Dirty money from the Isle of Man

Dirty money from the Isle of Man

By Paul Cristian Radu

In the shadow of some very famous Romanian businesses there are various Russian oligarchs, hidden behind some off-shore companies. All too often, these companies are involved in transactions with Russian criminal groups, in money laundering, drug traffic or blackmail.

Our story begins on a small island in the Irish Sea, between Great Britain and Ireland: the Isle of Man. With a surface of only 572 square kilometres, the Isle of Man or Manx, as the locals call it, is one of the places where a significant part of the world’s financial capital is concentrated. The Isle of Man is one of the main off-shore areas and one of the favourite places of the Russian oligarchs who want to conceal their influence and money.
On this island we have managed to identify several companies which have business affairs with some companies in Romania. One of these off-shore companies is called Best Associates Limited and its shareholders are Gabriel Bivolaru, ex MP, who is currently in jail for embezzling the BRD (Romanian Bank for Development), his spouse, Mona Socec de Freitas, a certain Alexandru Constantin Covrig and a British citizen, John Szepietowski.

THE ISLE OF MAN: A famous tax haven.
CRJI has written several times about Mona de Freitas, a person who seems taken from a detective novel. A woman who, even since the 80s, with the complicity of the Security, changed her identity very frequently, assumed all kinds of nobility titles and performed fraudulent activities in various countries of the world. Mona de Freitas was also under penal prosecution, along with Bivolaru, in the BRD fraud case, but her file still remains unresolved.

The name of Szepietowski has also been mentioned several times by CRJI. He is one of the head members of the group Freitas-Bivolaru, and he has been involved in businesses with Freitas, both in England and in Romania.

Thus, according to some press releases, Szepietowski was involved, in the middle of the 90s, in an attempt to fraud Amidon Glucoza Fructoza Drojdie (AGFD – Starch Glucose Fructose Yeast) in Tandarei. Bivolaru illegally sold this society to Mona de Freitas, who, in turn, sold the assets of the society to John Szepietowski and the land to Mihaela Ene, who is Bivolaru’s sister but also a founding member of VGB Invest (the company that took over RAFO Onesti from Iacobov, by means of Balkan Petroleum).

The same Szepietowski sold an apartment in Bucharest to the lawyer Ion Neagu, ex-chairman of the Juridical Committee of the Chamber of Deputies in the former legislature. The apartment, located on the Unirii Boulevard, was given to Szepietowski by Mona de Freitas and was sold by her right in the period when she was under penal prosecution for embezzling the BRD.

In England, Mona de Freitas and Szepietowski are associates in the companies: Magazine Limited; Asterix Travel Limited; Classic Hotel UK Limited and others.

DRUGS TRAFFIC AND MONEY LAUNDERING. Szepietowski’s name became very important in the equation of the businesses ran by the couple Bivolaru-Freitas in August 2005, when the Assets Recovery Agency of the British government announced that they had put under distraint £1 million worth assets, because these goods had been purchased by means of drugs traffic and money laundering.

John Szepietowski’s name is mentioned in the ARA press release, as manager of the Countess Investments Limited and representative of Heritage Investment Trust.

According to ARA, the Countess Investments Company has its headquarters in 33 Monument Green Square, in the British town Weybridge. The reporters of Jurnalul National went to this address, in the county of Surrey, last year, when we revealed the connections between the RAFO business, Frank Timisi and the group VGB-Bivolaru-mentioned above. In the company Classic Hotel UK Limited, Mona de Freitas, under the name Lady Mona Bradley, is listed as living precisely 33 Monument Green, Weybridge.

FRIDMAN’S LADIES. But let’s come back to the island in the Irish Sea and to the company Best Associates Limited. As we have mentioned, a certain Alexandru Constantin Covrig is currently involved in this company. Covrig is also an old partner of the group Bivolaru-Freitas. He has been a partner in several Romanian companies with Bivolaru, Freitas or with Mihaela Ene, the founder of the VGB Invest group.

However, the head managers of Best Associates are two citizens of the Isle of Man: Gillian Norah Caine and Susan Christine Cubbon. These two ladies are also mentioned in a process currently under way in America. We are referring to the NOREX case, tried by the Justice court of New York. In this process, Caine and Cubbon are accused of being accomplices to money laundering and bribing some officials of the Moscow government together with Mikhail Fridman, one of the most powerful Russian oligarchs, and with the latter’s business group, ALFA BANK.

This isn’t the first time when Fridman and the ALFA group prove to have connections with organized crime activities. An FSB (the new KGB) report quoted by the American organization Centre for Public Integrity, mentions that the ALFA group has been heavily involved, at the beginning of the 90s, in laundering money resulted from drugs traffic in Russia and Columbia. The same report says that drugs from the Far East have been imported to Europe through this network.

ISKANDAR MAKHMUDOV. This summer there have been rumours saying that the RAFO refinery in Onesti, the centre of so many scandals lately and one of the main debtors to the state budget, had been overtaken by the Alfa Oil group, a group which includes the companies Expanet Trading Limited, Calder-A International BV and Raglam Overseas Ltd.

The documents obtained by CRJI prove who is behind this mysterious business group. Thus, the most important company of this holding is Calder-A International BV. This company, registered in Rotterdam, Holland, has as sole shareholder another Austrian company called KRU Holding. KRU Holding is in fact Kuzbassrazrezugol, one of the biggest Russian companies in the field of coal exploitation.

According to the information provided by the Austrian Trade Register, the main shareholder of KRU Holding is Iskandar Makhmudov. The latter is, according to Forbes magazine, one of the most mysterious Russian businessmen. He was born in Bukhara, Uzbekistan and he has served the Soviet army in Iraq and Libya. He is currently the leader of the UGMK group, the second biggest on the Russian non-ferrous metals market.

THE RELATION WITH THE ALFA BANK. An interesting fact is that Makhmudov’s company, Calder-A International, has been financed lately by the means of the very ALFA group of Mikhail Fridman.

Thus, in 2003, Calder obtained a loan of almost $125 de million, which was guaranteed by Alfa Bank.