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3.6 million documents leak / Investigation: Cyprus, the little Moscow in the Mediterranean! Billions of sanctioned Russian oligarchs are hidden and purged

2023-11-14 20:15:29Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
3.6 million documents leak / Investigation: Cyprus, the little Moscow in the
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Poet Leonidas Malenis compared his native Cyprus to a "green-gold leaf thrown into the sea", but in recent years the eastern Mediterranean island nation has acquired a darker reputation.

Cyprus has spent years dealing with Russian money and investment, and in the process has turned into an island of corporate service providers. Hundreds of bankers, accountants, auditors and lawyers began catering to a stream of wealthy Russian clients, helping them do business behind a veil of corporate secrecy. Today the island is sometimes called "Moscow in the Mediterranean".

When Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, the island also became their gateway to Europe. Less than ten years later, there were about $31 billion of Russian assets in Cyprus, according to Moody's estimates. By 2018, the head of the Russian Cypriot business association in Nicosia was claiming that the 300 Cypriot companies in the group were "worth about 80 percent of Cyprus' wealth".

"Initially not many questions were asked when these investments came," said Hubert Faustmann, a professor of Cypriot history and politics at the University of Nicosia.

But as the EU increasingly targets Kremlin-linked Russians and their wealth in the wake of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, attention has grown on Cyprus and its history of helping organize empires their business.

OCCRP and its media partners led early reporting on how Cypriot firms and lawyers helped powerful Russians restructure their assets to mitigate the impact of Western sanctions. Now, a global collaboration led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and Paper Trail Media, based on more than 3.6 million documents disclosed by Cypriot service providers, provides unprecedented insight into how these firms helped oligarchs and Russian billionaires to organize — and wipe out — their fortunes over the years.

The leaked files make it clear how many Russians requested these services. Most of the Russians who appear on the Forbes billionaires list were clients of Cypriot service providers, according to an ICIJ analysis. And more than 650 trusts and companies registered on the island owned or controlled by Russians have been sanctioned since 2014.

Stories from OCCRP and its partners show how powerful Russians used Cyprus and its service industry to do everything from moving millions of people around the world to buying the rights to young soccer players. Cypriot service providers helped their customers even when EU sanctions threatened.

Notable among them is the help given to sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich to hide his $1 billion art treasure and move funds freely around the world.

Full investigation


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