Dirty Russian Money DIRTY RUSSIAN MONEY PART 8: THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE? https://www.byline.com/column/81/article/2248

by Stephen Komarnyckyj Ukraine, Russia [Hmm, Ella came from a town just across from the Ukraine/Russian border..just saying]

One enterprising English law firm sits at the centre of a web of connections between Russian oligarchs and the British elite. An analysis of its connections shows how deeply Britain has been penetrated by Russian wealth and the potential threat it poses....

The offices of Tulloch and Company, an English law firm, are based in a sepulchral white town house in London’s Mayfair. There could, superficially, be nowhere more British, and you half expect to see a gentleman in a bowler hat striding up to its front door. But Tulloch and his partner, Bruce Gripton, sit at the centre of a web of connections between Russian oligarchs and the British establishment..

..If you research Tulloch’s name you feel as if you are looking at several interconnected spider webs. I came across his name in connection with Parex, the Latvian bank which collapsed having lent money on “favourable” terms to its owners. Tulloch was a name on a list of individuals linked to commercial pledges involving Double Coffee a coffee chain associated with Parex. The ownership of the coffee franchise was masked throughout much of its existence via a British Virgin Islands registered firm. His presence there remains mysterious and may be nothing more than an internet anomaly. However, his role often seems to be to act as the secretary for offshore entities to manage Russian wealth. As Michael Weiss writing on the Daily Beast in 2014 noted he was the secretary for a company called Sevenkeys which managed the assets of the family of Putin aide Igor Shuvalov. The ownership of Sevenkeys was masked via a British Virgin Islands registered firm.

When you search Tulloch’s name on the offshore leaks database it is linked to an enormous number of similarly mysterious entities:

Ardin Investments Limited, one of Tulloch's mysterious firms, was used by Aleksandr Lebedev to purchase a mansion in London in 2007. Tulloch is an officer at two offshore firms, The Gemini Investment Fund Limited (GIF) and the Lion Investment Fund Limited LIF, which featured in a 2013 case involving money laundering heard at the High Court of Justice in London. GIF was used to purchase overpriced Argentinian warrants but there is no suggestion he personally was aware the transaction was dubious. Similarly his name is given as the contact for four apartments at 1 Hyde Park, the world’s most expensive residential address, in the British land registry. The ultimate owners are probably still more of his high value clients.

Another offshore entity where Tulloch was an officer, Taurus Asset Management reportedly owned a 50% stake in Baltijas Aviacijas Sistemas (Baltic Aviation Systems) in 2011. BAS  was used to invest EUR 50m in airBaltic a low cost Latvian airline. It emerged that a Russian citizen Andrey Rudeshko, was the beneficiary of Taurus Asset Management, but that he in turn was the front man for Vladimir Antonov, the former owner of Latvia’s Krajbanka. Krajbanka collapsed in 2011 amid claims that ‘loans’ had been made to offshore companies believed to be controlled by Antonov as a means of transferring assets out of the bank.

This is only a snapshot of how Tulloch's offshore expertise rendered him valuable to his Russian clients. However, a second element of his role is his charitable work for Russian oligarchs…

If we hop on a jet from the Bahamas, where many of the Tulloch connected entities are registered and head back to the rainier climes of England we can pick up Tulloch’s trail in Oxford. He is one of the trustees of the Oxford Russia Fund along with Lord Patten, the Chancellor of Oxford University. The other trustees include Boris Saltykov a former Russian science minister and Rupert Caldecott of listed as a partner Dalton Strategic Partnership LLP (DSP). DSP is a global investment management firm managing $1.8bn for a range of organisations and private clients. The fund supports education in Russia. Tulloch, however, is also a trustee of four UK registered charities linked to Russian oligarchs. These are the Hill Foundation, Lebedev Foundation, The Mamut Foundation, and the Vinchel Foundation. He is the contact for the Khodorkovsky Foundation. The Hill Foundation while not bearing the name of an oligarch is linked via its chair Mr Anthony Smith CBE to other Russia linked charities. The charity supports gifted Russian students with Oxford scholarships and Tulloch regularly visits universities in Russia to promote its work.

The Lebedev Foundation is of course the pet project of Tulloch’s employer Aleksandr Lebedev and he and his son Evgeny are its trustees along with their solicitor. The main donors are the Lebedev family and the charity largely supports the work of the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation. Indeed Lebedev first foray into the “British social scene” was marked by a fundraising dinner for the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation in 2009. This allowed him both to make contacts among the British elite while associating himself with a name naively associated in the west with benevolent reforming politics. The Mamut foundation bears the name of its patron oligarch Aleksandr Mamut and while supporting cultural activities in Russia it made a donation of £100000 to Eton College for the renovation of the library. Mamut has a residence in Kensington.

Tulloch is listed as the contact for the Khodorkovsky Foundation which had long term investments of £413m against expenditure of £8.8m in 2017. Mikhail Khodorkovsky is, of course, the oligarch who was jailed by Putin in 2003 and released in 2013. He is known as a vocal critic of Putin’s “managed democracy.” Ironically Michael Weiss works for the Interpreter Magazine which was launched by the Institute of Modern Russia, an organisation founded by Khodorkovsky’s son Pavel. Khodorkovsky senior has sent out mixed messages on Crimea but a 2014 interview showed that he did not consider the issue within the framework of the sanctity of borders in international law. He stated that “Russia has several reasons to consider Crimea a part of its territory. The Crimean society also believes it to be a part of Russia.” The questionable statement on Crimea reflects his views on Chechnya which emphasise the imposed Russian legacy and display no awareness of that the country was violently subjugated to Russia. It’s rather as if a pith hatted monocle wearing British officer, just back from a ripping time in Simla was commenting on the views of the Indian population. Khodorkovsky is not the sole “democratic” Russian with similar views. Navalny, who is lauded naively as a reformer referred to people from the Caucasus as “rats.”

The Vinchel Foundation which aims to help blind and visually impaired people in Russia is in financial terms the smallest of these firms. Tulloch is one of three trustees the other two being Mikhail Vinchel and his son Anthony Vinchel. Mikhail is one of the co-founders of mail.ru a major Russian internet firm which was banned from Ukraine in 2017.When the western press covered the measure they were overwhelmingly critical suggesting that it was to quote the Economist “pointless” and “because they were Russian.” The article was imbued with the sneering condescension with which Ukrainians are all too familiar stating that “the government still sometimes takes steps that seem more appropriate for a budding authoritarian regime than for an aspiring European democracy.” The report, filed without a hint of irony from Moscow, seems extraordinarily naïve given the subsequent emergence in July 2017 of the fact that Facebook had permitted mail.ru to collate data on its users friends. The potential uses of this data will be apparent as will the journalist’s internalisation of negative perceptions about Ukraine which, in turn, blinded them to a potential security threat to their own country.