A French court has confiscated a luxury villa on the Côte d'Azur linked to Gazprom as part of a money laundering investigation, although its official owner is Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan. This is reported by Le Monde, UNN writes.
Details
It is noted that the French justice system has seized a villa worth about 120 million euros on the Côte d'Azur, in Roquebrune Cap Martin, in the Maritime Alps department, as part of a money laundering investigation.
The Judicial Investigation Department of the French Ministry of Finance found numerous documents showing that the villa never left the control of Gazprom Neft, the Gazprom subsidiary that theoretically sold the property to Karapetyan in January 2015. However, the loan was granted by a Russian bank secured by the villa.
According to the documents, Karapetyan bought the shares of the company that owns the villa from Gazprom Neft with a 115 million euro loan from Gazprombank, which is owned by Gazprom and Yuri Kovalchuk, a close ally of Vladimir Putin.
The estate is estimated to be worth €120 million. The property consists of a multi-storey main building, three swimming pools, a tennis court and a helipad.
Addendum
The Paris prosecutor's office confirmed the seizure in favor of the Agency for the Management and Recovery of Seized and Confiscated Assets (Agrasc). The National Court for Combating Organized Crime (Junalco) has launched a preliminary investigation into money laundering.
Recall
In March last year, a French court seized a villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in the southeast of the country, allegedly owned by Russian oligarch Viktor Rashnikov.