Criminal trials are underway in the island nation, citing Russian businessmen who bought Cypriot passports.
A Cypriot court, as part of hearings in the “golden passports” case, yesterday allowed email correspondence related to the obtaining of a passport by Nikolay Gornovsky, a former Gazprom board member and head of Mezhregiongaz, to be used as evidence. Gornovsky applied for Cypriot citizenship in 2018 under a now-canceled investment program. In the dock are former parliament speaker Demetris Syllouris and former MP and businessman Christakis Giovani. They are charged with influence peddling and conspiracy to fraudulently naturalize foreign investors.
The correspondence was between real estate agent Tony Kay and lawyer Andreas Pittagis, who was previously acquitted in the case. Some of the letters directly concern the two defendants. The material shows that Gornowski intended to buy property in Cyprus solely for the purpose of obtaining a passport and refused to personally come to the island to submit biometric data, as required by the program. The correspondence also refers to attempts to get Gornovsky exempted from having to submit biometric data through a certain Cypriot minister, whose name was not disclosed.
A criminal case against Gornovsky was opened by Russian investigators in the summer of 2003. According to the law enforcement authorities, he organized the sale of Russia’s largest producer of nitrogen fertilizers, Azot, to structures controlled by him at an undervalued price. He was also accused of misusing a Gazprom loan worth 25.5 million rubles. These charges led to Gornovsky’s detention by Interpol at Frankfurt am Main airport in 2006, but he was subsequently released and the German authorities found no grounds for extradition. Since 2004, Gornovsky has lived with his family in the UK and Spain, where he has been involved in oil-related business.
In October 2020, Al Jazeera TV channel released an investigation into the “golden passports”, which led to the resignation of Silouris and Giovani. The journalists posed as representatives of a fictional Chinese businessman with a criminal record trying to obtain Cypriot citizenship. During the filming, Silouris, Giovani and others promised to help circumvent the law despite the client’s “criminal record.” Al Jazeera had at its disposal data on 2,500 individuals who obtained Cypriot passports, mostly between 2017 and 2019.
Cypriot passports were regularly obtained by Russian businessmen implicated in criminal cases and financial scandals. Among them is Ruben Aganbegyan, a co-defendant in the Bank of Russia’s 290 billion ruble lawsuit against former Otkritie Bank executives. Yuri Obodovsky, a banker who was put on the federal wanted list by the Investigative Committee in 2018 on suspicion of paying bribes to Dmitry Zakharchenko, former deputy head of the T Directorate of the Main Department of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Main Directorate of the State Security and Investigative Committee, also had a Cypriot passport. Zakharchenko gained notoriety in 2016 when a search of him and his family turned up cash worth about 8.5 billion rubles, as well as property including 13 apartments, 14 car lots, cars and jewelry. Andrei Puchkov, a top manager of the bankrupt real estate developer Urban Group, who is also on Russia’s international wanted list, was also granted Cypriot citizenship.