Putin's inner circle of wealth - open Pandora's Box
Pandora papers reveal hidden riches of Putin’s inner circle
Alleged lover and others linked to Putin have all come into extreme wealth. But is the money really theirs?
Luke Harding in Monaco
Sun 3 Oct 2021 17.30 BST
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In September 2003, a secret transaction took place. The location was Monaco, a tax haven associated with the international rich. Specifically, an exclusive block just beneath its lavish casino. An apartment changed hands. A local notary signed the deal. Purchase price: €3.6m (£3.1m). For this, the buyer got a luxury fourth-floor flat, two parking spaces, a storeroom, and the use of a pool in the Monte Carlo Star complex.
From the balcony the new owner could gaze down on Monaco’s sparkling marina, stuffed during the summer with floating superyachts. Security ensured residents were undisturbed by tourists milling around a mini-garden built on the complex’s roof. There were sounds, too, pleasant ones – the clatter of helicopters ferrying new arrivals from Nice airport, and the screeching of swifts.
The identity of the flat’s buyer was a mystery. The official “purchaser” was an offshore company listed in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Brockville Development Ltd. Brockville was in turn owned by two further Panama-registered entities – Sefton Securities and, later, Radnor Investments SA. To outsiders, the arrangements looked a little like a Russian doll, with the ultimate beneficiary nestled under layers.
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Thanks to documents in the Pandora papers, the Guardian can identify the flat’s buyer – a woman, 28 years old in 2003, and at the time unknown. Name: Svetlana Krivonogikh. In the space of a few years, around the turn of the millennium, Krivonogikh became extremely wealthy. She acquired a flat in a prestigious compound in her home city of St Petersburg, properties in Moscow, a yacht, and other assets, worth an estimated $100m.
How to explain her fairytale rise? According to media reports, Krivonogikh’s background is modest. She grew up in a communal apartment, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with five families.
Krivonogikh was a business student and worked as a cleaner in a store. Then, in the late 1990s, she appears to have acquired a benefactor: Vladimir Putin.
In 2020, the investigative website Proekt – one of Russia’s few remaining independent media outlets – claimed Krivonogikh formed a friendship with Putin when he was St Petersburg’s deputy mayor. She became Putin’s lover, it alleged.
Regardless of the exact nature of their relationship, they seem to have been close. The scant public evidence indicates they travelled together on the same planes, for example, as Putin climbed towards power. In 1998, he became the FSB spy agency chief, then prime minister, and in 2000, president as Boris Yeltsin’s successor.
Three years later, in March 2003, Krivonogikh gave birth to a daughter, Elizaveta, or Luiza. Proekt has claimed Putin is Luiza’s father.
The Kremlin has not commented. Putin does not discuss his private life. He and his wife, Lyudmila – who have two daughters, Masha and Katerina – divorced in 2013.
After the Proekt scoop was published Luiza took part in social media chat forums. Her Instagram features images of parties, friends from influential families, and trips on private jets. Luiza has always dodged questions about Putin. She and her mother did not respond to questions from the Guardian.
Political figures are entitled to a private life. But the Krivonogikh story is not merely about an alleged romance that fizzled out some time ago. Rather it is about money, and how, according to the Pandora papers, some of Putin’s inner circle used Monaco as a discreet hub for their financial affairs. There is geopolitics, too. Prince Albert, Monaco’s ruler, has good relations with Putin.
Over the past two decades, Russian influence in Monaco has grown. “It has become Moscow-on-Sea. The mentality is to show off,” said Dominique Anastasis, a local lawyer. Foreigners including rich Russians were attracted by the warm climate and the lack of tax, he said. “Nobody asks where your money comes from. There’s no culture of checking. You don’t make a tax declaration.”
The secret flat transaction is also a tale of modern Russia: how a tightly knit group of ambitious KGB officers turned to a tax haven to help enrich themselves – spies who came in from the cold, in John le Carré’s phrase.
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Accounting for discretion
Walk up past the casino and the five-star Hôtel de Paris, with its Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, and you reach Rue de Lilas. At numbers four to six are the offices of Moores Rowland. A professional accountancy and tax firm, it is connected to a network of law companies and offshore service providers around the world. There is little to be seen from outside other than a pleasant roof garden.
The firm has a British managing director, Eamonn McGregor. Documents show it was McGregor who set up Brockville Development Ltd, Krivonogikh’s BVI company.
It is unclear how he became the accountant. His biography offers few clues. The son of a police constable, McGregor was born in 1950 in the seaside town of Southport, Merseyside. He trained in Liverpool, working for Littlewoods Mail Order Stores, and joined Moores Rowland in 1978. An expert on tax policy, he speaks French and Italian. In 1998, Prince Rainier, the then monarch, made McGregor a knight and Chevalier in the order of St Charles.
The Pandora papers revealMcGregor’s wealthy Monaco clients. They include Gennady Timchenko, a one-time Soviet bureaucrat. Forbes estimates Timchenko’s fortune at $22bn (£16.3bn). McGregor has looked after his family and business assets for at least 20 years. Among them are jets and a 40-metre pleasure yacht, the M/S Lena, named after Timchenko’s wife.
Timchenko and Putin have been friends since at least the early 1990s when the former was a St Petersburg oil trader and the latter a rising politician. In 1991, Putin – then head of the city’s foreign relations committee – gave Timchenko an oil export licence.
Timchenko went on to co-found Gunvor, a Swiss-based trading house that exports Russian oil, some billions of dollars-worth. The question of who exactly benefits from Gunvor is contested. In 2007, the Moscow political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky alleged Putin was a beneficiary of the company’s activities – in effect a sleeping co-owner – something Gunvor says is “ridiculous”. It denies he has – or ever had – an interest. Putin has said Timchenko’s rise “was absolutely without my participation”. In 2014, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Timchenko, together with other members of the “Russian leadership’s inner circle”. All acted on behalf of Putin, it alleged, who was described as a “senior Russian government official”. The US treasury department said: “Timchenko’s activities in the energy sector have been directly linked to Putin. Putin has investments in Gunvor and may have access to Gunvor funds.”
Moores Rowland says it cannot discuss its clients because of a “strict duty of confidence”. It says that at all times it complies with “all applicable laws and regulations”. And that customers are taken on – or “onboarded” – following “rigorous” checks. Moores Rowland is in contact with regulators in Monaco and beyond and follows guidance and advice whenever necessary, it adds. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing and there is nothing illegal or improper about setting up offshore companies.
But the Pandora papers do show how the firm assists well-off individuals, some of them subject to US sanctions, to hide their beneficial ownership. There are also questions remaining around exactly what due diligence it carries out on the sources of clients’ wealth. And whether the regulatory regimes where it operates are fit for purpose. Its glossy brochure says “maintaining confidentiality and minimising tax burdens” is key to the service it provides.
The company’s methods were certainly ingenious.
Normally a customer would buy a personalised offshore firm. From 2002, however, Moores Rowland started using an innovative new system. It employed a small group of in-house offshore companies, fronted by nominee directors. These were used to maintain the assets of different clients.
Much more in the actual article.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/03/pandora-papers-reveal-hidden-wealth-vladimir-putin-inner-circle
Luckily Putin is a man of the people with nothing to hide
