No tracking. No cookies
Subscriptions
Subscriptions
Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system
Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features
For decades, London’s courthouses have served as cherished hubs for powerful Russian interests seeking to advance their business, shield their assets, silence critics, and shuffle dirty cash around.
Drawn by the UK legal system’s reputation as a global leader in dispute resolution, coupled with the capital’s less illustrious role as veritable haven for illicit finances, many are the Kremlin allies who’ve turned to the British courts with “collusive litigation” over the years, suing one another on secretly pre-agreed terms so as to launder their wealth through the resulting settlement fees.
Others still have taken advantage of the nation’s punitive defamation laws, bringing vexatious claims against critical journalists and activists so as to both intimidate them from further reporting or campaigning, and to drain their resources through lengthy and costly legal proceedings.
Perhaps the most spectacular cases of such ‘lawfare’, however, are those that have seen Russian oligarchs engaged in the vicious pursuit of strategic lawsuits as part of wider wars of attrition waged against their business rivals, with the promise of handsome profits for the droves of lawyers, consultants and litigation funders only too willing to help them along the way.
Byline Times’ new investigation delves deep into the latest of these bitter and winding legal sagas, laying out how Russian businessman Alexander Gorbachev’s litigation against former Kremlin politician Andrey Guriev for lucrative shares in a Moscow fertiliser company was bankrolled by a controversial Israeli businessman, a UK group owned by “enablers” of Georgia’s autocratic regime, and a scandal-ridden Miami firm that once held sizable investments in several European football clubs.
That these actors held a stake in the lawsuit is no secret to Guriev himself, who was sanctioned in 2022 for his control of assets generating significant revenue for Russia’s war in Ukraine. But the Vladimir Putin ally now believes that another, perhaps more powerful set of hands may ultimately have been behind Gorbachev’s claims – and he is determined to find out who.
Assets, Dirt Cheap
With holdings worth more than $7.6 billion, PhosAgro is one of the world’s largest producers of phosphate fertilisers. Based in Moscow, its roots go back to the early 1990s, with oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s purchase of a lucrative mining complex in Russia’s far northwest during the anarchic privatisation of state assets that followed the Soviet collapse.
Better known by his reputation now as one of Putin’s harshest critics, Khodorkovsky would eventually flee Russia in 2013 for exile in London, having served eight years on fraud, embezzlement and money laundering charges he says were politically motivated.
Guriev, a co-director at Khodorkovsky’s holding company and a member of the Russian Federation Council who built PhosAgro during the wildcat years of Russian capitalism, was joined there by Gorbachev, an old friend from his days as a Communist Party youth secretary, as vice-president of the new firm.
After prosecutors seized Khordokovsky’s mining interests following his 2003 arrest, PhosAgro moved swiftly to purchase those assets from the state at below-market rates. Guriev went on to become a wealthy man – with a current net worth of roughly $9.5 billion, he was at one point the owner of the $450 million Witanhurst estate in Highgate, London’s second largest private residence after Buckingham Palace.
He eventually stepped back from politics in 2013. While some of his shares in PhosAgro have since been sold back to the Kremlin, he and his family continue to control a sizable portion of the group through an offshore trust, which saw them targeted with Western sanctions following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine for ownership of assets feeding Russia’s war machine.
By that stage, Guriev was already embroiled in a vicious dispute over the very same interests that had seen him sanctioned. These troubles began in 2015, when he received a letter from a team of private investigators in the UK, which included two high-ranking former Met Police officers, informing him of their ongoing probe into his ownership of PhosAgro and the circumstances of its listing on the London Stock Exchange, warning that civil, even criminal, proceedings would likely follow.
Their investigation, later described by a judge as “aimed rather to intimidate” than elicit answers, had been driven by a claim that some of Guriev’s shares in PhosAgro were in fact meant to have been held in trust for his old comrade Gorbachev, who’d progressed from vice-president to chairman before leaving the firm in 2004. Community Safety Development Ltd (CSD), as the PI firm was known, wound up amassing 15,000 documents on Guriev and his wife, only for their sleuthing to backfire spectacularly when the oligarch successfully used UK Data Protection laws to force them to hand over all the information they’d gathered.
