Spanish judge issued the warrants already in January, but they announced it only on May. Names include a former Prime Minister, a former Minister of Defense, the current Deputy Prime Minister and other prominent political figures.
The Audiencia Nacional, the Spanish special supreme court, issued a dozen of international arrest warrants. The Judge Jose de la Mata, along with other Spanish colleagues, is investigating over ten years on Tambovskaya and Malyshevskaya, two of Russia’s most powerful and best-known criminal organizations. whose leaders, Gennady Petrov and Aleksande Malishev, have already been arrested along with twenty other mobsters by the Spanish judges.
The request reads of “very serious matter” against each of the name on the wanted list, in connection with crimes committed in Spain, including murder, weapons and drug trafficking, extortion, and money laundering.
As in the scandal of Panama Papers, many of the closest figures to Putin are involved while the name of the Russian president remains visibly out.
But who are the names on the wanted list?
Prominent figures
Spanish issued warrants for Viktor Zubkov, former Prime Minister from 2007 to 2008, then Deputy Prime Minister until 2012 and current member of the board of Gazprom; for his son Anatoly Serdyukov, former MoD from 2007 to 2012 and current director of the military giant Rostec; for the current Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, who entered the Kremlin as head of the presidential staff during Putin’s rise in 2000; for Vladislav Reznik, head of the finance committee of the Duma and member of Putin’s party, United Russia, and considered by investigators an essential part of the financial relationship with the mob; for the former Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sobolevsky; for the former Minister of Technology Leonid Reiman and for Nikolaj Aulov, member of the General Directorate of the Interior Ministry.
Jose de la Mata wrote in his letter that Zubkov has favored the organization with some political decisions, while Reznik “performs all the necessary economic activities, such as legal or illegal insider trading and disclosure of privileged information to the highest levels in Russia in favor of Petrov’s interests”. Sobolevsky is responsible for maintaining the link between the organizations and the political apparatus “taking care of the exchange of favors” and Aulov, finally, “uses his power and trusted people to perform acts of intimidation or threat to some people who seek to harm Petrov”.
Operation Troika
The investigation was initiated by the Spanish judges Juan Carrau and Jose Grinda. In more than ten years of investigations on the presence of the Russian mafia in Spain they have collected thousands of wiretapping, scanned bank transactions, real estate and financial assets. Last June they drew up a report of almost 500 pages, the most detailed report ever written on the activities of the Russian mafia abroad, from which emerge connections between top government officials and members of the Tambovskaya and Malyshevskaya gangs, the Mafia clans that prospered in San Petersburg in the 90s, when Putin was deputy mayor of the city. And the Russian President himself is mentioned several times in the taped calls.
According to the report, the head of the group is Gennady Petrov, a shady businessman who, thanks to the close ties with the people of St. Petersburg circle, “managed to achieve a clear penetration of the state structures in his country, not only with the lawmaker Reznik but with several ministers”.
All the names on the wanted list are now resident in Russia.
@daniloeliatweet
Spanish judge issued the warrants already in January, but they announced it only on May. Names include a former Prime Minister, a former Minister of Defense, the current Deputy Prime Minister and other prominent political figures.
The Audiencia Nacional, the Spanish special supreme court, issued a dozen of international arrest warrants. The Judge Jose de la Mata, along with other Spanish colleagues, is investigating over ten years on Tambovskaya and Malyshevskaya, two of Russia’s most powerful and best-known criminal organizations. whose leaders, Gennady Petrov and Aleksande Malishev, have already been arrested along with twenty other mobsters by the Spanish judges.
