A Russian criminal organization, made up of senior officials from the Justice Administration, businessmen and police, linked to Vladimir Putinused an iReal estate agency in Playa de Las Américas, in Arona, to launder millions of dollars looted from the US investment fund Hermitage. In the south of Tenerife they acquired luxury properties – large villas, mansions and ostentatious apartments. An investigation by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit allowed the owner of the business, Natalia Kutireva, to be arrested last month, who apparently acted as an intermediary.
Kutireva, a 49-year-old Russian citizen, is accused of money laundering and belonging to a criminal organization. The agents consider that through Karina Properties SL it made numerous bank accounts available to the criminal network to facilitate transactions, according to El Confidencial.
The so-called Magnitsky case is coordinated in Spain by the Central Investigating Court number 2 of the National Court, which is trying to determine how the Russian network got here and what are the ways used to launder the money that was seized from the Hermitage fund.
From what is known so far, in In 2006, the Kremlin forced Hermitage to pay $230 million to the Treasury for alleged outstanding debts. The money was to have been paid back the following year, but it never came. Instead, he ended up being diverted into a network of companies in the name of oligarch Dmitri Klyuev, a banker friend of President Vladimir Putin.
Kutireva is already on provisional release and in charge of her business. Yesterday, she denied the accusations and the information disclosed and assured that she has put the matter in the hands of her lawyers.
However, agents from the Anti-Corruption Group of the European Center against Economic and Financial Crime (Efecc) of Europol traveled to Tenerife for his arrest. as support to the Spanish agents. In Costa Adeje and Las Américas, four properties linked to Kutireva were registered, including a store in the City Center shopping center and two houses, one in the Caldera del Rey urbanization (located in the upper part of the amusement park Siam Park) and another in a residential area near a golf course.
The agents found “abundant documentation in physical and digital format”, which, in the absence of an in-depth analysis, would confirm the researchers’ hypothesis. The police seized 30,000 euros in cash and various jewels and requested the seizure of three other properties, two high-end cars and 19 bank accounts linked to the investigated. The intervened real estate properties are valued at 25 million euros.
Investigators track $230 million stolen from Hermitage investment fund
Some sources point out that The detainee has been living in Tenerife for at least a decade. In his premises, compared to the usual in many real estate agencies, there are no posters with photos, information and prices of the houses or farms that are sold or rented. There is only one door with mirrored glass, which does not allow you to see inside.
Kutireva deals directly with the management of your business and the purchase and sale of properties. On the real estate sign, he makes it clear that a good part of his clients are Russian. Its objectives: investors with high purchasing power and properties in strategic locations in the south of Tenerife, in the surroundings of emblematic hotels or with spectacular views of the ocean and the tourist area itself.
To get to the Russian businesswoman, the investigators spent five years analyzing documentation. The money transfers of illicit origin reached their accounts from two banks in Estonia and one in Cyprus. And such capital movements were ordered from companies managed by front men in the British Virgin Islands, Belize and Cyprus, reports El Confidencial.
The case is named after Sergei Magnitsky, the tax attorney hired by Hermitage owner Bill Browder., to try to find out what happened to those funds. It was the lawyer who uncovered the existence of a network of collaborators –judges, tax inspectors, police officers and, in general, officials at all levels of the administration– who managed to impersonate Hermitage with stolen documents and intervention in police records. Thus, when the Russian Treasury returned the money, it did not do so to the investment fund from which the 230 million dollars came, but to the structure of Putin’s friends.
Magnitsky was detained and interrogated in June and October 2008. by officials involved in the plot; in november he was remanded into pretrial detention and almost 12 months later, at the age of 37, he died, allegedly as a result of the continued ill-treatment he suffered in prison.
The police arrested Natalia Kutireva, accused of intermediating with the plot related to the Kremlin
Browder went ahead with the complaints, also implying Moscow’s collusion with these practices.. He got the United States to pass the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act in 2012 to punish all Russian officials involved in the crime and the emptying of the Hermitage. But that did not prevent the money that was stolen from him from beginning to circulate around the world,
In 2017 the investigations reached Spain where the money trail has led, through multiple banking operations, in addition to Tenerife, to the Costa Brava and Torrevieja. Investigations are currently being carried out in 12 countries on the laundering of money from this scam.