The Funders
It was Gorbachev who hired the private investigators and who then brought legal proceedings against Guriev, initially in Cyprus. But court proceedings can be costly, and claimants often seek outside help to fund their cases.
Here, the mystery deepens, as Gorbachev would end up seeking funding from a trio of seemingly unconnected companies, all of whom have connections to Russians with football interests.
First into the picture comes Marholm Ltd, an offshore firm registered in the opaque tax haven of the British Virgin Islands, which bankrolled both Gorbachev’s private investigators and his Cyprus lawsuit. Court filings obtained by Byline Times indicate the controlling interest behind Marholm was ultimately an Israeli businessman by the name of Levi Kushnir, better known for his ill-fated stint as chairman of Portsmouth FC shortly before its financial collapse in 2010.
Kushnir purchased his initial stake in the club from Alexandre Gaydamak, a Franco-Russian oligarch who later fled to Moscow after being found guilty by a French court of illegal arms trading in Angola.
His other partners at Portsmouth FC included Daniel Azougy, a lawyer disbarred for 14 years by the Israeli Supreme Court following his 2002 conviction for fraud and breaking and entering. Another was Yoram Yossifoff, a fellow Israeli attorney implicated in the UK’s notorious Southern Cross Care Homes scandal. Azougy would later claim Yossifoff, before dying of a sudden heart attack in 2016, had also been muscled out of his shares in the Park Lane Club, a London casino popular with Russian expats, following a concerted campaign of “pressure” from a Latvian businessman. Azougy even claimed that at one point, Yosifoff had had a grenade thrown at him by an unknown assailant.
Kushnir’s company continued to fund Gorbachev’s litigation in the Mediterranean island nation until the claim was dismissed in June 2018. Gorbachev, however, remained resolute. He was soon at it again, this time in the UK where in 2019 he sued Guriev to claim the former Kremlin politician had promised him 24.75% ownership of PhosAgro, worth about $1.3 billion today, over the course of several conversations he said took place in London at a pub, in a sauna, at a restaurant, and in a high-end hotel between 2005-08. Guriev argued in court that Gorbachev’s claim amounted to a “shakedown.”
Second to enter the scene, in 2019, was Hunnewell Partners. Headquartered in the leafy London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, it’s the UK private equity group that owns, among other assets, Georgia’s largest broadcast network. A close business associate of the South Caucasian country’s ruling oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, critics have long accused the firm of using its control of Imedi TV to push state propaganda in support of the government’s anti-Western, authoritarian turn amid war in Ukraine.
Moscow’s Ties to the Georgian Regime Ran Through Kensington and Chelsea
Leaked documents reveal how UK firm Hunnewell Partners, controlled by alleged enablers of Georgia’s ruling oligarch, facilitated a top Putin crony’s attempts to exploit the collapse of a more than $1.5bn corruption scheme in Uzbekistan
Byline Times has reported on Hunnewell before, exposing how, for more than a decade, the UK group also enjoyed a secret business relationship with influential Russian businessman and former Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich.
In response to emailed requests for comment on this story, Hunnewell Partners called Byline Times’ previous coverage of the group “grossly defamatory” as well as “unfair, inaccurate and slanderous.” They added that material from this present article, shared with them ahead of publication, is “incorrect” and may represent “a campaign of misinformation,” in turn “giving rise to a concern on Hunnewell Partners’ part that you may be deliberately trying to spread misinformation about Hunnewell Partners.”
“Any suggestion that Hunnewell Partners is or has been operating at the behest of Russian or otherwise nefarious interests is completely unjustified, and not supported by any evidence,” they wrote. A spokesperson for the group had previously also told Byline Times that “Hunnewell Partners has no business dealings or investments, directly or indirectly, in Russia,” and that the firm is “unequivocally pro-Western and pro-Ukraine.”
