#intrahold

[alexantonkim]

Income source for Kim laundering scheme

Another income source for Kim was the funds he obtained after laundering the stolen Ukranian budgetary money. Particularly, Kim’s counteragent company known as Oxlord was specifically founded in Seychelles by the Intrahold AG as well as the Monohold AG companies for fraudulent activities:

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/OC334665/officers

The following companies are often mentioned in journalist investigations on the subject of president Yanukovych and his corruption. The following companies are figurants of withdrawing significant funds from Moldova: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/the-bank-fraud-in-moldova-and-20000-opaque-british-corporations.html

And once more, although Jossiv Kim have reached another level of criminal activities, international level even, he could not steer clear of the petty theft. In 2008 Kim was arrested in Florence, Italy for selling certain stolen items.

Although Hodak was doing his best and engaging the best lawyers to strike a deal, Kim was sentenced to jail Greedy bastard had to spend time behind bars and during this very period, his sick mind started to play tricks on him. He started to believe that he was a marine on a top secret assignment. Finally, after several months of hard work, Hodak has managed to help Kim enter a plea bargain. Kim was put under home arrest, but he soon escaped, never to be seen on Italian territory again. Quite a typical situation for Kim took place in Riga, where he was trying to claim that his old car was stolen (in truth, he simply sold the card to the Afghans). He was trying to get the meager insurance compensation that way.

[rarenews7]

A HIGH PROFILED PUTIN CRONY AND A “LAUNDROMAT” LINKED COMPANY IN THE OSLO PORT

The vessel RIX STREAM, IMO 9111125, a general cargo ship sailing under Cyprus flag, is owned by the Latvian company RIX SHIPMANAGEMENT SIA, a company owned by Andrey Naumenko. Naumenko and some of his shipping companies are profiled in Paradise Papers, and is linked to several other RIX-companies, and of those that for this case is more interesting is the UK LLP companies Naumenko is linked to; RIX SHIPPING AND CHARTERING LLP and SILVERSTAR NETWORKS LLP.

These two UK companies have a common denominator; some of the controlling companies of several “laundromat” companies are very well-known over the last 10 years:

IRELAND & OVERSEAS ACQUISITIONS LIMITED

MILLTOWN CORPORATE SERVICES LIMITED

INTRAHOLD AG

MONOHOLD AG

For Norwegians, maybe the most well-known case is the Seadrill sale of the West Juno rig, where the UK company HIGHWAY INVESTMENT PROCESSING LLP (“controlled” by IRELAND & OVERSEAS ACQUISITIONS, MILLTOWN CORPORATE SERVICES, ASTARTA INC, PILON INC, all offshore companies), which was an intermediary in a money laundering and corruption scheme involving Seadrill, West Juno and CHERNOMORNOEFTEGAZ.

Companies such as IRELAND & OVERSEAS ACQUISITIONS, MILLTOWN CORPORATE SERVICES , INTRAHOLD and MONOHOLD are also linked to several front persons, or “proxies”, some of the most well-known linked to these companies are Latvian Erik Vanagels and Stan Gorin, as well as Juri Vitman and Danny Banger. These companies and proxies “controls” hundreds of other front companies that has been involved in different money laundering, sanction evasion, corruption, illegal arms trade all over the world.

RIX has had these companies previously registered as Directors of Naumenko´s companies. In addition, they separately have other “laundromat” companies linked to them. SILVERSTAR has UNIWELL INC and TALLBERG LTD, and RIX has PRIMECROSS INC and FORMOND INC, also linked to money laundering, tax evasion, corruption, illegal arms trade and fraud schemes all over the world.

RIX STREAM route has been from Ventspils in Latvia to Oslo, what they are shipping is unclear, however, a company with this history should be subject for scrutiny both by banks and enforcements. Scrutiny of RIX STREAM from Norwegian enforcement has to wait, the company is already on its way and recently in the Danish port Frederiksværk.

