The house, in Art Deco style, would belong to Russian businessman Artur Ocheretny, the new companion of Lyoudmila Putin, former wife of the head of the Kremlin. The villa, which was purchased for an amount of 5.4 million euros in December 2013, was seized on December 6, 2023, the prosecution said.
The investigation must determine in particular whether the funds which enabled this acquisition have a fraudulent origin or not. The businessman acquired other real estate in Europe, notably in Spain and Switzerland for several million euros, the prosecutor said. No person is currently being prosecuted in this case, it added. The procedure was initiated following a complaint from the anti-corruption association Transparency International, he recalled. The complaint, filed in 2022 after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, targeted four Russian oligarchs or relatives of Russian oligarchs, according to a source familiar with the matter. The investigations were launched in September 2022 under the aegis of the National Jurisdiction for the Fight against Organized Crime (Junalco).