While it remains unclear how exactly Hunnewell first came to be involved in funding Gorbachev’s litigation against Guriev, what’s plain from the court documents is that by 2019, the firm had inked a deal to join Kushnir in financing the UK lawsuit through its Jersey-based litigation funding outfit, Park Street Litigation. By March 2021, Park Street had also requested that another company called Sphinx Funding – a subsidiary of controversial private investment group 777 Partners, based in Miami – join them in meeting those costs.
777 in the Premier League
777 has a chequered background. Founded in 2015, the Miami group had mainly made waves in football, buying up clubs all over the world until it owned shares in seven (including Genoa CFC, Standard Liege and Sevilla FC), as well as investing in two budget airlines.
Its founder, Josh Wander, first made headlines back in 2004 when he received a 15-year probationary sentence after pleading no contest to charges of receiving cocaine in the mail while at college. Having since forged a career for himself in the murky world of structured settlements, he then began living the Miami high life, racking up casino and credit card debts for which he was later pursued in court.
After co-founding 777, his profile rose, with sources at the company telling Byline Times that he would regularly hold business meetings in fancy restaurants and strip clubs. Those sources also said that Wander and others at the firm made regular, unexplained business trips to Kazakhstan.
These ties to the region can perhaps be explained by the fact that attorney and communications specialist Mark Medish, a Russian speaker who served in the Clinton administration as Senior Director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs, and who has long been active in Kazakhstan through his role as vice-chair of international advisory firm Panterra, apparently sat on 777’s “corporate advisory board.”
Another one of 777’s founders, Miami playboy Wayne Boich, is known to have sold a large stake in one of his family’s Montana mining facilities in 2011 to Gennady Timchenko’s Gunvor Group. Three years later, Timchenko was sanctioned by the US government over Russia’s seizure of Crimea, with the US Treasury claiming Vladimir Putin himself had investments in Gunvor and may have had access to its funds.
There is, however, a more direct link between Hunnewell and 777, which appears to have come in the figure of Andres Blazquez.
Currently CEO of Genoa FC, Blazquez began working for 777 around 2018, eventually becoming an operating partner, but his connection to Hunnewell’s Georgian co-founder, Irakli Rukhadze, goes much further back to their time together in the South Caucasian country.
Much of what’s known about Blazquez’s ties to Rukhadze comes from yet another series of complex legal proceedings in the UK, stemming from the death of late oligarch Arkady ‘Badri’ Patarkatsishvili.
A Georgian billionaire who also made his money amid the anarchic privatisation of state assets following the fall of the USSR, Patarkatsishvili died of a sudden heart attack at his Surrey mansion in 2008 without leaving behind a will, setting off one of the largest estate battles in legal history as his relatives, friends and associates went to war for a share of his $13 billion empire in the years that followed.
Amid the resulting melee of lawsuits, Hunnewell, co-founded by Rukhadze as one of Patarkatsishvili’s wealth managers, was accused by a number of former business partners of conspiring to cut them out of a deal to track down and retrieve the oligarch’s assets on behalf of his family, for which the firm had gone on to earn an estimated $260 million in bounty fees.
Sources who knew Blazquez from his time in Georgia told Byline Times the Spanish businessman met Rukhadze on the Tbilisi social scene in the mid-2000s, and that the two men quickly became friends. Public rulings from the London lawsuit, meanwhile, indicate he would go on to handle a share of Patarkatsishvili’s wealth via an offshore company in Gibraltar, and that he later received monthly consulting fees from Hunnewell, suggesting he was either involved in the firm’s recovery efforts, or its management of assets on behalf of the late oligarch’s family.