Source: Marinetraffic.com

Another RIX group ship, RIX RIVER, IMO 9065948 is still in Norway at the moment, but on its way out from the port of Mo i Rana.

Source: Marinetraffic.com

Putin´s crony

The Russian vessel RUISH 2, IMO 9317016, is owned by the Russian company VOLGA SHIPPING which is part of VOLGAFLOT. VOLGA is owned by the Russian oligarch Vladimir Lisin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and one of the richest in Russia and maybe most known as the beneficial owner of NMLK.

Lisin was also named on the “Putin List” that the US Treasury published in 2018, many on this list are today sanctioned by the US. Lisin is also an associate of US sanctioned Oleg Deripaska, and other high profiled Russian individuals such as the Cherney brothers and oligarchs such as Iskander Makhmudov through TRANS WORLD GROUP “TWG”. Makhmudov recently got Norwegian headlines when the Norwegian company BERGEN ENGINES was about to be acquired by the Russian company TRANSMASHHOLDING, which is linked to Makhmudov.

Vladimir Lisin has also been Chairman and Director of the Russian UNITED SHIPBUILDING CORPORATION, which is sanctioned by the US. Member of the Board of UNITED SHIPBUILDING CORPORATION, and Deputy Minister of Defence, Alexey Krivoruchko, who is also sanctioned by the US, is a former business partner of Iskander Makhmudov as former co-owners of KALASHNIKOV CONCERN, also a US sanctioned entity.

Lisin is also reported to has/have stakes in the US sanctioned CHERNOMORNOEFTEGAZ (also CHORNOMORNAFTOGAZ). To add a final note to this, SEADRILL and the sale of the West Juno rig to HIGHWAY INVESTMENT PROCESSING LLP mentioned above in this post, is linked to CHERNOMORNONEFTEGAZ as the West Juno rig was supplied to them.

Source: Marinetraffic.com

Learning points from this?

With international shipping, Norway is not only exposed to risk outside Norway, any NORWEGIAN financial institution that have customers that are doing business with RIX and or VOLGA SHIPPING, should scrutinize these payments and request underlying documents supporting the transactions.

DISCLAIMER: Information in this post is based on open source information, available to anyone to verify or dispute. Deviating information can occur. I don’t accuse any of the companies and or individuals in this post of wrongdoing Assessment and conclusions of findings is to anyone for themselves to make. This post is merely for information sharing.

[jossivkim]

Jossiv Kim - a thief and notorious fraudster

Born on July 26, 1954, Jossiv Kim comes from a family of Korean origins. His birthplace, the Sulak village, is located in Russia. Even as a child, Jossiv was quite an unstable personality with various mental issues. Sure enough, he ended up in the school for juvenile criminals, where he was also being supervised by a psychiatrist. 

The Soviet Union fell, and that’s when Jossiv Kim started out on his path of misdeeds. He had a certain experience in forging legal documents, and he used that experience to score some loans in Russia’s banks. Eventually, the lenders started to look for him, so he ran to Poland to hide from them. 

A bit later, in the 2000s, Jossiv Kim was also busy trying to fool the Netherlands’ banking system. He was trying to get major loans and even forged a ton of paperwork, trying to prove that he was getting a lot of money as a salary – around $10K a month. Still, the banking system in the Netherlands was quite robust and didn’t succumb to his shady schemes. 

Hence, Jossiv Kim started to smuggle fake perfumes and even Gillette products. Furthermore, he used a Dutch company to ensure a steady supply of electronic components and wide-angle mini-cameras made in the US and Israel to China, UAE, and Russia. 

But that didn’t end there. Jossiv Kim also found yet another criminal source of income by participating in the famous Ukrainian scheme – where he was busy laundering the money that was stolen from the people of Ukraine. He used an offshore company known as Oxlord to make the most of his crime. The company itself was originally established in Seychelles by Intrahold AG and Monohold AG companies.

