MADRID, 23 Ene. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Civil Guard has arrested a British citizen at the Madrid-Barajas airport, at the request of the US authorities, accused of leading a business network through which they tried to hide under a pseudonym the yacht ‘Tango’, one of the assets intervened by the sanctions against Russia after the war in Ukraine.
The investigators calculate that the detainee and his company earned approximately more than 800,000 euros for the administration of the yacht ‘Tango’, which was already searched in April last year by agents of the Civil Guard, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations. (HIS) of the USA.
Then documentation was intervened that has now allowed the arrest of this British citizen. The ship is one of those that was retained in Palma de Mallorca for its links with the Russian magnate Viktor Vekselberg after the start of the war in Ukraine.
The arrest occurred at the Adolfo Suárez-Madrid Barajas Airport in the capital when the agents detected the presence of this person. He is accused of committing fraud and money laundering in favor of a Russian citizen and owner of a Russian business conglomerate with interests in the oil, energy and telecommunications sectors, as reported by the Civil Guard.
The US Department of Justice announced this past weekend that it had filed charges against Richard Masters, a citizen of the United Kingdom residing in Mallorca, for skipping sanctions against Russia.
The detained British citizen is the owner and administrator of a commercial company based in Palma de Mallorca (Balearic Islands) dedicated to the maintenance and provision of administrative services to boats.
Among its clients and managed vessels was a yacht owned by a Russian citizen who is prohibited from operating in markets and with US financial and commercial entities. This yacht was used by said Russian citizen and his family environment.
According to the Civil Guard, the company of the detainee provided services aimed at satisfying the personal needs of the owner and users of the yacht with knowledge of the existence of existing sanctions and prohibitions on this person.
To get around them, he designated the yacht with a pseudonym so as not to arouse suspicion. In this way, he provided services and goods to the yacht itself, to its owner and its users, for a value of more than 485 thousand US dollars, according to the US authorities.
Likewise, the detainee and his company received considerable profits by approving and coordinating the yacht’s annual operating budget, which states that a large part of said budget was allocated to the fees paid to the yacht’s management company itself.
The Civil Guard has reported that ‘Operation Mangolia’ is aimed at aid provided in favor of a Russian citizen subject to a sanction in April 2018 by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), of the US Department of the Treasury, after the annexation of the Crimean peninsula by the Russian Federation in 2014. The sanction was renewed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
After the April registration on the yacht, sources from the Civil Guard announced that the objective was to corroborate the identity of the owner of the boat, 78 meters long and valued at more than 90 million euros, paralyzed since days before in the shipyard Palm.
According to information from a year ago, the yacht has the flag of the Cook Islands and is registered in the name of a company based in the British Virgin Islands, which in turn is managed by companies from Panama, all following a complex financial and company to hide the true ownership thereof.
