Pandora Papers: Dirty Money, Bribery and the U.K. High Street

Money from a corrupt company at the centre of a global bribery scandal has been invested in the UK High Street.

Documents from the Pandora Papers leak reveal how £7.5m ($10.2m) in earnings from Unaoil – a business which paid bribes to secure oil and gas contracts – was funnelled offshore.

The money from Ata Ahsani, the British Iranian founder of Unaoil, was paid into large funds used to invest in UK property including a cinema complex in Sunderland and a business park near Hull.

Ata Ahsani’s lawyers say he has not been convicted of anything and there is no evidence that all of the money generated by Unaoil was the proceeds of crime.

Pandora Papers: The leak

Among the 11.9 million financial and legal documents making up the latest offshore leak, a handful bear the name of the disgraced intermediary company Unaoil. In 2016, the company was exposed for paying vast sums of money in bribes to officials, in order to secure lucrative oil and gas contracts for large multinational corporations – such as British icon Rolls-Royce.

The ripple effects of the bribery scandal has led to multiple prosecutions both in the UK and US. Notably, two of Ata’s sons, Cyrus and Saman Ahsani, have pleaded guilty for their roles in the scheme and are due to be sentenced in the US later this year.

The investigation by the UK Serious Fraud Office identified $17m (£12.5m) in bribes were paid through Unaoil to win contracts worth $1.7bn in Iraq.

The leaked documents seen by BBC File on 4 and the Guardian, as part of a joint investigation, show how at least £7.5m worth of Ata Ahsani’s suspect earnings from Unaoil were laundered through a number of companies in the British Virgin Islands – an offshore jurisdiction notorious for its secrecy.

This money was then moved into two larger investment funds, also registered offshore – mixing Ata Ahsani’s tainted Unaoil millions with money from other investors.

More than a quarter of the leaked documents, including the ones dealing with companies for Ata Ahsani, came from the Trident Trust. The company serves a lot of international businesses, providing administration services for corporations, trusts and family offices.

This leak has exposed some of its most secretive clients. A spokesperson said: “Each of Trident’s trust and corporate businesses is regulated in the jurisdiction in which it operates and is fully committed to compliance with all applicable regulations.”

The other brother

The two offshore funds were advised by another Ahsani business – run by the patriarch’s youngest son Sassan who, unlike his older brothers, has not been prosecuted by the authorities.

LRE Capital Ltd is Sassan Ahsani’s current business. Before that he was the director of a similarly named company – Lumina Real Estate Capital Ltd. Lawyers for the Ahsani family told us these companies didn’t actually own or invest in any property, they simply acted as advisers for investment funds.

Our investigation has discovered that Sassan Ahsani also had an additional important role in running the administration of the funds. He was one of the directors of what’s known as the general partner – the corporate entity that, in effect, runs the funds.

And these funds were far larger than just Ata’s £7.5m. Lawyers for the family told us Ata’s money represents just 5.6% of the two funds, so other investors were involved.

One of the offshore funds was invested in the Sunniside complex in Sunderland which is home to an Empire Cinema, Nando’s and Grosvenor Casino.

Lawyers acting for Sassan Ahsani insisted he didn’t know or suspect Unaoil’s criminal involvement, only finding out what Unaoil had been up to when everyone else did, in 2016. They said he has never been involved in laundering the proceeds of crime.

They added: “Ata Ahsani’s last investment was made in 2013, a full three years before the Unaoil allegations came to light. After that the companies beneficially owned by Mr Ata Ahsani were removed as investors in the funds.”

The UK’s Serious Fraud Office began a large scale investigation into Unaoil and four senior employees are currently serving sentences. A spokesperson for the SFO told us the department “obtained arrest warrants for the Ahsanis and fought to bring them back to face justice. Their guilty pleas in the US ultimately prevented this”.

Sassan Ahsani was arrested by the SFO in 2017 as part of its investigation but was never prosecuted. The BBC understands Ata Ahsani paid around $2m as part of a Non-Prosecution Agreement with the US Department of Justice.

Lawyers for the family told us Ata Ahsani has never been convicted of anything and so it is false to suggest his assets are the proceeds of crime and despite “extensive and lengthy investigations by the SFO and the US Department of Justice, there has been no finding that all monies generated by Unaoil are the proceeds of bribery”.

“It’s dirty, it’s tainted”

Financial crime expert Graham Barrow says any money earned through a company known to have used bribery and corruption is tainted.

“One of the things that people seek to do with dirty money is to blend it with clean money. It makes it so much harder to find it. It makes it so much harder to recover.”

The risk of money laundering in the UK is currently classed as “high” with the Treasury and Home Office recognising the lure of commercial property as a criminal target for its “high value” and the fact that “complex company structures used by overseas entities are less likely to raise suspicion in the commercial sector compared with the residential market”.

The Pandora Papers is a leak of almost 12 million documents and files exposing the secret wealth and dealings of world leaders, politicians and billionaires. The data was obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in Washington DC and has led to one of the biggest ever global investigations. More than 600 journalists from 117 countries have looked at the hidden fortunes of some of the most powerful people on the planet. BBC Panorama and the Guardian have led the investigation in the UK.

Article credit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-58792333