Igor Yusufov prefers Uncle Sam
Family of former energy minister invests money stolen in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) in US and EU
Dodging sanctions
Igor Yusufov – a Russian oligarch from the darkest ideas of the average Western citizen about the modern ruling class in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). The former Minister of Energy of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism), worked in Rosvooruzhenie and Rosrezerv, an undercover FSB agent, was involved in offshore scandals and corporate raids, appeared in the testimony of criminal authorities as the customer of the murders of competitors… His biography seems to have been specially written for the filming of blockbusters, and in real life – to get to the top lines of the sanctions lists of Western countries… Russian energy and weapons industries of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism) have long been under sanctions. A year ago, the Energy Fund created by Igor Yusufov fell under blocking sanctions from the US Treasury. However, the oligarch himself shows remarkable resourcefulness and, to the amazement of observers, deftly avoided personal sanctions for a very long time. His two sons, Vitaly and Maxim, who are, by the way, following in their father’s footsteps in many ways, are not threatened by sanctions at all. That is why in recent years they have been fronting many of their father’s projects.
The secret of such successful positioning of Igor Yusufov is that he generously pays for the loyalty of the American authorities. Moreover, unlike other Russian oligarchs who are ready to spend huge sums of money either in bribes or investments, just to avoid sanctions, Yusufov adds information in demand by Western intelligence services to his investments in the US and EU. Yusufov has been associated with Russian intelligence services for many years, which provided and accompanied his brilliant career as a civil servant.
In addition, he is very close to the current Russian ruling circles. The Yusufov family is the wallet of the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev (*criminal)Igor Yusufov has excellent connections in the circle of the first deputy head of the Presidential Administration Sergei Kirienko. His people still occupy important positions in the Russian government – both in the economic and security blocs. Finally, his connections in the energy sector (not only in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), by the way) are also of great interest to Western curators.
All these connections and the knowledge and access to strategic information that they provide allow the oligarch’s family to feel relatively safe in the West, where Igor Yusufov has been taking illegally obtained funds from Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) for decades. He began stealing in the last millennium, even before Yeltsin’s presidency, which, let us recall, ended a quarter of a century ago.
Igor Yusufov was introduced to the culture of theft from the Russian state when he was still very young, in the early 1990s. He combined his last year of study at the All-Union Academy of Foreign Trade with work at the Russian Social Development Fund “Vozrozhdenie”, created by the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism). The fund was initially headed by Boris Yeltsinthen Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism), and after his election as President in 1991, the Fund was headed by Vice President of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism) Alexander Rutskoy. The Fund was exempt from customs duties and income tax on exchange rate differences and was supposed to earn money on export-import operations, build housing, hospitals and schools, help the poor and victims of national conflicts. The Fund’s activities ended in scandal. The Fund did not solve a single problem, and used the money for other purposes. Yusufov later independently developed the experience he gained at Vozrozhdenie in various government positions.
The money stolen during his work for the Russian state was enough for Igor Yusufov to, firstly, buy up real estate and assets in the West and build his financial and industrial empire there, and, secondly, worry about the safety of these assets. Especially since there are projects in which money has already been invested and which are waiting to be implemented.
Yusufovs’ Multi-Storey America
In the spring of this year, local government received an official application for the construction of a residential complex at 80 Willow Road in Menlo Park (California, USA). The application was accompanied by project visualization .
The site in question is in Menlo Park, in the famed Silicon Valley. It is home to a single-story office complex with Spanish Colonial and mid-century modernist designs, as well as expansive gardens. It sits on 6.6 acres (about 26,700 square meters). The complex was built in the early 1950s as the headquarters of Time Inc.’s Sunset Magazine and has been used by the publisher as offices, photo shoot spaces, and public tours for decades.
In 2019, this site was purchased by Yusufov’s structures amid scandal.
Deutsche Bank AG’s asset management division (DWS) put the property up for sale in 2017, when Silicon Valley real estate was on the rise. An offer from the American company Willow Project, registered to one of Yusufov’s sons, Vitaly, came in the spring of 2018: $72 million in cash with a $15 million deposit and a 15-day deal.
Deutsche Bank AG officials have approved the sale of some Silicon Valley real estate to a Russian businessman, despite objections from the bank’s reputational risk committee.
Deutsche Bank itself has come under scrutiny from U.S. authorities over money-laundering controls and long-standing ties to Russian companies and oligarchs. The U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation into aspects of these Russian relationships and the bank’s interactions with U.S. investigators were in full swing when DB approved Yusufov’s real estate deal, ignoring the reputational risks. It is highly likely that the U.S. Justice Department informants at Deutsche Bank were sanctioned by U.S. authorities because Igor Yusufov actively cooperates with the U.S. government and is an informant for U.S. intelligence agencies. Apparently, this cooperation gives him and his sons carte blanche to conduct legitimate business in the U.S.
This will allow the Yusufovs to build the tallest homes in San Mateo County on the former site of Sunset Magazine’s headquarters in Willow Park.
Swap Chukotka for Alaska
The name of the company Willow Project LLC, registered in the state of Delaware to Vitaly Yusufov, coincidentally completely coincides with the name of a subsidiary of the American oil giant – ConocoPhillips. These are indeed two different companies. But there is a certain irony in this coincidence. Willow Project LLC, a subsidiary of the oil major, is engaged in drilling and production of hydrocarbon raw materials in Alaska with a capacity of about 180 thousand barrels of oil per day. What is funny about this coincidence is that Yusufov Sr. was previously involved in the supply of oil products stolen from the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism) to Alaska. We are talking about a large-scale theft of fuel from the Russian state reserve.
