Vladislav Osipov, a Russian national, and Richard Masters, a United Kingdom national, are charged in indictments unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, with facilitating a sanctions evasion and money laundering scheme in relation to the ownership and operation of the Motor Yacht Tango, a $90 million, 255-foot luxury yacht owned by sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.
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The defendants are charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and to commit offenses against the United States, violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and money laundering.
The United States requested that the Kingdom of Spain provisionally arrest Masters for purposes of extradition.
The arrest was executed by the Spanish Guardia Civil. An arrest warrant against Osipov is outstanding.
According to the indictment, despite U.S. sanctions issued against Vekselberg in April 2018, Osipov and Masters facilitated the operation of Tango through the use of U.S. companies and the U.S. financial system, attempting to obfuscate Vekselberg’s involvement in the vessel.
Osipov, an employee of Vekselberg who functioned as a property manager for Tango, designed a complicated ownership structure of shell companies to hide Vekselberg’s ownership of the yacht, despite that Vekselberg designed the yacht, was the sole user, and was the ultimate beneficial owner.
As alleged, Masters ran a yacht management company in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. After Vekselberg was sanctioned in April 2018, Masters’s company took over the management of Tango, and conspired with others to evade the U.S. sanctions.
According to the indictment, among other things, Masters devised a scheme to use a false name for the yacht, “the Fanta,†in order to hide from financial institutions that payments in U.S. dollars were ultimately for the benefit of Tango and Vekselberg.
As a result of this obfuscation, U.S. financial institutions processed hundreds of thousands of dollars of transactions for Tango that they otherwise would not have permitted had they known of Vekselberg’s involvement in the financial transaction. Further, these payments and Vekselberg’s involvement therein were not reported to the Department of the Treasury.
Additionally, according to the indictment, Osipov and Masters advised and enabled Tango employees to continue to do business with numerous U.S. companies, using various workarounds to avoid sanctions, such as payments in other currencies and through third parties.
As a result of these schemes, the working mechanisms of Tango, to include its internet, technology, weather forecasting and computing systems, as well as the trappings of Tango, including its satellite television, luxury goods, and teleconferencing software, were all U.S.-origin products and services supplied by U.S. companies, for the benefit of Vekselberg.
The efforts of these facilitators permitted Tango to continue to operate as a luxury yacht with the full array of services and luxury goods available to it, supported by hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegally-obtained U.S. services and U.S. financial transactions, and all for the benefit of Vekselberg.
On April 4, 2022, Spanish law enforcement executed a Spanish court order freezing Tango. The Spanish acted following a request from the Department of Justice that it assist with the execution of a seizure warrant, issued in March 2022 by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which alleged that Tango was subject to forfeiture based on violations of U.S. bank fraud, money laundering, and sanctions statutes.
The FBI Minneapolis Field Office is investigating the case. Valuable assistance has been provided by the HSI New York Field Office and the Spanish Guardia Civil - Jefatura de Informacion – Unidad Central Especial Numero III (UCE-III). ■