UAE royals helped OneCoin kingpin Ruja Ignatova in promoting large properties in Dubai

Whereas sitting in Dubai, an organization named AG Mena, which works as agent for Dominica in promoting citizenship and diplomatic place has been publishing ads and sponsored posts on social media luring Bangladesh residents in laundering cash, there’s stunning details about a infamous rip-off racket offloading properties in Dubai with the lively collaboration of members of the UAE royal household.

Based on media studies, so-called Crypto Queen Ruja Ignatova, kingpin of OneCoin who swindled over 4 billion of {dollars} by dishonest individuals and been in FBI’s Most Needed record has succeeded in promoting properties value tens of millions of {dollars} with the direct assist of numerous influential figures within the royal household. Her safety adviser, Frank Schneider, who was below home arrest in France battling extradition to the US additionally has offered his properties in the same method. Schneider escaped home arrest and was lacking for years, though lately it has been revealed that he at present is in Indonesia’s Aceh province – most probably through the use of a unique identify and passport issued by one of many Caribbean nations.

Based on OCCRP investigation, a number of of Frank Schneider’s former associates in one of many largest cryptocurrency scams in historical past have been going through prison costs, and a few have been on the run. But when the previous Luxembourg intelligence officer was involved that the online was closing in on him too, it didn’t have an effect on his train routine.

A health app recorded Schneider’s March 21, 2020, bike trip across the circumference of the posh Palm Jumeirah improvement in Dubai.

Schneider had bought an condo there for US$2 million in early 2018.

Ruja Ignatova, the mastermind behind the huge OneCoin crypto rip-off, had purchased a penthouse in 2015 in the identical gated neighborhood – a synthetic array of islands formed like a palm tree inside a round halo.

Ignatova and Schneider had begun working collectively after Schneider left his job as a director of operations for Luxembourg’s spy service, and began his personal company intelligence agency. Schneider allegedly aided in “evading legislation enforcement investigations” and helped in “managing the scheme’s proceeds”, in line with a US indictment in opposition to him.

By the point Schneider took his mid-day bike trip in 2020, Ignatova had disappeared – some studies say she was murdered –– and OneCoin had collapsed, costing buyers over US$4 billion.

Schneider had not but been publicly linked to the scandal when he bought his condo in 2018, a 12 months after OneCoin collapsed. Nevertheless, leaked Dubai property information present his and Ignatova’s properties have been offered after that they had already been charged with prison offenses following OneCoin’s collapse, elevating questions over Dubai’s enforcement of anti-money laundering guidelines.

Ignatova had bought her 500-square-meter condo by way of a shell firm. A title deed obtained by OCCRP’s accomplice, paper path media, exhibits the corporate offered the property in December 2019, by which period Ignatova was needed by prosecutors in New York.

The OneCoin disaster was well-known by the point the properties have been offered off. Quite a few media studies quoted victims describing intimately how Ignatova had duped them into shopping for her faux cryptocurrency. The BBC traced Ignatova’s speedy rise and spectacular demise in a well-liked podcast launched in September 2019 known as The Lacking Cryptoqueen, which included scores of interviews with victims.

Ignatova and Schneider have been in a position to perform the actual property offers regardless of a United Arab Emirates legislation in place since 2019 that requires realtors to run background checks on consumers and sellers of properties, and report any suspicious transactions to authorities.

“You must know the purchasers you’re coping with”, stated Henry Wyad, Investigations Analyst at Themis, a UK- and UAE-based agency that helps shoppers handle monetary crime dangers. The legislation is “express” about this, and clearly covers each vendor and purchaser, he added.

This permissiveness is no surprise, in line with Alexander Yearsley, managing director of Edinburgh-based Martello Threat, who has carried out monetary investigations and forensic auditing on Dubai.

He stated an absence of enforcement had helped earn the UAE a status as a protected place to stash the proceeds of prison exercise.

“You’ve bought the truth that there’s an unbelievably mild contact to regulation – if you wish to name it regulation. You actually can get away with no matter you need”, Yearsley stated. “If the value is true, the politics don’t hassle them”.

UAE officers — together with on the ministries of inside, economic system, and justice — and Dubai Police didn’t reply to detailed questions from reporters concerning the sale of properties belonging to Ignatova and Schneider. UAE embassies within the UK and Norway despatched a short remark saying that the nation “works carefully with worldwide companions to disrupt and deter all types of illicit finance”.

Based on Dubai information, Frank Schneider’s most up-to-date UAE ID information exhibits his residency was approved by way of July 2023, which might have granted him lawful entry into Dubai on the time he escaped French custody.

An FBI spokesperson informed OCCRP that Schneider “stays a fugitive”. However journalists found new clues linking Schneider to Indonesia, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US.

Schneider appeared as director of an Indonesia-registered firm known as White Orchid Administration, described in registration paperwork as being arrange in March 2020 to purchase, promote, lease, and function actual property.

On September 8, 2023 – months after Schneider disappeared – the shares of the corporate have been transferred to his spouse and son, and he left his place as director.

Ignatova too has disappeared with out hint. Whereas OCCRP’s Bulgarian media accomplice, Fowl, reported in February 2023 that Ignatova was possible murdered, her demise has by no means been confirmed. In 2022, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation declared Ignatova, who was born in Bulgaria and have become a German citizen, considered one of its most needed fugitives.

