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A Russian man wanted in the U.K. for allegedly laundering money for a criminal network has a Maltese passport, according to the country’s official gazette.
Malta previously revoked his older brother’s citizenship after he was convicted in the same international cash cleaning operation.
Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has announced charges against Alexander Kuksov, 23, putting him on its “most wanted” list. The NCA alleged he was “involved with an organised crime group responsible for the transfer and movement of multi-millions of pounds of criminal cash.”
The Times of Malta, OCCRP and Amphora Media previously revealed that Alexander Kuksov’s brother, Semen, was stripped of his Maltese citizenship last October, following his five-year sentence. Semen, 25, was convicted in the U.K. of involvement in the same group, which the NCA called a “professional banking service for criminals across the world.”
The brothers, together with their father Vladimir Anatolyevich Kuksov, appear on a list of people granted citizenship in 2022 by Malta. The Kuksovs appear to have been given citizenship just weeks before Russians were excluded from passport sales to wealthy investors after the Kremlin’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In July 2022 — about six months after receiving his Malta citizenship — Semen began managing “couriers to collect criminal money and deliver the laundered money overseas,” according to a statement by the U.K.’s Crown Prosecution Service.
The NCA now alleges that Vladimir Kuksov’s younger son was also involved in the criminal money laundering operation.
Lawyers for the elder Kuksov told OCCRP in 2024 that he had “no comment to make but notes that he and his adult son have lived separate lives for some years.”
Vladimir Kuksov did not respond to a request for comment about the new allegations against his younger son, Alexander, whose whereabouts are unknown.
The Kuksovs received Maltese passports through the country’s so-called “golden passport” program, which was eliminated this year following a damning judgement by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
The Community Malta Agency, which oversaw the citizenship-by-investment program, did not respond to questions about what actions it might take following the criminal charges against Alexander.
Under Maltese law, passports can be revoked if an applicant is sentenced within seven years of becoming a citizen to a jail term of a year or longer.
The charges announced by the NCA against Alexander have not been tried in court, and the money laundering allegations against him are not proven.
When the NCA announced its “Operation Destabilise” investigation in December 2024, it said the money laundering bust was its biggest in a decade, OCCRP reported at the time. The agency said the ring run out of Moscow and Dubai had been moving billions in cryptocurrency and hard cash for criminal operations, ranging from Russian ransomware attacks to street-level drug deals in the U.K.
Several alleged members of the network were sanctioned, and the NCA said it had arrested 84 people. Those arrested included Semen Kuksov, who later pleaded guilty to laundering more than $15 million of “criminally obtained cash,” according to the U.K. prosecution service.
The Malta Police Force did not respond to questions about the U.K. case against Alexander Kuksov, and whether it was investigating the allegations against him.
