2024-07-29 13:21:26
Chain Walk on the north bank of the River Thames is home to many of London’s wealthy. James Bond author Ian Fleming once lived there, as did at least two members of the Rolling Stones.
In 2018, OCCRP partner from Armenia “Hetk” revealed other residents of the luxurious Chelsea district. at that time, the wife and sons of the President of Armenia, Armen Sarkissian, were registered there in a five-story brick mansion. The real ownership of the property was hidden behind an unknown offshore company registered in the British Virgin Islands.
Now journalists have discovered the name of that company. According to the document of the offshore company, the owner of the mansion is Sargsyan’s sister, Karine Sargsyan. Through various offshore companies, he owns four other expensive properties in London worth tens of millions of pounds.
For years, the assets belonging to these five companies were hidden from the public. But in 2022, the UK passed a law requiring offshore companies with property in the country to declare their true owners, which allowed journalists to discover that Karine Sargsyan was listed as their owner. Armen Sargsyan’s two sons are also listed as having “significant influence or control”.
“The new transparency rules shine a light on how world political leaders, including leaders of countries with serious governance problems, own vast amounts of real estate in the UK through secret offshore companies,” Transparency International UK, a group of states, told OCCRP. and Juliet Swan, Head of Regional Programs.
In response to a request to comment on the assets, Armen Sargsyan said that in the 90s, when he first entered the state service, he made a decision to “entrust the wealth earned by creating software and video games to my sister.” Answering the journalists’ questions, Armen Sargsyan wrote that this decision implied Karine Sargsyan becoming the beneficiary of the companies she founded, and the hiring of professional managers who would manage and make investments.
“Some of them [ներդրումները] were held by companies based in the British Virgin Islands. This was a fairly standard mechanism for wealth management activities, on which professional advice and expertise was obtained. Basically, the properties you mentioned were bought with the income of these investments,” he wrote.
If Armen Sargsyan was the real owner of the London properties, then by law he was obliged to declare them in Armenia when he returned to politics from the position he held in the private sector in 2013, being appointed the ambassador of Armenia to Great Britain. However, the property does not appear in Sargsyan’s 2013-2022 declarations.
It is not the first time that there are important omissions in Sargsyan’s declarations. “Hetqn” reported earlier that the former president did not declare his position as a director in a French company with real estate in Paris, and that he and his sister had a secret bank account in Switzerland with 10 million francs.
Unlike his sister, who worked as a doctor in the Armenian state hospitals for years, Sargsyan was a successful businessman, for whom it was not a problem to acquire luxurious real estate. In the early 1990s, Sargsyan took advantage of the video game boom, co-founding the Tetris-Wordtris game that appeared on Nintendo’s popular SNES and Game Boy systems.
As of February 2022, his sons have acquired “significant influence or control” in two of the British Virgin Islands-registered companies behind the two London properties, according to the British Companies Register. At that time, not even a month had passed since Sargsyan’s unexpected resignation from the post of the President of Armenia.
“In 2022, when I left politics and when my sister was approaching her 70th birthday, she gifted the two properties to my sons, continuing to be the owner of the rest,” Sargsyan told OCCRP.
British background
After four years in office, Sargsyan stated among the reasons for his resignation that the president in Armenia does not have the authority to influence important issues, and also that he has health problems caused by political “attacks” against him and his family.
He stepped down as president just days after receiving questions from Hetki and OCCRP reporters about an investigation into his holding a passport from the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis while in office.
The Constitution of Armenia prohibits the president from having foreign citizenship. The Armenian Prosecutor’s Office told OCCRP that authorities are currently investigating whether Sargsyan committed a criminal offense.
Before returning to public service in 2013 while working in the private sector, Sargsyan also held British citizenship, as evidenced by the United Kingdom’s Companies Register. According to his spokesman, Sargsyan had renounced his British passport, as required by RA law, before being appointed as Armenia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom that year.
During his time in the private sector, Sargsyan held consulting positions at several European foundations and companies, including British Petroleum and French telecommunications giant Alcatel Trade International AG. He also founded the consulting firm Eurasia House International.
As the property register shows, in this period, 2000-2008. four of his family’s five London properties were bought.
