Setbacks accumulate and diversify for UBS. Caught in a delicate financial situation, the Swiss bank was raided at some of its German facilities on Tuesday as part of an investigation into a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, he said.
The suspected target is Alicher Ousmanov, close to the Russian president, whose various properties in Germany, particularly in Bavaria, had already been searched in September.
The 69-year-old Russian billionaire, former president of the International Fencing Federation, is notably suspected of having his assets monitored by a security company while they were on the sanctions list imposed by the European Union after the invasion of Ukraine. for Russia
550 million euros of fraud
By paying for these monitoring services, Alisher Usmanov allegedly violated the ban on disposing of these frozen assets. He would also be suspected of laundering tax fraud, up to 550 million euros, according to the magazine “Der Spiegel”, which revealed the raids of the day.
Alicher Ousmanov, who would have lived most of the time in Bavaria in recent years, would not be in Germany himself, nor in Russia: the researchers believe that he would currently be in Uzbekistan, his native country, according to Spiegel.
He is presented by the German weekly as a “straw man” for the Russian president in various business cases.
Germany already seized in April the world’s largest yacht that belongs to it, the “Dilbar”, a 156-meter vessel valued at about 600 million dollars according to Forbes magazine, under repair in a Hamburg shipyard.
Usmanov, one of dozens of Russian billionaires hit by Western sanctions, was also ranked sixth in the Sunday Times’ 2021 list of Britain’s richest people.
Source: BFM TV
