Corruption case reopened against Mikhail Fridman due to new evidence
The Spanish National Court of Justice has reopened the investigation into the alleged involvement of Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman and his team in the deliberate bankruptcy of the Spanish corporation Zed WorldWide, the Deutsche Welle reports.
At the request of the prosecutor’s office, Judge Manuel
García Castellón canceled his own decision of December 2020, when he closed the
criminal case in question against Fridman.
According to the press office of the National Court, the
prosecutor’s office insisted on continuing the case in connection with the
discovery of a number of documents, including e-mails that testify to Fridman’s
involvement in the orchestration of the bankruptcy of Zed. The Russian oligarch
was a shareholder and creditor for Zed, and according to the court documents
had ‘a privileged position for any type of decision in the group’.
The accusation of Fridman in the Zed case was sanctioned by
court at the request of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office back in 2019,
who suspected that Mr Fridman broke the country’s criminal code in 2016 in an
attempt to take control of Zed by causing its insolvency. In a submission to
the court, prosecutor José Grinda González described the alleged attack on Zed
WorldWide as a “raid”, noting that “the word ‘raider’ is used in the realm of
organised Russian crime to describe the theft of a business “either through
violence, killing or economic strangulation.”
After Judge Castellón dismissed Fridman from the case, the
prosecutor refuted the reasons given by the judge in this regard, in
particular, the thesis that it was not possible to demonstrate that the Russian
magnate was using Vimpelcom, a partner of ‘Alfa Group’, and it was controlled
by Mikhail Fridman through ‘LetterOne’.
In his brief, the prosecutor provided a battery of evidence
that would show that the Russian partners with participation in Zed sought to
suffocate the technology company. The international auditing company PwC,
according to the prosecutor’s office, discovered violations in the joint
company Tema, founded by Zed WorldWide and Fridman’s company Vimpelcom, back in
2015. The Russians allegedly secretly withdrew capital from Tema, and then
unexpectedly severed all business ties with Zed. The company then lost half of
her income, could not service its loans and eventually went bankrupt.
It adds to this that the oligarch’s accusation is based not
only on the formal relationship with Vimpelcom, but on the fact that Fridman
was aware of the operations that led to the insolvency of Zed and participated
in making the relevant decisions. Prosecutorial documents, partly published by
the Spanish edition of El Confidencial, show that Friedman, as a partner of
Zed, “personally supervised the actions that led to the corporation’s
bankruptcy in 2016.” There are instant messages presented to the court in which
Zed’s CEO Javier Pérez Dolset speaks with Russian directors of Vimpelcom about
the power of Fridman.
In addition to this, there was a sequence of actions aimed
at “the pressure and economic suffocation” of Zed developed by Fridman’s
Russian partners, with whom an “illegal strategy of interruption of dividend
payments of Russian subsidiaries was planned that led to a total lack of
liquidity “, indicated the prosecutor.
The situation of corporate paralysis, the lack of liquidity
and the blocking of external investors led the Spanish company to insolvency,
which led to the filing of an application bankruptcy for Zed WorldWide on June
30, 2016. Four months later, Fridman’s
people bought it for €20 million, ‘much less than its value (€1.2 bln) when
blockage maneuvers controlled by Mr. Fridman started,’ claimed the prosecutors.
The investigation is not exhausted at this time since there
is an ongoing rogatory commission with the Netherlands and at least two
diligence checks in regard to Zed’s PWC audit and the statement of the former
Vimpelcom business development manager.
Comments
Post a Comment