2023-10-30 06:45:11
Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov, in Moscow, November 2012. AFP
We left the resounding Kerimov affair at the center of negotiations, in the summer of 2022, between the appeal courts of Aix-en-Provence and Paris, while waiting to know who would inherit this emblematic case of the inability of French justice to apprehend certain Russian assets. According to information from Mondean arbitration was rendered this summer to transfer it to a specialized magistrate of the Paris judicial court. “An investigating judge from Nice has resigned in favor of an investigating judge from the national jurisdiction for the fight against organized crimespecifies the Paris prosecutor’s office. The procedure concerns the offense of organized gang laundering the direct or indirect proceeds of a crime, in particular those of corruption, embezzlement of public funds and aggravated tax evasion. »
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This last episode, far from being an epilogue, is part of a legal saga that began in 2014, the date on which the Nice justice system began to investigate strange real estate transactions at Cap d’Antibes. The investigators discovered, during telephone tapping in a completely different case, that the purchase of a villa, called Hier, would have given rise to the payment of several tens of millions of euros in bribes by the alleged buyer, Suleiman Kerimov, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin. If the official price of the villa is 35 million euros, the sellers actually pocketed an additional undeclared 92 million euros.
As for the sellers of the villa, the investigation resulted in the indictment of thirteen people and two companies. Their referral to the criminal court is currently the subject of an appeal. On the buyers’ side, the investigation quickly expanded to include three other villas, suspected of also belonging to Souleïman Kerimov. The judicial police are particularly interested in the role played by the house’s steward, Cédric F., and their official owner, Alexander Studhalter, suspected of acting as a front man. But due to errors of assessment by the investigating judge in the classification of the facts, the indictments of the three men for money laundering were canceled by the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal in June 2018.
The investigation relaunched with the war in Ukraine
After having re-indicted Mr. Kerimov’s entourage in September 2019 for laundering tax fraud allegedly committed by the oligarch, the Nice investigating judge decided to split the file, which had become sprawling, to extract the “Kerimov” section. » in a separate procedure in December 2019. The aim is to investigate the origin of the money which financed the purchase and maintenance of the villas, and to understand who is the real owner. The investigation uncovered a double financing network based on offshore companies and the use of large quantities of cash for the operation of the villas, suspected of coming from tax fraud in Russia. But quickly, this new procedure also came to an end, as it was not possible to demonstrate the existence of the original offense.
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