The plot with two houses linked to Serguéi Chemezov in Castell-Platja d'Aro (Girona).©Toni Ferragut (EL PAÍS)
Sergey Chemezov, director of the Russian state arms corporation, will no longer have the 4,000 square meter plot in the Mas Semí urbanization, in Castell-Platja D'Or (Girona), a hill of modern villas with sea views Mediterranean and where there are hardly any neighbors on the streets.
There he has built two mansions with swimming pools, although everything is in the name of his stepdaughter.
He will also not be able to access the apartment on the beachfront in the same town or the 6,000 square meter estate in the nearby exclusive area of S'Agaró.
In the province of Girona alone there are eight properties in the name of Chemezov's stepdaughter, of which neither he nor his relatives have been able to dispose of since last April 21, as EL PAÍS has verified.
The blockade of these buildings has not been carried out with large police deployments and, therefore, there are no seals on the doors of the houses.
Only a small annotation in the property registry documents of each of the farms: “Prohibition of disposal”.
It is the same that already appears in, at least, 23 of the 29 properties of seven oligarchs or people linked to them located so far in Spain.
Tracking the assets of these businessmen close to Russian President Vladimir Putin is complex, because intermediary companies, family members or figureheads are often used to hide them.
Another of the assets linked to Chemezov exemplifies this type of framework: an 800-square-meter villa in Estepona (Málaga).
At the moment it is not among the assets frozen by the Spanish authorities.
According to the land registry, its owner is Holytown Limited, an Irish company whose shareholder is Penimar Holdings Limited.
There are no more public traces of Penimar: only that it was created in the British Virgin Islands, one of the most opaque territories in the world.
The owner of Penimar does not have to register in any register.
His files are kept in offices that are dedicated to creating private documents to prove ownership or a sale.
Those of Penimar were in Trident Trust, an offshore
service provider
whose insides are only known thanks to the leak generated
by the Pandora Papers
, published by EL PAÍS together with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and dozens of media outlets around the world. world.
That is where it is stated that the beneficiaries are Anastasia Ignatova and Lyudmila Rukavishnikova, Chemezov's stepdaughter and his grandmother.
It's the kind of dead end that investigators often come to.
To overcome this, after the invasion of Ukraine, the Spanish Government created a working group in which experts from various areas of the State, from police officers to notaries and registrars, share documents and databases: it is a large information center whose members can access directly to different sources.
The team, created in mid-March and called the Coordination Group for the Determination of Funds and Economic Resources of Sanctioned Persons, is "absolutely unprecedented," sources point out.
It depends on the Department of National Security and the security forces form part of it through the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime (CITCO,
Since this week, this group has an exceptional legal weapon, the Royal Decree that was published in the BOE last Tuesday.
It makes it possible to avoid the obstacles of running into assets registered in the names of figureheads.
If there are "rational indications" that the official owner is a shell company, or a straw man intended to hide a sanctioned Russian oligarch, it will be enough to note the "prohibition of disposal" in the documentation of the asset without the need for authorization. judicial.
From that moment on, no one will be able to sell them.
In all cases, there must be a prior report that justifies these indications that the true owner of the estates, assets or rights is a person who appears on the EU sanctioned lists.
Before this Royal Decree, at least three yachts were held in Spanish ports with the endorsement of a report from the State Attorney's Office.
At that time there was less coordination between administrations, but action began to be taken against ships (and not against real estate) for two reasons, according to research sources.
The first, the risk that the ships would loosen their moorings and leave European waters.
The second, the legal difficulties of circumventing, albeit exceptionally, the Spanish mortgage law to act on real estate.
This rule guarantees property owners who have registered their property certain rights, such as not modifying the deeds without their consent or judicial authorization.
With the new Royal Decree, the rule is circumvented in specific cases linked to Russian tycoons.
Their assets will be blocked until they themselves present allegations (and these are substantiated in court) or while their names appear on the lists of those sanctioned for the war in Ukraine.
The new rule will allow, for the time being, to act against at least six other properties that to date could not be intervened.
In total, 29 have been identified, to which are added four yachts and a berth for a total of 34 goods in Spain belonging to oligarchs close to Putin and included in the EU sanctioned list.
They are concentrated along the entire Mediterranean coast, with a special incidence in Catalonia (two yachts and 14 properties, of which 11 are in the province of Girona and 3 in Tarragona).
The rest of the properties linked to businessmen linked 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.
A Moscow politician with four homes in Alicante
Arkady Nikolaevich Ponomarev, a member of the Russian state Parliament (the Duma), is linked to four properties in Alicante, sources close to the investigation have confirmed to EL PAÍS.
More than half of all the homes linked to sanctioned people found in this province are theirs, the second where there are more (seven) after Girona (11).
Ponomarev is not an oligarch from Putin's inner circle, but a politician.
He began holding public office in 2010 and, since 2013, he has been a deputy in the Duma.
He entered politics with United Russia, the party of the Russian president, after decades in the private sector and after founding Molvest, one of the country's largest dairy companies.
The figure of the oligarch is usually associated with those businessmen who use their power to get better laws and contracts for their companies, and the best known are usually businessmen with close ties to Europe such as Mikhail Fridman or Román Abramóvich.
But it is not unusual to find senior public officials on the list of those sanctioned by the European Union: of the 1,093 people sanctioned, there are more than 500 who hold positions of power in Russia, including members of the Duma, officials of the National Security Council or senior state charges.
The EU usually includes in its sanctioned list members of Parliament for having voted in favor of the resolution with which Russia recognized the provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent.
They are the two areas that make up the Donbas region, in eastern Ukraine, and in which, since the end of March, Putin has focused war efforts after abandoning an offensive that aimed to invade the entire country.
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