Moscow’s Ties to the Georgian Regime Ran Through Kensington and Chelsea

On 23 December 2013, five men broke into a house in Switzerland. Prowling the villa’s hallways, situated on the uber-exclusive shores of Lake Geneva, they took only photographs, later releasing the images to the world as a cursory catalogue of the building’s contents. 

Among those items were hand-woven oriental rugs, an 18th-century jewel-encrusted Quran, and priceless paintings by celebrated Soviet-era artists – many of them believed to have been lifted from the State History Museum in Tashkent, more than 6,000km away. 

The men were no ordinary burglars, but dissidents opposed to the tyranny of Uzbekistan’s then-president, Islam Karimov. The home was one of many belonging to the premier’s daughter, Gulnara Karimova, herself a businesswoman, diplomat, popstar and, as was fast emerging, alleged head of a criminal syndicate at the heart of one of the largest corruption cases in history.

Precipitated by a bitter rift with her father, Karimova’s fall from grace was swift. Chief among the allegations to come would be that her organization, known only as ‘The Office’, had solicited hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes from Russia’s largest telecoms provider, Mobile Telesystems (MTS), in exchange for access to the Uzbek market.

So damaging were the revelations that investors later sued MTS, with one UK private equity group – Hunnewell Partners, headquartered in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea – leading a charge through the US courts after claiming to have sustained losses to its stake in the Russian communications giant as a result of the scandal.

The problem? Technically, it hadn’t. Drawing on leaked corporate documents, public records and court proceedings, Byline Times can now reveal the London firm appears to have in fact been acting on behalf of one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted confidants: Roman Abramovich.

Not only shedding fresh light on the former Chelsea FC owner’s long-running efforts to conceal his interests from Western authorities, these findings further provide a window into Abramovich’s apparent ties to yet another autocratic, post-Soviet regime.

Because Hunnewell isn’t just a British private equity group. Its founders are also close enough business partners of Georgia’s very own ‘pro-Russian’ ruling oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, for critics to view the firm as a crucial enabler of the spiralling human rights crisis that has engulfed the South Caucasian country since the outbreak of war in Ukraine. 

“Hunnewell Partners is primarily a political player in Georgia,” said Hans Gutbrod, a professor of public policy at Tbilisi’s Ilia State University. “Exercising a significant hold on the Georgian economy, it’s a company that could only operate with Ivanishvili’s blessing, and in turn also works directly for his interests.”

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The Fall of Googoosha

Born 1972, Gulnara Karimova was once one of the most powerful people in Central Asia. The eldest daughter of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, who ruled the repressive former Soviet Republic with an iron fist until his death in 2016, she rose to become not only her country’s Deputy Foreign Minister, but also its Permanent UN Representative.

At one time tipped as her father’s most likely successor, her passions were perhaps more varied than your average dictatorial heir-apparent. A self-styled “poet, mezzo-soprano, designer and exotic Uzbekistan beauty,” per her Twitter bio, she would also establish her own fragrance, fashion and jewelry lines, penning ill-fated screenplays and releasing duets with the likes of French actor Gérard Depardieu.

It was just four months after the launch of her debut album (Googoosha, her father’s pet name for her) that the clouds began to gather. In September 2012, a journalistic investigation found that a Swedish telecoms provider had paid $320 million to an obscure company controlled by Karimova’s associates. A quid pro quo, the reporters claimed, for her influence in securing access to the Uzbek market.

That story marked the beginning of the end for Karimova. Over the next decade, her assets and dealings came under intense scrutiny across more than a dozen countries as part of a massive international probe into allegations of bribery and financial crimes worth $1.5 billion. Spanning Hong Kong, Dubai, France, Switzerland and the UK, where it included residences in Belgravia, Mayfair and Surrey, her property empire alone stood just shy of $250 million.

By the time of the break-in at Lake Geneva in 2013, the Uzbek first daughter was already on the back foot, claiming to be the victim of a conspiracy by her country’s top security chief to oust her from her father’s favour and bury her on corruption charges.

If true, it would appear to have worked. First convicted of money laundering and fraud by the Uzbek courts in 2017, she has more or less remained in prison since.

Contacted for this story, Karimova’s lawyers noted the facts of her case remain contested. They said that since she first came under investigation in Switzerland in 2013, no tribunal has found her guilty, and that a court which heard the case found “there was no evidence she was a public agent and, therefore, that she could be corrupted.”

Their comments refer to earlier legal proceedings against the Swedish telecoms company and its executives accused of bribing Karimova, in which a judge found the former first daughter could not be included “in the narrow circle of bribeable persons according to Swedish law” because she was not formally in charge of government decisions regarding Uzbekistan’s telecoms sector.

“The trials in Uzbekistan are disgraceful,” her lawyers added. “Her rights were never preserved. She was once even ‘tried’ in her own kitchen. Gulnara Karimova keeps fighting with all her energy to prove her innocence.”

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Payback Time

Of the alleged bribes paid by three international telecom giants, the largest sum came from MTS, forking out roughly $420 million to entities believed to have been ultimately controlled by Karimova between 2004 and 2012.

As a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the Russian group subsequently found itself liable for prosecution in the US over the scandal. But in March 2019, MTS entered into an arrangement with American financial authorities to avoid trial by admitting the charges and paying a penalty of $850 million.

While prosecutors trumpeted the settlement as a victory over corruption in global markets, investors were less convinced. The firm’s stock price had taken repeated hits as a result of the allegations. People had lost money, and they wanted it back.

The lawsuit landed two weeks after the penalty was announced, and in September of that year, Hunnewell Partners was appointed lead plaintiff, with the UK group’s stated losses of at least $13 million affording it “the largest financial interest” of any party involved, per documents from those proceedings.

Though the courts eventually dismissed Hunnewell’s pursuit of damages in March 2021, and again at appeal the following April, partly on the grounds that MTS didn’t appear to have deliberately deceived investors, there was little reason for a judge to question whether the London firm had itself sustained those losses.

Because the finer details of its claim would remain hidden until a massive hack saw millions of documents released from inside an offshore service provider, MeritServus, almost 9,000km away in Cyprus.