Spanish police smash €250m dirty money ring
The arrests were made across the southern coast, and police investigated 18 homes and offices in Spain, as well as locations in the Netherlands and Russia.
The investigation, which began in September 2003, was referred to as Operation White Whale.
The police have seized 251 plots of real estate and bank accounts with “several tens of millions” of euro, as well as 42 luxury cars, two private planes and a boat, the government said. They also have found several trucks of documents and hard disks from computers, the government said.
Police also found a connection between a group of lawyers in the Marbella area with other organised crime groups involved in drug and arms trafficking and prostitution.
The law firm helped set up companies to send money to locations and countries where the money wouldn’t easily be tracked, the government said, without naming the law firm.
Seven lawyers and three notaries were among those arrested, the Madrid-based ministry said. Spanish, Moroccan, French, Finnish, Russian and Ukrainian nationals were taken into custody, the government said.
The police may have found the destination of “significant flows of money coming from a massive illegal siphoning of funds” from Yukos, the Interior Ministry said.
The money laundering ring is the largest discovered in Spain so far, the ministry said. The arrests followed 18 months of investigations involving more than 300 police agents, including Interpol and Europol, as well as local police.
The group may have been laundering over €600m, El Pais reported, without saying how it got the information.
The ring helped criminal groups invest their profits in real estate on the southern coast and elsewhere in Spain, the Interior Ministry said, adding that the police may make more arrests in relation to the case.
The Interior Ministry said it appears that a “significant” amount money taken from Yukos was diverted to a company in the Netherlands, which then invested the money through a Spanish unit. Spain has been in contact with Russia’s police and justice system regarding the investigation. No one was identified by name in the ministry’s statement.
Yukos denied reports that it might have been involved in money laundering in Spain.
Yukos spokesman Alexander Shadrin told Ekho Moskvy radio that such reports were “nonsense.”
“The only place left to look is on Mars - did we launder something there?” Ekho Moskvy quoted Shadrin as saying, in a sarcastic reference to the Russian government’s campaign of accusations and tax claims against the beleaguered company.
According to the radio station, the Russian prosecutor general’s office declined to comment on the reports but said that it had not contacted Spanish authorities about the issue.
Russian prosecutors could not immediately be reached for comment on Saturday.
Yukos has been targeted by Russian authorities in a legal campaign widely seen as punishment by President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin for its founder and ex-CEO Mikhail Khodorkvosky’s economic clout and political ambitions.
The company’s biggest production unit was sold by the state in a disputed December auction to pay part of the €23m authorities say Yukos owes in back taxes.
Khodorkovsky has been jailed since his October 2003 arrest, and is being tried on fraud and tax-evasion charges separate from claims against the company.
Marbella and the Costa del Sol as a whole is a base for mobs dealing in everything from stolen cars to illegal weapons. In 2003, police broke up 53 criminal gangs who were involved in money laundering, drug and weapons trafficking.
“This tourist destination area is seen by criminals not only as a good place to live and relax, but rather as a zone that offers services to launder and hide money,’ the government said in the statement.
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