It was two months later that Hardman’s warrant got him into E2010, leading to the revealing spreadsheet. He says the document shows that Eastbridge had managed hundreds of shell companies, many of which had never been disclosed to the court.
E-mails found in Shalabayev’s Yahoo accounts showed that he’d been overseeing the transfer of these companies from Eastbridge to a Cyprus-based firm called Euroguard Assets Ltd., according to court papers.
Asset Freeze
With BTA’s lawyers able to link both Eastbridge and Euroguard to Ablyazov, Justice Nigel Teare ruled in February 2012 that by concealing holdings from BTA, Ablyazov had violated the August 2009 asset-freezing order. Teare held that Ablyazov “acted in contempt of court as alleged by the bank.”
Shortly before he was sentenced to 22 months in prison, Ablyazov fled the country. So, too, did the Shalabayev brothers, who were eventually found in contempt as well; they couldn’t be reached for comment. In March 2013, Teare ruled that Ablyazov had defrauded the bank and ordered him to make restitution. As of Dec. 9, he owed BTA $4.1 billion.
Hardman dusted off the follow-his-people strategy. After a court hearing in London in July, several of BTA’s detectives shadowed one of Ablyazov’s lawyers, a Ukrainian woman named Olena Tyshchenko, all the way to a seaside villa just west of Cannes, France, where they spotted the fugitive banker, according to one of the investigators.
Behind Bars
French police jailed Ablyazov after arresting him on an Interpol warrant issued by Ukraine, which, along with Russia and Kazakhstan, had charged him with fraud. In two hearings in December, with the hunt for the $6 billion shifting to a French courthouse in Aix-en-Provence, Ablyazov pleaded with a three- judge tribunal not to extradite him to Ukraine or Russia.
If Ablyazov stays behind bars in France or elsewhere, Prosyankin says, the hunt for the $6 billion might get easier. The BTA adviser says he suspects that when Ablyazov was on the run, he continued to shield assets from BTA by burying them in newly created daisy chains of shell companies.
“It was a complex fraud machine,” Prosyankin says. Now in jail, Ablyazov can no longer manage such a convoluted structure so easily, Prosyankin says.