requiring them.

    Our lawyer sent a request to registry@jerseyfsc.org on TBOL Holdings Jersey Limited register of members and received a short reply confirming that the register is kept at the company’s registered office and is available upon request. They asked whether it could be provided electronically. It could. Within a few hours, the PDF of TBOL Holdings Jersey Limited register of members as of June 18, 2026 was in our inbox (download). Nor, to our surprise, was there any fee to pay.  Let’s see it.

    Who is The Big Man?

    We have no idea why Konstantin Sokolov decided to become the largest individual shareholder in a UK bank — but he did.

    It is also unclear why the register lists personal residential addresses for both Sokolov and his mother, rather than a corporate or nominee address, as is customary for shareholders of this size — or any of the US business addresses associated with his companies, such as IJS Investments or Dynamic Frontier. Sokolov’s registered address is residential, on Malta; his mother’s is a residential address in Gibraltar. We are not publishing the specific addresses here, but the full register — which we obtained lawfully under Article 45 of the Companies (Jersey) Law 1991 — is attached for anyone who wants to verify this themselves.

    Sokolov holds 399,122,220 ordinary shares in TBOL Holdings Jersey Limited — 8.28% of the company. His mother, Bronislava Gorelik, owns 391,263,039 shares — 8.12%. Individually, both sit just below the 10% threshold at which the PRA’s controller regime kicks in under Part XII of FSMA 2000. Together they account for 16.4%.

    For context on why a residential address matters here: this is the same Konstantin Sokolov the Guardian identified in July 2026 as founder and chairman of the U.S. State Department’s $201 million TRIPP+ Enterprise Fund — a man the paper’s sources questioned specifically over “the ability to personally benefit from investment decisions.” A quasi-governmental appointee of this profile using a home address on a bank’s shareholder register, instead of the corporate infrastructure he otherwise operates through, is the kind of detail that invites the question, not answers it.

    We would like to remind that Konstantin has a highly promising investment project — Pelagos Data Centres in Gibraltar — which we have written about many times. Just type PELAGOS in the search bar of our blog or click 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

    Add the two Cyprus companies the document itself flags as connected to Sokolov — ANALIKA LIMITED (9.41%) and ELISCANOUS LIMITED (4.81%) — and the bloc reaches 30.62%. The Sokolov link to ANALIKA and ELISCANOUS is our assessment (see our previous article), not the filing’s. The record shows names and shares — not ownership chains.

    What the filing does confirm independently: of the 72.29% (2/3+) of shares that voted in favour of the 2Q 2026 capital resolution, the voting weight is concentrated in three shareholder groups — assuming the “probable connection” holds:

    1. The Unattributed Group (first 3 members): Soata Limited + Buscelo Limited + PSInvest Capital Ltd — 28.63%
    2. Sokolov’s Group (our opinion): Sokolov + Gorelik + Analika + Eliscanous — 30.62%
    3. Tluszcz’s Group: Mangrove VI Investments Sarl + Mangrove V Investments Sarl — 12.99%

    Anatomy of the Members: 55 Shareholders, Eight Countries, One Extraordinary Year

    TBOL Holdings Jersey Limited has 55 shareholders. None of them holds 10% or more. The largest shareholder is Soata Limited with 9.635%. This keeps each holder below the 10% threshold at which the PRA’s controller regime would apply.

    By geography, the ownership of Britain’s newest clearing bank looks nothing like Britain.

    JurisdictionHoldersShare of capital
    Cyprus542.9%
    United States3119.7%
    Luxembourg617.0%
    Malta216.4%
    Cayman Islands12.5%
    Jersey11.3%
    Bermuda10.3%
    United Kingdom30.01%

    Five Cyprus-registered companies alone hold  42.9% shares of Bank of London that is more than every American venture fund that financed its launch, combined.  

    By type of holder, the register splits into 28 individuals, 14 companies, 10 funds, 3 charitable trusts/foundations.

    By timing, the current cap table is far younger than the bank. Nearly 60% of it traces to just two quarters: Q2 and Q3 2025. That’s not when Bank of London launched (2021), and not when the April 2026 resolution was passed — it’s the window in which most of today’s ownership was quietly assembled, more than half a year before the public first saw any of these names.

    The Participants We Flagged

    Shaun Woodward — holds 8,572 shares (0.0000018%). A real, well-known former politician. Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (2007–2010), former Labour MP, and before that a Conservative MP who defected to Labour in 1999. He left the Conservative Party partly over its stance on LGBT rights.

    Anthony Watson still holds 490,028 shares — 0.0001% of the company he founded. Five funding rounds and several ownership restructurings later, the man whose name is on the bank’s early press coverage owns a rounding error.

    Victoria Raffé — holds 276 shares (0.00000006%). Former Director of Authorisations at the FCA, 20 years at the regulator (FCA/FSA), member of the Executive Committee, Chair of the Regulatory Transactions Committee, left in April 2015. She also served as a Director of The Bank of London Group Limited from November 2021 to October 2023 — before the change of control. After that — non-executive director at Starling Bank (a direct competitor of Bank of London!) and Reliance Bank.

    Armen Grigoryan — holds 110 shares (0.00000002%). Secretary of the Security Council of Armenia from 2018 to August 2026, also Acting Foreign Minister in July–August 2021. Senior Advisor at PMCG, working on TRIPP. And that last point is the one that matters most. Konstantin Sokolov is the president of the TRIPP+ Enterprise Fund — a $201 million US State Department-backed vehicle for infrastructure projects in the South Caucasus. Grigoryan, a former Armenian security chief, now advises on TRIPP. This is not a “possible connection.” It is a direct intersection — the same project, the same fund, the same network.

    Shaunt Sarkissian holds 4,888 shares (0.0000010%). Founder of Cortex MCP, later Head of Payments at Uphold and Chief Markets Officer at Bank of London. His father, Vahe Sarkissian, holds 8,677 shares (0.0000018%). Vahe is a Silicon Valley semiconductor veteran and former CEO and Chairman of FEI Company. Both are American entrepreneurs of Armenian heritage.  In 2018, Uphold acquired Cortex MCP — explicitly including its patent portfolio. Today, part of that technology sits inside the Bank of London corporate structure. We’ll come back to the patents later — and what they reveal about Bank of London’s technology — in a separate piece.

    If you have found anyone else worth a second look, tell us. We will happily add them to the list.

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