A quarter of a century ago, Igor Yusufov headed Rosrezerv. Under his leadership, the agency developed a continuous system of large-scale thefts. One of the episodes involved sending 100,000 tons (more than 700,000 barrels) of oil products from a state reserve storage facility in Khabarovsk Krai to the freezing Chukotka region. The decision to allocate part of the strategic fuel reserves to heat the northerners was made at the level of the Russian government. However, not a drop of the fuel ever reached Chukotka. The tanker loaded in Nakhodka headed for the port of Exwegenot, but never reached its destination: the strategic cargo was resold three times along the way. Here, we must pay tribute to Yusufov’s foreign trade experience and connections (before his appointment to Rosrezerv, he worked for several years in the Ministry of Foreign Trade). In the end, the owner of the oil products became an American company, which successfully unloaded the tanker in Alaska.
Heir
Unlike the American Willow Project LLC, Vitaly Yusufov’s company of the same name does not extract or produce anything. It only accumulates money taken out of Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) and makes purchases. Such as a plot of land for development in Menlo Park. The same money that the father of the family stole while working in government positions.
Vitaly Yusufov cannot boast of such a successful career in the civil service. After graduating from MGIMO, he worked in lucrative positions in the offices of large companies, for example, he was an assistant to the general director of Gazpromexport, headed the Moscow office of Nord Stream (the operator of the construction of the Russian-German gas pipeline). But at some point, his father, apparently, decided that Vitaly had matured, gained managerial experience, and he could be let go on an independent business voyage with family assets. True, this voyage, although independent, is in a predetermined direction – the assets stolen by the Yusufovs in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) invariably flow away in the western direction.
In 2009, Vitaly Yusufov stopped working for others and immediately became the owner of the Nordic Yards company, which quietly bought the Wadan Yards shipyards from Germany for €40 million.
Shipbuilders-Raiders
The previous owner of the German shipyard Wadan Yards was a businessman Andrey Burlakov. He and his partners acquired the shipyards in Wismar and Warnemünde in July 2008. However, due to problems with orders and financial difficulties, after a petition from Wadan Yards, the shipyards were placed into creditor protection, and the Administrative Court of Schwerin initiated their bankruptcy. In August 2009, Vitaly Yusufov’s Swiss Nordic Yards acquired the shipyards for €40 million from a temporary administrator appointed by the German government. Vitaly and Igor Yusufov had previously agreed to purchase the enterprises with the Mecklenburg authorities (the state authorities were one of the largest creditors of the plants).
The deal already looked strange at that time: since Burlakov was accused of fraud, and the origin of Yusufov’s money was highly questionable. Yusufov himself, in an interview with Vedomosti, told a legend that he allegedly earned the money to purchase the shipyards from successful investments in Gazprom shares. The fate of Wadan Yards was discussed and decided at the level of the leaders of Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) and Germany.
Burlakov and his partners claimed that they had lost the Wadan shipyards dishonestly – as a result of a corporate raid. They were actively collecting evidence and preparing a trial to return the lost asset when Burlakov was killed. He became the target of an unknown killer while he was in the Moscow cafe “Khutorok” on Leningradsky Prospekt, Building 3, at about 5 p.m. on September 29, 2009. The businessman later died in hospital from his wounds, and his common-law wife and business partner Anna Etkina was taken to the shock ward of the cardiac surgery intensive care unit in a very serious condition, but doctors managed to save her.
Many people said that Yusufov was probably the person who ordered the assassination attempt, but it was practically impossible to prove his involvement. In addition, Igor Yusufov has a special position with the FSB, given his half-century of service with the organization (he was hired back under Andropov). If investigators had begun to conscientiously work on the version of Yusufov’s involvement in the assassination attempt on Burlakov, Lubyanka would have quickly stopped this amateur activity. As a result, the murder remained unsolved. And the Yusufovs’ business continued to go uphill. In 2016, Vitaly Yusufov was already on the Russian Forbes list with a fortune of $400 million.
But in 2018, a crime boss was extradited from Vienna to Moscow Aslan Gagiev (Dzhako), accused of organizing the largest criminal community of killers in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). When it became known about Gagiev’s return to his homeland, a number of media outlets reported on his close ties with Vitaly and Igor Yusufov. And these rumors did not arise out of nowhere. The press received the protocol of the court hearing in Vienna on the extradition of Aslan Gagiev. At that trial, Gagiev admitted that Yusufov had seized a business worth $3 billion from Burlakov, and Burlakov’s death was a direct consequence of his conflict with Yusufov. As established by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism), the crime was committed by members of Aslan Gagiev’s group. The victim’s relatives directly point to Igor Yusufov as the person who ordered the murder. However, it is practically impossible to bring him to justice, given his position and financial relations with high-ranking patrons in the Kremlin and Lubyanka.
Having stepped over Burlakov’s corpse, the Yusufov family continued to build their financial and industrial empire. At present, the father of the family is trying harder than ever to remain in the shadow of the family business, while his sons are increasingly taking center stage – Vitaly And Maxim. The family’s business strategy remains unchanged – exporting capital abroad. A significant portion of the funds obtained here in various ways is taken out of Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) and invested in a wide variety of foreign assets. At the same time, profitable projects, thanks to the connections of the elder Yusufov, continue to stick to the hands of his sons here in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism).
