German authorities announced on Tuesday September 27 that they had searched a
yacht belonging to a “69-year-old Russian entrepreneur”
whose identity they did not reveal, as part of a tax evasion investigation.
The announcement comes days after several properties in Germany of a Russian oligarch of the same age, targeted by European sanctions, were also raided.
His name had not been revealed either, but sources close to the investigation had designated a close friend of Vladimir Putin, Alicher Ousmanov.
Germany had seized in April the largest yacht in the world, belonging precisely to Alicher Ousmanov.
The “
Dilbar
”, a ship 156 meters long and worth around 600 million dollars by Forbes magazine, has been since October 2021 at the dock under repair in a shipyard in Hamburg.
"Tax evasion"
“
The suspect, a citizen of the Russian Federation, is suspected of having carried out several money transactions between 2017 and 2022 in order to hide his origin
”, specify the Frankfurt (west) public prosecutor’s office and the judicial federal police (BKA) in a press release.
The authorities suspect that the laundered money, estimated at “
several tens of millions
”, came from “
criminal operations, in particular tax evasion
”, via a complex network of offshore companies, they explain.
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According to the magazine Der Spiegel, the amount would amount to 550 million euros.
The police have not given any details at this stage on the result of the operation, which had also been requested by the United States Department of Justice.
The searches involved around sixty experts from the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office (west), the BKA, the Hamburg police in the north and tax auditors.
Monitoring services
Alisher Usmanov was ranked sixth in the Sunday Times' 2021 list of the richest people in the UK. The former president of the International Fencing Federation is also suspected of having had his property monitored by a company of security, despite being on the list of sanctions imposed by the European Union on February 28 in response to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
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By paying for these surveillance services, Alisher Usmanov allegedly violated the prohibition on disposing of frozen funds.
The oligarch, who would have lived most of the time in Bavaria in recent years, is not currently in Germany.
Investigators believe he is in Uzbekistan, his native country, according to Spiegel.
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