The Companies Registry shows that each of the properties is owned by a separate company registered in the British Virgin Islands. One of these companies owns a five-story brick building on Chain Walk, and the other owns a neighboring property on the same street. Another company owns a third-floor flat in Evelyn Mansions, just ten minutes from Buckingham Palace.
Another company also owns De Mulberry, a mansion on the outskirts of London in the wealthy Virginia Water district. The house next door belonged to Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of the late dictator of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. The mansion was seized by Britain’s Special Fraud Enforcement Agency in August.
The purchase prices of two of the properties, a mansion in Chain Walk and an apartment in Evelyn Mansions, are not known, but they are worth at least £6m today, according to online property databases. The other two mansions were bought in 2006 and 2008 for a total of £24 million.
At the end of last year, Karine Sargsyan declared the fifth property, an apartment in the center of London, of which she is the real owner, it was acquired in 2018 by another company registered in the British Virgin Islands. It is currently priced at £789,000.
Sargsyan told OCCRP that the properties “were not originally purchased at their current high values,” though he did not elaborate on how much his family paid for them.
“Their price increase over the years suggests smart investments rather than, as it seems, extravagant spending,” he said, adding that “part of the property” was bought with a loan.
The records show that a mortgage was taken out for 12 and 14 Cheyne Walk, but it was registered in 2018, ten years after the purchase.
Cypriot company
Karine also had corporate assets belonging to their family. Recent leaked documents from the Cyprus Corporate Services Authority have shown that Karine was listed as the beneficial owner of a company called Twoford Business Limited between 2008 and 2020. That company imports and licenses major international brands such as Pepsi, Nestle and Carlsberg to Armenia, Georgia and Uzbekistan.
The 2020 filings show that Twoford was renamed Revery Group Limited, and that in August 2020, Karine transferred its ownership to a trust management fund in the name of her nephew, Hayk Sargsyan. Although company filings show that Karine owned the company briefly in 2008 and between 2012 and 2020, Revery’s website says that Hayk founded the company in 2015.
Investor relations
The documents to transfer ownership of Revery Group to Sargsyan’s son reveal some of the company’s business partners. All of them have connections with Sargsyan, but none with his sister, from which we can assume that she (the sister) may have acted as his brother’s confidant in the ownership of the company before its transfer.
The transfer documents also contain a letter from a Swiss law firm addressed to a Russian bank. It outlines the ownership structure of one of the companies in which Revery has invested. It shows Revery owns shares in Moscow-based TPF Kaskad LLC. Kaskad’s core business is real estate leasing and management, and it is expected to generate revenue of nearly $3 million in 2022.
There are three other investors in Kaskad through various foundations and offshore companies, all with ties to Sargsyan, but none to Karine.
The Italian billionaire Cremonini family, which supplies hamburger meat to McDonalds and Burger King in several countries and provides catering services on passenger trains in Europe, Russia and Turkey. In 2014, when Cremonini’s Inalca Spa company signed a catering deal with “Russian Railways” for the first time, Sargsyan participated in the signing of the agreement as the chairman of Knightsbridge Group, a partner of Cremonini in Eurasia.
Diaspora Armenian businessman Hayk Didizyan, who died this year. Didizyan supported Sargsyan’s “Yerevan Im Ser” charitable foundation, whose goal was to preserve the architectural heritage of the capital of Armenia and help disadvantaged children. When Didizyan and his wife opened a school in Yerevan, Sargsyan was there to cut the ribbon.
Almas Sultangazi, the 40th richest businessman in Kazakhstan according to the Forbes 2023 list, and partner of Dariga Nazarbaeva, daughter of former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Sargsyan’s connections with Nazarbaeva are extensive. they were co-directors of Sargsyan’s Eurasia House International consulting business from 2002-2005, and in 2002 co-founded an annual conference in Kazakhstan, the Eurasian Media Forum. In 2010, Nazarbaeva even sang Kazakh and Armenian folk songs at the charity event organized by Sargsyan and hosted by Prince Charles.
In his answer to OCCRP, Sargsyan confirmed that the company was founded by Hayk, but added that it “once existed in a different form”.
Sargsyan said that his “family invested” in the company from the beginning, but he did not have his own shares, which should have been reported to the Armenian authorities.
“During my tenure, I did not have any declared interest,” said Sargsyan.