Greetings from Sarajevo, 

The second half of July was a busy fortnight for the OCCRP network. We published five investigations, including two that expose a trove of secret assets tied to a Russian banker.

Here's our latest: 

NEW #RUSSIANASSETTRACKER

🇷🇺 Putin’s “Piggy Bank,” Its Sanctioned Chairman, and Their European Assets 🇷🇺 — We reveal how banker Andrei Kostin and the Russian state lender he runs, VTB, are tied to luxury properties, offshore companies, and extensive investments in Europe.

In two investigations, we exposed the complex methods used to obscure Kostin’s business interests: 

Story 1. Swanky Hotel in Austria: Hotel Tannenhof in Austria’s elite St. Anton am Arlberg ski area is supposedly owned by two married Austrian hoteliers.

But corporate documents obtained by OCCRP tell a different story.

From 2010 to 2015, during the time the couple was said to have owned the resort, Hotel Tannenhof was actually owned by VTB, which has been dubbed Putin’s “piggy bank.” 

In 2015, the ownership of the hotel’s Cyprus-registered holding company was passed to another Cyprus company, which then sold a stake to a third Cyprus company. 

Until recently, Cyprus was a notoriously opaque jurisdiction, meaning that whoever set up this complex structure could feel confident that the true owners would never be discovered.

But in June, at long last, the Mediterranean nation opened its registry of beneficial owners to the public. OCCRP journalists were some of the first in the world to request information from the registry.

It wasn’t easy, requiring an in-person visit to Nicosia, but it paid off. We discovered that 50% of the hotel was owned by Eric Whyte, a Canadian who appears to have spent years fronting for Andrei Kostin. Read the full story.

This brings us to our second story…

Story 2. Kostin’s Canadian Proxy: Eric Whyte spent his teenage years in Moscow after his father, a member of the Communist Party, went to work there in the 1960s. Today, the younger Whyte seems to have fully embraced crony capitalism: He owns companies registered in secretive offshore jurisdictions that hold luxury properties across Russia and Europe linked to Kostin.

Below are some of the assets that we traced to Whyte, colored in red. Read the full story.

 🌐 The Big Picture: Reporters unraveled an incredibly complex web of companies and proxies to expose valuable assets in the heart of Europe that appear to be owned by a sanctioned Russian oligarch. It’s unclear if EU authorities were aware of these assets’ connection to Kostin. 

Follow this newsletter to see if the bloc takes action against the Russian banker’s proxy. 

MORE NEW INVESTIGATIONS

🇰🇷 Korean Doomsday Cult Gets Rich in Fiji With Government Help 🇫🇯 — South Korean sect Grace Road Church believes Judgment Day is near. It views the Pacific country of Fiji as the post-apocalyptic promised land.

But despite repeated accusations of abuses, including ritual beatings and forcing members to perform unpaid labor, Grace Road Church received millions in loans from the state-backed Fiji Development Bank. This is the first investigation produced by OCCRP’s brand-new Pacific Island team. Read the full story.

🌐 The Big Picture: If you’ve spent time in Fiji, you probably noticed the many businesses there owned by Grace Road Church, which has long been seen as having a cozy relationship with Fiji’s government. But until now, no one has examined these rumors. 

⚡ Impact: Opposition parties in Fiji have called for an official inquiry into the operations of Grace Road Church after OCCRP’s investigation.

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🦜 The Bird Smuggling Industry 🦜 — Forget cocaine or guns. Smuggling parrots and other rare birds is a far more lucrative trade, according to a courier for an organized crime ring.

When a single bird can rake in €30,000, traffickers don’t mind if most die while being transported from their rainforest homes to Europe. OCCRP spoke to a man who worked for an organized crime ring, driving birds around in the trunk of his car and selling them to collectors and even supposed conservationists.

Over the course of several interviews, he explained the inner workings of this illicit trade. Read the full story.

🌐  The Big Picture: Although there’s an international system that regulates how rare birds can be traded and transported, experts say it’s breathtakingly easy to smuggle wildlife, even within the European Union. Smugglers often use fake permits or reuse the same ones many times. Border officials can rarely spot the differences between the permits — or between one bird and another.

The result is a system full of loopholes often exploited by traffickers, who can rake in “astronomical” profits, according to the former smuggler.  

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🇻🇪 Properties Linked to a Venezuelan Spy and Alleged Drug Trafficker — Meet Pedro Luis Martin Olivares, a Venezuelan ex-intelligence official who has been indicted on drug trafficking charges by a Florida court and sanctioned by the U.S.

His family also owns real estate in one of Barcelona’s fanciest neighborhoods. Read the full story.

🌐  The Big Picture: This investigation found luxury property linked to Martin that Spanish authorities were unaware of.

THE OCCRP NETWORK

🇭🇺 Direkt36: Our Hungarian member center reports on a news website co-owned by the ex-wife of Antal Rogán, a powerful minister who runs Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s cabinet.

Despite what appears to be low traffic, the website, Top World News, has reported impressive profits that one media industry expert had a difficult time explaining. 

🇷🇺 IStories: Our Russian partner speaks with an anthropologist about the tsunami of myths being spread in Russia about Ukraine and NATO countries, including food aid being filled with needles and Ukrainians castrating Russian prisoners.  

🇹🇲 Turkmen.News: Our member center in Turkmenistan obtained a copy of a decree by former President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow approving a $214.7-million contract with a French company to demolish one of the country’s largest government buildings, and build a business center in its place.