The State Attorney General’s Office (FGE) is collecting information from the proceedings he has conducted concerning citizens of Russian nationality –among them oligarchs and members of the mafia– in cases of corruption or criminal organization in recent years in Spain. It is also collecting data related to Russian citizens about whom it has information about criminal activities in their country of origin even if they are not formally investigated.
Sources from the Public Ministry have assured the Europa Press agency that they are organizing the information on the cases in which at least a hundred citizens of Russian nationality appear with the intention of having a global idea of the volume of procedures that have been followed in Spain . They have specified, however, that it is not possible to speak of a list. The prosecutors have already begun to provide the required information.
The movement of the Public Ministry coincides with the war of occupation that the Government of Vladimir Putin is carrying out in Ukraine and with the sanctions that the European Union and different countries are applying to the Kremlin and to Russian oligarchs.
Fridman case
Tax sources have recalled that in Anticorruption the cases that have been directed against the Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman by day sale and the bankruptcy situation of the Spanish company Zed WorldWide. This same week, the businessman resigned from his position as a member of the council of the investment vehicle LetterOne – owner of the supermarket chain – after he was sanctioned by the European Union.
Likewise, in the Special Prosecutor’s Office, procedures are collected in which the name of the former First Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia Alexander Bastrykin and also former Prosecutor Igor Borisovich Soboleski appear. Against the latter, Anticorruption even requested an international arrest warrant in 2015 for his alleged link to a mafia network investigated in the framework of the Troika operation. This macro police operation was considered at the time as the biggest blow to the Russian mafia in Spain. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office then requested prison sentences for crimes of illicit association and money laundering to the ‘capo’ Gennadios Petrov and his main lieutenants: Alexander Ivanovich Malyshev and Olga Solovyeva.
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The Public Ministry considered that those investigated in this mafia network were part of a structure that would have laundered large sums of money from the commission of murders, contract beatings, smuggling or drug trafficking. They would have had legal, accounting and tax advice for this, as well as translator services for these activities.
Regarding the cases of extradition of Russian citizens claimed by the Kremlin, sources from the National High Court have confirmed that at the moment they cannot materialize as a result of the ban on flights in both directions adopted by the governments after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.