Greed got Jossiv Kim arrested in 2008, for selling some stolen items. 5 years later, he was put on the Wanted list of the Dubai police. Reason – forging legal paperwork – something that Kim has a real knack for. 

At the moment, Jossiv Kim, together with his wife Angelina Kim and his son, Anton Alex Kim, are hiding from law enforcement, moving around the EU all the time. He was last spotted in Spain in 2013. 

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

Financial records filed last year in the secretive tax haven of Cyprus, where Paul J. Manafort kept bank accounts during his years working in Ukraine and investing with a Russian oligarch, indicate that he had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in March 2016.

The money appears to have been owed by shell companies connected to Mr. Manafort’s business activities in Ukraine when he worked as a consultant to the pro-Russia Party of Regions. The Cyprus documents obtained by The New York Times include audited financial statements for the companies, which were part of a complex web of more than a dozen entities that transferred millions of dollars among them in the form of loans, payments and fees.

The records, which include details for numerous loans, were certified as accurate by an accounting firm as of December 2015, several months before Mr. Manafort joined the Trump campaign, and were filed with Cyprus government authorities in 2016. The notion of indebtedness on the part of Mr. Manafort also aligns with assertions made in a court complaint filed in Virginia in 2015 by the Russian oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, who claimed Mr. Manafort and his partners owed him $19 million related to a failed investment in a Ukrainian cable television business.

After The Times shared some of the documents with representatives of Mr. Manafort, a spokesman, Jason Maloni, did not address whether the debts might have existed at one time. But he maintained that the Cyprus records were “stale and do not purport to reflect any current financial arrangements.”

“Manafort is not indebted to Mr. Deripaska or the Party of Regions, nor was he at the time he began working for the Trump campaign,” Mr. Maloni said. “The broader point, which Mr. Manafort has maintained from the beginning, is that he did not collude with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.” (Mr. Manafort resigned as campaign manager last August amid questions about his past work in Ukraine.)

Still, the Cyprus documents offer the most detailed view yet into the murky financial world inhabited by Mr. Manafort in the years before he joined the Trump campaign.

Mr. Manafort is one of several former Trump associates known to be the focus of inquiries into Russian meddling in the presidential election. He was among those in attendance at a meeting in June 2016 at which Donald Trump Jr. was told they would receive compromising information on Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.

Mr. Manafort’s Cyprus-related business activities are under scrutiny by investigators looking into his finances during and after his years as a consultant to the Party of Regions in Ukraine. He recently filed a long-overdue report with the Justice Department disclosing his lobbying efforts in Ukraine through early 2014, when his main client, President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine, was ousted in a popular uprising and fled to Russia.

The Cyprus documents detail transactions that occurred in 2012 and 2013, during the peak of Mr. Manafort’s decade-long tenure as a political consultant and investor in the former Soviet republic, where his past work remains a source of controversy. Last year, his name surfaced in a handwritten ledger showing $12.7 million designated for him by the Party of Regions, and documents recovered from his former office in Kiev suggest some of that money was routed through offshore shell companies and disguised as payment for computer hardware.

The byzantine nature of the transactions reflected in the Cyprus records obscures the reasons that money flowed among the various parties, and it is possible they were characterized as loans for another purpose, like avoiding taxes that would otherwise be owed on income or equity investments.

One of the Manafort-related debts listed in the Cyprus records, totaling $7.8 million, was owed to Oguster Management Limited, a company in the British Virgin Islands connected to Mr. Deripaska. The debtor was a Cyprus company, LOAV Advisers, that the Deripaska court complaint says was set up by Mr. Manafort to make investments with Mr. Deripaska, a billionaire close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The loan is unsecured, bears 2 percent interest and has “no specified repayment date,” according to a financial statement for LOAV.