By his own account, 777’s foray into the world of football came about as a result of Blazquez’s own desire for the group to build up a multi-club portfolio. Byline Times understands he helped secure funding for the firm’s investment in Sevilla FC by courting Russian oligarch Oleg Boyko, a fintech entrepreneur with alleged links to the Kremlin who was later sanctioned by Ukraine, Poland and Australia.
The Miami firm’s failed bid to buy Everton FC last year, however, ultimately marked the beginning of a downward spiral. The Premier League team was being sold by Farhad Moshiri, a long-term business partner and associate of Alisher Usmanov, yet another sanctioned Kremlin oligarch, who was also involved in sponsoring the Merseyside club. But despite spending months loaning Everton money, 777 was never able to win Premier League approval or close the deal amid growing concern over their business practices and liquidity. Moshiri eventually sold to the US-based Friedkin Group instead.
At the time of writing, 777 finds itself on the brink of bankruptcy, barely continuing to stagger along under the weight of an ongoing US Department of Justice investigation into allegations of money laundering at the firm. Most of its assets, including its football clubs, have already been seized by creditors, and little has been seen in public in recent weeks of the group’s once high-profile managing partner, Josh Wander, who’s understood to have “pleaded the fifth” when subpoenaed by federal prosecutors as part of the DoJ probe.
Awaiting Disclosure: the Billion Dollar Question
Much like his earlier lawsuits in Cyprus, Gorbachev’s action against Guriev in the UK ultimately failed, with the courts ruling against him after they found his evidence “was contradictory, lacked credibility, and at times, was plainly false”.
Guriev told Byline Times through his lawyers that all of Gorbachev’s claims had been dismissed because the judge “found that none of the allegations had been established,” and that they were “commercially implausible and inconsistent in many respects.” Gorbachev, Kushnir and 777, meanwhile, did not respond to requests for comment.
Amid this heady mix of obscure Israeli, Georgian, British and Russian interests, Guriev has lately found himself in court again. This time in Florida, pursuing discovery proceedings in the hope of uncovering “information relevant to the identities and ultimate sources of the funds provided by the third-party funders who financed Mr Gorbachev’s failed, frivolous and potentially fraudulent claims, as well as the true motives and objectives in bringing those claims,” according to the most recent filings in that case.
For what it’s worth, Gorbachev’s financing arrangements would appear to have been anything but plain sailing if Wander’s January 2024 testimony before the UK courts is anything to go by. The former 777 chief explained a “dispute” had arisen between the Russian businessman and his funders the previous March, resulting in the Miami group not making final payments to Gorbachev, and the matter eventually being taken into “confidential arbitration.”
Byline Times, however, has seen documentary evidence suggesting Gorbachev was in fact having difficulty with 777 as early as July 2022, when his lawyers at London firm CMS found themselves chasing Wander over outstanding fees of more than $2 million.
At one point, 777 even tried to buy Kushnir out of his share in the deal, according to sources who worked at the company at the time. Wander does indeed mention in his testimony having “purchased a debt” from one of Gorbachev’s creditors, in order to prevent that creditor harming the Russians’ position in his proceedings against Guriev. But whether the creditor in question was Kushnir remains unclear.
Whatever the true upshot of those squabbles, Wander’s claims that Kushnir, Hunnewell and 777 eventually all stopped bankrolling Gorbachev’s lawsuit in May 2023 would seem to be borne out by the Russian businessman’s insistence he now doesn’t have the funds to meet the $16 million in legal costs ultimately awarded to Guriev as a result of the failed UK litigation.
In a statement relayed through his lawyers, Guriev said Gorbachev has now “been declared bankrupt,” and that the Florida proceedings have therefore in part been brought to recover the former politician’s outstanding costs. But again, Guriev appears unconvinced the buck stops with either Gorbachev, or Kushnir, or Hunnewell, or even 777, suggesting the sanctioned Kremlin oligarch’s suspicions may very well be directed elsewhere.
Where, exactly, is a billion-dollar question that, if unlikely to be answered in full any time soon, will at least become clearer as those Florida proceedings progress.