An FBI spokesperson stated in an e mail that the company “is conscious of media studies relating to Ruja Ignatova’s demise, nevertheless, till there’s documented proof that she is lifeless, the FBI considers Ignatova as alive, and he or she stays on the FBI Prime 10 Most Needed Record”.

Based on an investigative report revealed in Blitz in October 2023, though Ruja Ignatova is seen by Federal Investigation Company (FBI) as “lacking cryptoqueen” or a fugitive, in actuality she has been dwelling in the UK below safety of a number of mighty politicians belonging to the Labour Occasion, whereas she is having fun with authorized companies from numerous front-ranking UK attorneys. Final week she got here out of hiding to make a proper declare on a £13.5 million townhouse in London, whereas the UK authorities neither arrested her nor introduced the matter to consideration of Interpol or FBI.

In the meantime, in line with info, a UK legislation agency named Locke Lord supplied its companies to Ruja Ignatova lengthy after she went lacking. A letter admitted in proof on the US trial of ex-employee Mark Scott exhibits that on July 12, 2018 James Channo, a accomplice on the London department of the agency, wrote to Ruja about her UK properties.

“We consider it will be important that we revisit the style wherein you maintain your actual property pursuits within the UK,” he wrote. The letter, addressed to Ruja at a Sofia deal with.

A press release offered by Locke Lord and James Channo stated the letter was a proposal of authorized companies “in a typical kind”, that it was disclosed by Locke Lord to US prosecutors, and that no work was achieved for Ruja because of this.

One fascinating line within the letter confirmed what BBC sources had been telling – that it wasn’t simply the penthouse Ruja Ignatova had purchased within the UK. On the fifth ground of Abbots Home there’s a much less fancy two-bedroom condo that ex-porter James informed BBC Ruja Ignatova’s bodyguards would keep in.

UK information present the proprietor of 11 Abbots Home can also be a Guernsey shell firm, Abbots Property Restricted, and that it too is registered at Aquitaine’s deal with.

The smaller flat was additionally purchased in 2016 – for £1.9m. Her identify was once more saved off the paperwork, however our sources say she was the one behind the acquisition.

Requested by the BBC about its dealings with Ruja Ignatova, Aquitaine stated it had no remark to make.

BBC report stated, after she disappeared, 11 Abbots Home appears to have taken on a unique perform, serving as a secret storage facility, which its sources informed at one level that home was containing two giant safes.

Since her disappearance in 2017, Blitz in a variety of unique studies had had offered details about Ruja Ignatova proudly owning properties in the UK, Dubai and a number of other Caribbean island international locations.

Based on a supply, Ruja Ignatova succeeded in shopping for Dominica citizenship by giving “additional money” to Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, whereas additionally it is learnt that Ruja has made vital funding in numerous enterprise ventures in Dominica and different Caribbean nations.

In the meantime, Ignatova’s OneCoin co-founder, Karl Sebastian Greenwood, pleaded responsible to wire fraud and cash laundering. In September 2023 he was sentenced to twenty years in jail, and ordered to forfeit US$300 million.

As first revealed by the BBC’s The Lacking Cryptoqueen podcast, Greenwood additionally held Dubai property, bought earlier than OneCoin launched. Information present that his villa was valued at US$5.4 million when it was put in the marketplace in 2022 as a part of an unrelated lawsuit.

Total, the findings present how Dubai stays a horny vacation spot each for foreigners who need to put money into actual property in a low-tax jurisdiction and for cash launderers who profit from some native actual property brokers’ “no-questions-asked” coverage. Actual property investments additionally permit foreigners to acquire UAE residency in the event that they purchase a number of properties value a minimum of US$545,000.

In addition to the OneCoin fraudsters, the 2022 information reveal that dozens of criminals, together with mafia bosses and people sanctioned for financing al-Qaida and different terrorist teams, purchased luxurious flats, industrial actual property and parking heaps within the Persian Gulf’s monetary hub. Amongst them are Daniel Kinahan, a former boxing promoter who’s accused by Irish and US authorities of operating a lethal world drug cartel from the UAE, and his spouse, Caoimhe Robinson.

The dataset lists passport numbers, constructing names, room descriptions and different particulars of flats and industrial properties owned by people and corporations. ICIJ and reporters collaborating within the Dubai Unlocked investigation cross-referenced the property information with the UAE registry of sale transactions from 1990 to 2023.

The information additionally present that even people who’re the topic of an Interpol pink discover — a request for a rustic to provisionally arrest somebody — could be property homeowners in Dubai. For instance, Isabel dos Santos, the rich daughter of Angola’s former ruler, is listed because the co-owner of a two-bedroom condo close to the Dubai waterfront. Since 2019, a minimum of three international locations have frozen Isabel dos Santos’ belongings. Dos Santos, who denies wrongdoing, is banned from coming into the US as a consequence of her alleged “involvement in vital corruption” and was lately charged in Angola with 12 crimes, together with embezzlement and fraud.

Quickly after, the European Fee sought to take away the UAE from the EU’s personal record of nations at excessive danger of cash laundering, however the European Parliament blocked that proposal in April, citing “necessary and up to date” proof that the UAE facilitates monetary crimes and the evasion of sanctions.

In contrast to different notoriously secretive jurisdictions such because the British Virgin Islands, the UAE’s function as a vital army ally of the U.S. and a bulwark in opposition to terrorism within the Center East have shielded the nation from a larger diploma of scrutiny by Western powers.