Mega-rich homes tour puts spotlight on London’s oligarchs – Campaigners connected to Russia’s opposition leader Alexei Navalny – a lawyer and critic of corruption – hired a bus and gave a guided tour of houses and flats in London’s most exclusive districts, properties owned by Russian government ministers and wealthy friends of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
“It’s a refuge, a showroom and deposit box,” Roman Borisovich said of Witanhurst, standing near its massive red-brick wall. The palace was purchased in 2008 for £50m, but the owner was for some time a mystery. Last year the New Yorker magazine revealed that the mansion belonged to Andrei Guriev, a Russian tycoon and fertiliser baron who until recently had served in Putin’s senate.
The tour included properties owned by Russian government ministers and wealthy friends of the country’s president, Vladimir Putin.
Borisovich is an anti-corruption activist who appeared in the Channel 4 documentary From Russia With Cash.
Posing as a Russian official who had stolen his country’s health budget, he exposed the antics of unscrupulous estate agents. He said his latest idea aims to draw attention to how dirty money from countries such as Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, continues to pour into the west.
Borisovich said he also wanted to highlight how a group of “enablers”, such as lawyers, accountants, and bankers, were helping oligarchs launder their “ill-gotten gains” by investing the cash in prime London mansions.
In central London offshore companies owned one in 10 of the houses, he said, and shell companies owned £122bn worth of property.
As well as Witanhurst, the tour members visited Eden House, a pleasant villa in Highgate. A silver Mercedes was parked in the driveway, near a tasteful statue of a boy. The house, they were told, belonged to Andrei Yakunin.
Yakunin’s father, Vladimir, was reportedly close to Putin and until 2015 had run the company Russian Railways. A former KGB officer, Yakunin Sr had sponsored anti-western Russian thinktanks.
Yakunin’s neighbour, Andrew, popped out and said he had invited the Russian and his wife round for drinks when they moved in a couple of years ago. “Funnily enough, they didn’t invite us back,” he said.
He said the Yakunins had installed hi-tech security cameras. They bought the house for £4.5m in 2007 via a Panamanian company. “One day I was clipping the hedge next to their property. Suddenly I heard a voice from the security camera telling me ‘Keep clear! Leave the premises!’”
Were Russian millions a bad thing for London? “Well, I made my money as an engineer and a lawyer,” he said.
Thursday’s London tour had begun just down the road from the Houses of Parliament, on Victoria embankment. Borisovich posed with a lifesize cardboard cut-out of Russia’s deputy prime minister, Igor Shuvalov. As well as being one of the top figures in the Russian government Shuvalov and his wife, Olga, owned two luxury apartments worth £11.4m overlooking the Thames. The homes cost 100 times Shuvalov’s official salary.
“It’s in Britain’s interests to stop this flow of corrupt money,” said Vladmir Ashurkov, a Russian opposition politician, who has received political asylum in the UK. Ashurkov said he rejected the argument that foreign money helped the economy. Rather, he said, it raised house prices to unaffordable levels and turned London into a global centre for money laundering.
The tour bus trundled past Belgrave Square, in Kensington, known jokingly as Red Square because of its association with other high-profile Russians.
The metals tycoon Oleg Deripaska owned No 5; the former oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who died in 2013, had several flats at No 26. Roman Abramovich’s home, two adjacent townhouses in Chester Square, was a short stroll away.
The smallest house on the tour belonged to Roman Rotenberg; situated in Cadogan Lane, Belgravia, it cost a mere £3.3m. Rotenberg’s father and uncle, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, were said to be Putin’s oldest friends and former judo partners. Since Putin became president in 2000, the pair had become billionaires, supplying pipelines to the state-controlled energy corporation Gazprom. In 2014 the EU and US sanctioned both of the Rotenbergs in connection with the Crimea crisis.
Roman Rotenberg is a British citizen, and now the formal owner of many of his father’s companies. On Thursday he did not seem to be at home. There were no signs of life outside his mansion, with its handsome Dutch wooden shutters. “The US has sanctioned the Rotenbergs,” Borisovich said, standing in the cobbled road outside. He added: “Why doesn’t Britain do something?”
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