We left the Kerimov case, which resonated between the Aix-en-Provence and Paris appeal courts in the summer of 2022, at the center of the negotiations and waited to know who would inherit this symbolic case that showed the inability of French justice to arrest some suspects. Russian assets. According to the information received WorldThis summer an arbitration decision was made to transfer the Paris judicial court to a specialist magistrate. “An investigating judge from Nice resigned in favor of an investigating judge with national jurisdiction to fight organized crimeRefers to the Paris prosecutor’s office. The procedure relates specifically to organized gang crime, which is the direct or indirect laundering of proceeds from corruption, embezzlement of public funds and aggravated tax evasion. »
Far from being an epilogue, this final chapter is part of the legal saga that began in 2014, when the Nice justice system began investigating strange real estate transactions in Cap d’Antibes. During wiretaps in a completely different case, investigators discovered that the purchase of a villa called Hier would lead to the alleged buyer, Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov, paying tens of millions of euros in bribes. He is close to President Vladimir Putin. If the official price of the villa is 35 million euros, the sellers actually pocketed an additional undeclared money of 92 million euros.
In the investigation regarding villa sellers, a criminal complaint was filed against 13 people and 2 companies. Their referral to the criminal court is currently under appeal. On the buyers’ side, the investigation was quickly expanded to include three other villas suspected to belong to Souleïman Kerimov. The judicial police are particularly interested in the role played by the house’s steward, Cédric F., and its official owner, Alexander Studhalter, who are suspected of acting as a front. However, due to assessment errors made by the investigating judge in the classification of facts, the money laundering allegations of the three men were annulled by the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal in June 2018.
The investigation was restarted with the war in Ukraine
After re-indicting Mr. Kerimov’s entourage in September 2019 on charges of laundering tax evasion allegedly committed by the oligarch, the Nice investigative judge decided to split the growing file to remove the “Kerimov” section. » » The aim is to investigate where the money used for the purchase and maintenance of the villas came from and to understand who the real owner is. The investigation revealed a double financing network based on offshore companies and the use of large amounts of cash suspected to have come from tax evasion in Russia to run the villas. However, this new procedure quickly ended as it was not possible to prove the existence of the original crime.
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