Wealthy Armenians Join the Dubai Land Rush
Current and former members of parliament, tax officials, honorary diplomats, and other Armenian officials have purchased expensive properties in Dubai — raising questions about how they could afford them.
Current and former members of parliament, tax officials, honorary diplomats, and other Armenian officials have purchased expensive properties in Dubai — raising questions about how they could afford them.
An $8 million villa on Dubai’s luxurious Palm Jumeirah has been controlled for years by the family of Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s former first deputy prime minister. Its ownership structure shows how the wealthy use offshores to obscure their assets.
Dubai’s secretive offshore financial system seems to play a role in almost every international corruption scandal. Why?
A major leak of privately collected property data in Dubai has revealed the enormous wealth amassed by a flamboyant British financier now under investigation in one of the world’s biggest tax evasion scandals.
The Emirates Hills are known as the “Beverly Hills of Dubai.” It’s an exclusive housing estate where gleaming marble-clad villas, overlooking the perfectly manicured greens of a signature golf course, fetch up to US $52 million.
A leak of private property data in Dubai has shed new light on how the proceeds of a notorious US$ 1.3 billion oil deal involving Royal Dutch Shell may have been spent on luxury properties in the secretive Arab Emirate.
In March 2011, investigators in Kyrgyzstan arrested a man in the outskirts of the capital Bishkek. At his apartment they found $20,000 in cash, a diverse spectrum of weapons, and 2.5 kilos of drugs, including one package neatly labeled “To my brother Kamchy.”
Khadem Al Qubaisi is an Emirati businessman who, while in charge of two Abu Dhabi state companies, enriched himself and his associates by diverting billions of dollar of public funds using a fleet of businesses and shell companies across the world.
Drug trafficker and Russian organized crime figure Vasily Khristoforov was designated by the US Treasury in 2017 as a representative of the “Thieves in Law,” a Eurasian transnational criminal network.
Guerman Goutorov is the chairman of the Canada-based Streit Group, one of the world’s largest private armored vehicle manufacturers.
Hossein Pournaghshband, an Iranian citizen, was sanctioned by the United States in January 2016 for allegedly providing material assistance to Iran’s ballistic missile program.
Kambiz Mahmoud Rostamian, an Iranian citizen, was sanctioned by the United States in February 2016 for allegedly providing “financial, material, technological, or other support” to two Iranian conglomerates involved in his country’s ballistic missile program.
Mohamed Tajideen is the son of Kassim Tajideen, a Lebanese-Belgian citizen the United States has called an “important financial contributor to Hezbollah.”
For two years, Othman El Ballouti, allegedly one of Europe’s major cocaine traffickers, has been on the run from Belgian police, who suspect him to be hiding in Dubai. Now a leaked database of real estate information shows the alleged drug lord owns property in the emirate.
Sami Bebawi was a vice president of Montreal-based engineering firm, SNC-Lavalin, from 2000 to 2006. He stands accused of fraud, extortion, bribing a foreign official, obstruction of justice, possession of the proceeds of a crime, and money laundering.
Suleiman Marouf is a Syrian businessman who has been called Bashar al-Assad’s “fixer.”
Adnan Khamis Abuzanat, a Minnesota businessman, was involved in a health care fraud scheme that cheated the state of Minnesota out of US$ 120,000 in welfare benefits, according to the FBI.
Hassein Eduardo Figueroa Gomez is the son of an established drug trafficker.
On the night of Dec. 11, 2013 in Prague’s Old Town, four men jumped out of a Porsche Cayenne on Kaprova Street and attacked the security guards of the COCO Cafe Cocktail Bar.