Russian oligarch brothers help hide Putin's family assets from sanctions

Seventeen media outlets worldwide have taken hold of the so-called Rottenberg Archive, comprising 30,000 emails and 12,000 documents, which explain how oligarchs Arkadiy and Boris Rottenberg are hiding their assets as well as the assets of Putin’s family from Western sanctions.

Source: Vazhnie Istorii (Important Stories) media outlet, founded by well-known investigative journalists from Russia, which gave access to this archive

Vazhnie Istorii received the archive from a source which preferred to remain anonymous for safety reasons.

The investigators have established that after the sanctions against the Rotenberg brothers were implemented in 2014, their shares in different Russian enterprises were gradually becoming the property of closed mutual investment funds managed by the Eurocorp company, the CEO of which is Maksym Viktorov. The members of the majority of these funds were the Rotenberg brothers.

At the end of 2014, Viktorov started negotiations about buying a €9 million villa at the elite Spanish resort near Valencia. The agreement was registered in such a way that the real owner was concealed: first the villa was owned by a company from Malta, then from Cyprus. Yet the leaks helped confirm that Karina Rottenberg, the wife of Boris Rottenberg, is the real owner. Moreover, a monogram with the initials KRB can be seen in the photos of the house, which can also be found in the photos of Karina Rottenberg on Instagram.

Thus with the help of a leak the investigators were able to find a few more assets of Rottenbergs: a €10.8 million villa in Austria, two apartments in Riga worth €200,000, a $42 million Bombardier plane, a €4.25 million villa in France, an apartment in Monaco, a horse club and a number of houses in France worth €15.8 million.

Arkadiy Rottenberg registered a part of his real estate in Russia and Monaco with the help of closed mutual funds under the name of his unofficial wife, Maria Borodunova. Earlier there was no information about her and their two children.

In addition to this, the Rottenberg Archives investigation discovered that Putin’s family owns a chalet at the Kitzbühel ski resort worth €10.8 million. According to the documents, the house belongs to a Wayblue Investments Cyprus company, which received a big loan from one of the companies of Arkadiy Rottenberg. Local residents told the journalists that they saw Maria Vorontsova, Putin’s elder daughter, and her former common-law husband Jorrit Faassen at the terrain.

Background: Gennadiy Timchenko and Arkadiy Rottenberg, Russian oligarchs close to Putin, are trying to evade the sanctions implemented against them by hiding their assets from the European authorities – some EU officials assist them in this.

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