Inside a gallery in Ulaanbaatar, there is little indication that Mongolia is confronting one of its worst fuel crises on record. While ordinary Mongolians contend with inflation, rationing and hours-long queues, the Lkham Gallery remains a gathering place for the country’s wealthy and politically connected.

Natsagsuren Mangalam opened Lkham in 2022, billing it as Mongolia’s first international contemporary art space. In the four years since, a former president has attended its launch, a culture minister has visited its exhibition in Paris and the Business Council of Mongolia has admitted it as a member. Mangalam, meanwhile, has won praise across the art world.

Now based in Zurich, Mangalam presents herself as a devotee of art, opera and poetry. Her gallery’s website describes a career spanning investment funds and commodity markets. Online, she cultivates the image of a globe-trotting patron of culture who is pursuing her fifth master’s degree after spending much of the past decade in the orbit of Mongolia’s political elite.

Far less visible is her connection to Jononbayar Erdenesuren, the man at the center of the $1.1 billion Lex Oil fraud scheme. Trafigura, once a leading fuel importer in Mongolia and the reported victim of the scheme, subsequently stopped entering new business in the country.

Mangalam has been reported to be Jononbayar’s former wife and to have received money linked to his network. Just weeks after Lkham opened—and while the fuel-import fraud was underway—Jononbayar transferred his shares in the Singapore company Cocoon Capital Partners directly to her.

The transfer did not appear to end their association. The two were photographed together at a gallery exhibition in 2023. Also present was David Edwards, chief executive of Alpha Aurora Aviation, a helicopter company owned by Jononbayar’s family and connected to the broader corruption scandal that helped bring down former Prime Minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene. As recently as March 2026, Mangalam was posting older photographs of herself with Jononbayar.

As Jononbayar’s relationships with politicians and state institutions expanded, Lkham developed connections of its own. Mongolia’s first president, the late Punsalmaagiin Ochirbat, attended the gallery’s opening. A year later, Lkham staged its first exhibition abroad with support from the International Art Development Association.

That exhibition was part of President Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh’s state visit to France, which included a three-part cultural program at the Palace of Versailles, the Nantes History Museum and Lkham’s Paris pop-up. Mangalam attended the Versailles event, sitting in the Royal Opera alongside the president, the first lady and France’s foreign minister.

Lkham’s business-development lead, Yosef Sharon, is not a member of Mongolia’s establishment. The Israeli American’s career across Russia, China and Greece instead connects Mangalam to the controversial world of investor-residency programs commonly known as golden visas.

Yosef Jason Gil Sharon, known as “Yosi,” completed his undergraduate studies in North Carolina before moving to Russia, where he earned a master’s degree from the Russian Presidential Academy, an institution known for training the country’s civil servants.

In Russia, Sharon initially worked in real estate before moving into food wholesaling at PNY Trade. During the same period, Jononbayar’s family was exporting meat to Iran through its own food wholesaler, Erdenetmak Market. The parallel alone does not establish a business relationship, but it forms part of a wider web of overlapping interests.

Sharon and Mangalam had worked together for at least two years before opening Lkham. In October 2020, they appeared on a conference call under the names “Natsagaa FG” and “Yosi FG.” The initials referred to Faimon and Goldfinch, a company Mangalam had incorporated ten weeks earlier. Also on the call were Mary Tsiganou, chief executive of Golden Visa Greece, and Michael Vidalis, who likewise works in Greek investment-migration schemes.

Sharon already had ties to the industry. In 2019, he and his business partner, Nemanja “Nikita” Nikitović, acquired an interest in Cyprus-based PSIN Advisors. The company had been incorporated earlier that year by Emily Yiolitis, a lawyer known for her work involving golden-passport programs. Yiolitis left PSIN in 2020 to become Cyprus’s justice minister, a post she held for about a year before resigning amid public controversy. Sharon and Nikitović later used PSIN to acquire the Moscow food wholesaler PNY in 2020.

Sharon’s business connections to Mangalam continued. In 2021, he incorporated the British company DTY Herbal with two other people. One of them, Terrance Ward, owns shares in another British entity, Network Platform Technologies, operator of the messaging service Qwil. Mangalam acquired a stake in that company in 2023.

Sharon has also appeared within Jononbayar’s circle. In 2025, he was photographed in Mongolia with Edwards in front of an Alpha Aurora Aviation helicopter.

The network reaches Dubai as well. Sharon’s LinkedIn profile identifies him as a trader at Rigel Core, or Rigel Resources, a Dubai oil-and-gas brokerage established by Nikitović, his partner at PSIN. Nikitović also owns Core Values, another crude-oil trading company.

Both companies operate from desks on the same floor as APEXPP Commodities, also known as Apex Core (DMCC-815842). That crude-oil trading entity has been linked to Jononbayar’s Lex Oil scheme through its former chief executive, Batdavaa Banzragch. The proximity does not by itself prove coordination, but it adds another point of contact within an already closely connected commercial network.

Like Mangalam, Sharon keeps these interests largely separate from the lifestyle he presents online. His public image centers on hospitality ventures on the Greek island of Ios, where he co-owns the hip-hop venue Coo Bar Ios and the speakeasy The French Quarter, which he also manages.

As Mangalam and Sharon expanded their international interests, Lkham’s reach grew with them. In October 2025, Museum Rietberg—a public institution owned by the City of Zurich whose collection has faced scrutiny over provenance—partnered with Lkham for a major exhibition of Mongolian art. For the historical works, the museum enlisted the Chinggis Khaan National Museum and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. For the contemporary portion, it turned to Lkham and named Mangalam a partner and guest curator. Then-Prime Minister Gombojavyn Zandanshatar visited the exhibition in January 2026 while traveling to Davos.

Other partnerships followed. In 2024, Lkham received a stand at the Paris art fair AsiaNOW. That year, the Business Council of Mongolia, of which the gallery is now a member, held its first event at Lkham. Earlier this month, a French-Mongolian calligraphy exhibition backed by the Institut français and the Alliance Française opened at the gallery in Ulaanbaatar.

Mangalam has been profiled in Mongolian and international media as a pioneering woman in the country’s art world. Her private holdings have expanded alongside that reputation. After acquiring Jononbayar’s shares in Cocoon Capital, she continued buying stakes in overseas companies. In January 2023, she invested in the Maltese company Impact Fooding XXVIII, a parent company of the Heura Foods brand. A few weeks later, she acquired her shares in Network Platform Technologies. In Mongolia, she retains ownership of Faimon and Goldfinch, where her brother, Batmandah Mangalam, a recent London Business School graduate, now works.

For ordinary Mongolians, the picture could hardly be more different: rising prices, fuel rationing and hours spent waiting in line. Lkham, now firmly embedded in Mongolia’s establishment, has never appeared more successful. Questions about the origins and movement of money around its founder have not prevented the gallery from securing the imprimatur of a Zurich museum, French cultural institutions and senior Mongolian officials. In the rarefied world of international art, proximity to scandal has proved no barrier to prestige.