The other debt, for $9.9 million, was owed to Lucicle Consultants, a Cyprus company that appears to have ties to a Party of Regions member of Parliament, Ivan Fursin. Lucicle, whose precise ownership is unclear, is linked to Mr. Fursin through another offshore entity, Mistaro Ventures, which is registered in St. Kitts and Nevis and listed on a government financial disclosure form that Mr. Fursin filed in Ukraine. Mistaro transferred millions to Lucicle in February 2012 shortly before Lucicle made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C., a Delaware company that Mr. Manafort previously used to buy real estate in New York. The loan to Jesand was unsecured, with a 3.5 percent interest rate, and payable on demand. 

There is no indication from the financial statements that the loans had been repaid as of the time they were filed in December 2015. The statements contain a note saying that as of January 2014, the debts and assets for Lucicle and LOAV had been assigned to “a related party,” which is not identified. The records define related parties as entities that are under common control, suggesting that the assignment did not affect the ultimate debtors and creditors. The statements also said there had been no other changes after the financial reporting period covered by them, which was for the 2013 calendar year.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska declined to comment. Mr. Deripaska appears to have stopped pursuing his court action against Mr. Manafort and his former investment partners, Rick Gates and Rick Davis, in late 2015. In addition to the $19 million he said he had invested with Mr. Manafort, Mr. Deripaska claimed he paid Mr. Manafort an additional $7.3 million in management fees.

Mr. Manafort has previously said any payments he received for his Ukraine activities were aboveboard and made via wire transfers to an American bank. The Cyprus records suggest that at least some transactions originated with shell companies in tax havens like the Seychelles and the British Virgin Islands, and passed through financial institutions on Cyprus, including Hellenic Bank and Cyprus Popular Bank.

Mr. Manafort’s name does not show up in the Cyprus records. However, hints of his dealings in Ukraine appear throughout.

A 23-page financial statement for a Cyprus shell, Black Sea View Limited, lists transactions that include one with Pericles Capital Partners. Both Black Sea View and Pericles Capital are identified in court papers filed by Mr. Deripaska in the Cayman Islands as part of the corporate structure that Mr. Manafort put together to invest in a Ukrainian telecommunications business, Black Sea Cable. The same statement also reports what are described as $9.2 million in loans received in 2012 from four other entities, including one controlled by two Seychelles companies, Intrahold A.G. and Monohold A.G., which Ukrainian authorities have asserted were involved in the looting of public assets by allies of the Yanukovych government. The Black Sea Cable business was controlled at one point by Monohold and Intrahold.

Similarly, Manafort-connected entities appear in the financial records for Lucicle Consultants, the Cyprus shell that received financing from a company associated with Mr. Fursin, the Party of Regions politician in Ukraine. Mr. Fursin did not respond to a request for comment. Lucicle received money from Black Sea View and PEM Advisers Limited, another firm identified in court papers as controlled by Mr. Manafort. It also made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C.

Jesand appears to be a conflation of Jessica and Andrea, the names of Mr. Manafort’s two daughters. In hacked text messages belonging to Andrea Manafort that were posted last year on a website used by Ukrainian hackers, Jesand is mentioned in the context of financial dealings involving the Manaforts. Jesand was used by Mr. Manafort and his daughter Andrea in 2007 to buy a Manhattan condominium for $2.5 million.

The condo was one of several expensive pieces of real estate that Mr. Manafort bought, often with cash, during and after his time in Ukraine. He also invested millions with his son-in-law, Jeffrey Yohai, who set up a business to buy and redevelop luxury properties in the Los Angeles area. The business failed amid accusations of fraud by another former investor, who claimed Mr. Yohai had exploited his connection to Mr. Manafort to raise funds.

Last year, while trying to salvage his investments with Mr. Yohai, Mr. Manafort embarked on a borrowing spree in the United States, obtaining mortgages totaling more than $20 million on properties controlled by him and his wife. The F.B.I. and the New York attorney general’s office are investigating some of Mr. Manafort’s real estate dealings, including the loans he obtained last year.