Catalonia concentrates 16 of the 34 assets located in Spain to Russian oligarchs

Agents of the Civil Guard guard the yacht 'Tango', supposedly owned by the Russian oligarch Víktor Vekselberg, seized by a Palma judge at the request of the US, on April 4. FRANCISCO UBILLA (AP)

Four yachts, a boat mooring and 29 properties.

The 34 assets of oligarchs close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, included in the list of sanctioned by the European Union that have been located in Spain, are concentrated along the entire Mediterranean coast, with special incidence in Catalonia, according to data from the investigation to which EL PAÍS has had access.

In this community, a total of 14 properties have been located, of which 11 are in the province of Girona and the other three, in Tarragona.

In this last province, in addition, a judge ordered on April 4 the seizure of a yacht valued at more than 100 million euros and in the port of Barcelona a second luxury boat had been immobilized two weeks earlier.

The rest of the properties allegedly linked to businessmen with connections to the Kremlin are divided between Alicante, where seven properties have been located;

Malaga, with four, and the island of Mallorca, where there are two pleasure boats retained and four other buildings and a port mooring have been located.

Most of these assets have been located thanks to the tracking carried out by the General Council of Notaries and, specifically, by its Centralized Body for the Prevention of Money Laundering in the so-called Notarial Single Index, a database created in January 2004 and in which all the operations carried out by the public notaries since then are registered.

According to sources from the institution, the General Council of Notaries tracked the 150 million records of this database based on the information contained in the list of sanctioned persons drawn up by the European Council in response to the invasion of Ukraine and that, in Currently, it includes 1,091 people and 80 entities.

In most cases, the information of the Russian oligarchs that this list includes is the proper name, the patronymic (in Russia it is derived from the father's name), the surname and the date of birth, but without identity document numbers. .

The crosschecking of information made it possible to incorporate, after the search for assets in Spain, the identity of relatives of those sanctioned, as well as that of people who appear as partners or attorneys-in-fact of their companies.

In total, the tracking of the General Council of Notaries has made it possible to identify operations of 14 people included in the EU list and another 88 linked to them.

In addition, it has reviewed notarial activity of eight companies registered in Spain and another seven abroad - in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Lithuania and Liechtenstein - directly linked to those sanctioned, as well as a boat mooring and 29 properties.

Of the latter, 11 are directly owned by those sanctioned or their companies, and the remaining 18 are listed in the name of relatives.

All this information has been transmitted to the Executive Service of the Commission for the Prevention of Money Laundering and Monetary Offenses (Sepblac), the financial intelligence unit under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, add the sources consulted.

In Girona and Malaga, two of the provinces where assets have been located, he owns two properties, through his stepdaughter, Sergei Chemezov, CEO of Rostec, the gigantic Russian public arms company.

Chemezov, considered by the EU to be a direct collaborator of Putin, has been on the community list of sanctioned oligarchs since 2014, when a first round of economic measures was promoted against the environment of the Russian president for the then annexation of the Crimean peninsula.

One of these properties is a villa in the Girona town of S'Agaró acquired in 2017, as revealed by an investigation by the journalistic investigation platform OCCRP in March 2019 and as verified by EL PAÍS in the Spanish property registry.

The property was purchased for 2.9 million euros, a fifth of its real value.

The second farm is in Estepona.

Of 800 square meters, the property is owned, since 1998, by Holytown Limited, a company registered in Dublin (Ireland) that is controlled, at least since 2017, by Penimar Holdings Limited, a company whose beneficiaries are Anastasia Ignatova, the stepdaughter of the oligarch, and Liudmila Rukavishnikova, his grandmother, as

revealed .

Chemezov is also the alleged owner of the

yacht , a pleasure boat 85 meters long and valued at 130 million euros that was immobilized by order of the General Directorate of the Merchant Marine in the port of Barcelona on March 14.

The ship is listed in the name of Delima Services Limited, a company in the Virgin Islands linked to Ignatova.

A day later, Spain acted in the same way against the

in Port Adriano (Mallorca), a yacht belonging to the oligarch Alexander Mijeev, general director of the defense material exporter Rosoboronexpor.

That same week it was blocked, in this case in the port of Tarragona, the

a 135-meter-long vessel that formally appears in the name of the Densiarly Entst company, domiciled in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands, although it is suspected that it actually belongs to Igor Sechin, considered a close friend of the Russian president and head of the oil company Rosneft, the Kremlin's most valuable corporate asset.

On April 4, a judge ordered the judicial seizure of the yacht after the US justice sent a rogatory commission (request for judicial assistance) on Sechin, who appears on the list of sanctions drawn up by the Washington authorities.

The magistrate ordered the police to take witness statements from five crew members of the ship about the identity of the true owner.

That same day, another judge, in this case from Mallorca, also seized, at the request of the US, the

, a 78-meter-long vessel valued at 90 million euros and flagged in the Cook Islands, where it appears in the name of a company based in the British Virgin Islands which, in turn, is managed by companies in Panama.

Its alleged real owner is Víktor Vekselberg, owner of the Renova group (a business conglomerate with interests in the aluminum, energy and telecommunications sectors) and who is estimated by

magazine to have a fortune of more than 13,000 million dollars (about 11,850 million of euros).

Freezing of financial assets and limitation of balances

Financial institutions are obliged to track the presence of persons or entities that appear on the EU sanctioned list among the holders of their deposits and assets, in order to block them if they are found.

"For now there have not been many cases," say sources in the sector who do not dare to quantify the number.

"Each entity knows its data and communicates it to the Public Treasury and Sepblac [Service for the Prevention of Money Laundering, dependent on the Ministry of Economic Affairs]", they explain.

Entities must immobilize deposits and immediately inform this body by sending an email with the subject “freezing”.

However, the control obligations of financial institutions go beyond the people who appear on the list of sanctioned and also includes Russian citizens or other nationalities residing in that country and the companies and organizations established there even if they do not appear on the EU sanction list.

In that case, your deposits cannot exceed €100,000.

They are also prevented from acquiring securities, add the sources consulted.

"This type of tracking has been done in an automated way for years," these sources point out, emphasizing that it has previously been done with suspected terrorists or leaders of other sanctioned countries.

A key tool for them is the so-called File of Financial Ownership, a centralized registry, existing since 2016, which is fed with the data that financial entities are obliged to provide about the holders, both physical and legal, of current accounts, savings and deposits, as well as rental contracts for safe deposit boxes and payment accounts in cryptocurrencies.

This file was created to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

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