Credit Suisse hid Abramovich’s $1.4bn assets

Oligarch Roman Abramovich hid several offshore companies behind a complex corporate structure, through which he owned shares in large stable US companies.

He used the shares as collateral, under which he took hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loans from the Swiss bank Credit Suisse. Abramovich had more than $1.4 billion worth of assets in Credit Suisse, according to the leak.

Abramovich was an important client of the Cypriot company MeritServus. At the same time, the risks were ignored: employees of this company indicated that Abramovich allegedly never was a politically exposed person, and his company was not associated with countries with a “significant level of corruption.”

It is in the correspondence between MeritServus and Credit Suisse that Abramovich is directly called the beneficiary of HF Trust, an opaque trust that is part of the aforementioned structure and is now transferred to Abramovich’s children. An internal document from Credit Suisse also says that Abramovich does not need to be listed as the owner of the HF Trust account in order to hide his connection to the assets from public scrutiny.

In addition, it became known that Abramovich’s companies issued loans to each other. Such operations could constitute money laundering.