In Berlin’s already tight real estate market, paranormal phenomena were being recorded in certain wooded areas on the outskirts. The most notable case is that of Grunewald, a green district just twenty minutes from the center, where so many luxury villas were being bought and restored at stratospheric prices that led the magazine ‘Der Spiegel’ to ask who could afford them. Pulling that thread, it has been discovered that several Russian oligarchs are circumventing European sanctions and are accumulating properties in exclusive real estate sectors, using share agreements with construction companies. The councilor of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Oliver Schruoffeneger, is now demanding stricter transparency requirements for construction companies, which prevent Putin’s friends from coming to live quietly in the German capital. “We would need much stricter regulations for the sale of land and for controlling the origin of funds,” he says, “Germany is having a very difficult time with this” and Berlin has become a “safe haven” for questionable investors. An example of this colonization is the villa in the Waldtierviertel of Grunewald, where the former Russian ambassador Vladimir Kotenev lived, which later housed the German subsidiary of Gazprom and which has belonged to a St. Petersburg businessman with connections to the elite. Russian political and financial: billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, Vladimir Putin’s confidant and whose personal fortune according to Forbes amounted to about $2.5 billion in July 2018. Related News Standard If the United States aims to deploy North Korean troops in the Russian region from Kursk Miriam González Ukrainian Intelligence estimates that Pyongyang’s military will be sent to combat zones imminently. Russian investors in the area also include Duma deputy Boris Paikin, affected by EU sanctions and who He worked for a subsidiary of Gazprom, which owned a villa and apartment blocks in the area. An authorized representative Paikin, together with his mother, ran a chain of gambling halls in Germany. And the same list of investors also includes Jurij Bukin, former director of the Rotenberg business empire, who owns a property in Waldtierviertel, also very close to the Wildentensteig. Irina Wirganskaya, daughter of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, In 2020, it acquired a property in Wildentensteig for 4.8 million euros. This is how, in the Waldtierviertel, in the Grunewald district of Schmargendorf, a colony of oligarchs has emerged, most of whom have hidden their identity through share agreements with the owners of the land. Waldtierviertel was urbanized after the Second World War with the goal of quickly building housing for American officers. After the withdrawal of the United States troops from Berlin, 30 years ago, the German State sold numerous properties there to investors who managed the single-family homes or small apartment blocks until the unavoidable Russian offers have now arrived. Since the land registry offices in Berlin still operate analogically and not digitally, it appears that only directly identified natural persons are monitored, but not those behind the ownership companies. This has allowed, for example, Rotenberg to own with his daughter and brother Boris a property that includes a luxury villa next to the exclusive Pücklerstrasse street. His daughter even registered her residence there for a time, despite being subject to sanctions, although she now declares that she lives in Moscow. A manager from the Rotenberg empire also bought a villa in the area in 2012 and is still registered as a resident in Berlin. Notaries in the German capital are subject to a “notarization ban” for houses and land that have been proven to belong to a person on the EU sanctions list, according to the College of Notaries, which has put online a list of the names of its members. Luxury villas, however, are registered in the property registry in the name of their wives, daughters or mothers, without any further verification apparently being carried out. In other cases, mysterious shell companies appear in Cyprus and other countries that leave sanctions behind. The district administration does not allow a selective search of names in official archives for data protection reasons, argues district construction councilor Fabian Schmitz-Grethlein, it would only be possible if, for example, German customs asked for help due to a ” reasonable suspicion.”Another question for Berlin’s tax administration is whether Putin’s friends are really obliged to pay taxes, which depends on whether the villas are not only an investment, but also available as a place of residence. And another interesting point is that, whoever is subject to sanctions, these assets must be frozen, which cannot be sold. Rotenberg, however, got rid of a luxury villa for a good price. In the company that owned it, his children received his shares and then the company sold the property.
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