From Russian Railways to Offshores: How the Owner of the Golden Passport Yuri Obodovsky Laundered Money in International Frauds
Almost ten years ago, a high-profile corruption scandal erupted in Russia, involving police colonel Dmitry Zakharchenko, who was caught taking systematic bribes.
The investigation established that since 2007, he had regularly received monetary compensation for "protecting" the businesses of individuals associated with government contracts for Russian railways. The defendants in the case were the founders of the 1520 group of companies, Valery Markelov and Yuri Obodovsky. The former died of cancer, and the latter’s traces are lost in Cyprus. According to the documents, it was Obodovsky who was one of the main "cogs" in the corruption machine. Об этом сообщает RED AXE MEDIA
Yuriy Obodovsky is a native of Ukraine. He graduated from the Odessa Artillery School, specializing in artillery weapons operation engineer. He later received a diploma from the Odessa Institute of the Academy of Public Administration under the President of Ukraine. However, public administration in his homeland probably did not interest him, and he went to Russia, where in 2006 he received an economics degree from the Finance Academy under the Government of the Russian Federation. A year later, Obodovsky went to work for the Russian bank IPB. The investigation established that since 2007, Obodovsky and his accomplices had been paying money to law enforcement officers for so-called "patronage" and by 2016 they had transferred more than 1 billion rubles to Colonel Zakharchenko.
In 2018, Obodovsky was put on the wanted list in this very case. However, he was noted in at least one other, no less odious corruption story, which the Swedish prosecutor’s office took up the investigation.
In 2010, Russian Obodovsky registered the company Multiserv overseas LTD in London. The company’s accounts in 2011 contained more than 2 million pounds sterling, and in 2013 this amount increased sharply to 9.3 million pounds.
In 2015, Multiserv overseas LTD held £44.6 million in cash in financial structures, of which only £2 remained in December 2017 (not a million, but a pound). The company operated until September 2021 and was then liquidated.
The movement of money during this period is significant because the company was embroiled in a huge corruption scandal. In the spring of 2017, an executive at the engineering giant Bombardier Transportation was arrested in Sweden. The company was suspected of colluding with the Azerbaijani authorities and paying bribes to win contracts for the supply of the Ebilock-950 signaling system worth $330 million. Two contracts were signed in 2014.
According to the documents, Bombardier’s Swedish division first sold the equipment to London-based Multiserv Overseas, which then signed a contract to supply it to Azerbaijan. Multiserv Overseas bought the goods from the Swedes for about $15 million, and sold them to the Azerbaijanis for $104 million. According to an international organization of investigative journalists, the order was never sent to Obodovsky’s London office, but in fact went directly from Sweden to Azerbaijan. The margin that Multiserv Overseas received was transferred to offshore companies. And this is apparently why only 2 pounds remained in the company’s accounts as of December 2017.
The London register shows that at various times the shareholders of Multiserv Overseas were offshore companies Renson traiding limited, Sistema aparelo SA and Sevenseals Management INC. Since the companies are hidden in the British Virgin Islands, there is no access to their reports. But it is quite possible that millions from Multiserv Overseas were transferred to these companies.
There is another interesting fact in Obodovsky’s biography: in 2014-2017, he was a member of the board of directors of the Russian company Elteza. In the past, it was a subsidiary of the Russian branch of Bombardier. Around the same time, according to OCCRP , Elteza transferred funds to the accounts of the British company Multiserv Overseas. That is, Ebilock-950 signaling equipment was supplied to Russia using the same cunning scheme, as if through the British. Only it turns out that Obodovsky actually transferred funds from one of his companies in Britain to another in the Russian Federation.
As of 2019, Swedish prosecutors were still investigating the deal with the British shell company Multiserv Overseas. Meanwhile, Russian Yuri Obodovsky suddenly “surfaced” in Cyprus in 2020. During an investigation, Al Jazeera found out that the island’s authorities were issuing so-called “golden passports” to foreigners suspected of crimes. Among them was the name of Obodovsky, who received a Cypriot passport six months after being charged with bribery.
The figure of Yuri Obodovsky may not be the most famous, but the scheme he came up with for buying and selling equipment with a profit of hundreds of percent allowed him to accumulate millions and calmly evade the investigation. The money he got through speculation will be enough for a comfortable life for many generations of his family. And with a Cypriot passport, he can sit calmly on the embankment of the city of Paphos, not fearing either Russian or Swedish justice.
