Revealed: oligarchs spied on UK lawyers who ran Serious Fraud Office cases | Surveillance

Oligarchs whose enterprise empire was below investigation by the Severe Fraud Workplace spied on legal professionals who ran a number of the UK’s most delicate prison circumstances.The Guardian has obtained surveillance pictures of former SFO prosecutors taken by employed spies. Their objective is claimed to have been gathering info on the company’s actions, figuring out its sources and gaining “leverage”.Backed with billions from Vladimir Putin’s regime, the oligarchs had been on the time waging an aggressive counterattack towards an SFO investigation into suspected corruption and fraud, a significant case the company in the end dropped.Andy Slaughter, a Labour MP who chairs parliament’s justice committee, stated: “It’s deeply troubling that people with data of significant fraud inquiries ought to be surveilled by the very organisations they’ve been investigating.” He added: “The hunter has develop into the hunted.”The surveillance started in 2019. It’s unclear when, or if, it completed. Because the legislation enforcement company that takes on the hardest white-collar crime circumstances towards multinational firms and billionaires, the SFO usually faces fightbacks by well-funded legislation corporations and even cyber-attacks. However that is believed to be the primary time surveillance of former SFO prosecutors has been revealed.Attorneys for the oligarchs’ mining firm didn’t dispute that the surveillance occurred. However they stated any “investigations” into the targets had been lawful, undertaken in preparation for lawsuits it introduced towards the SFO.‘We’re not honest recreation’On Saturday 7 March 2020, the spies pulled up in a automobile exterior the house of former senior SFO prosecutor Tom Martin. At 10.39am, the goal emerged from his entrance door carrying denims and a Wolverhampton Wanderers hoodie. It was a momentous day: Martin was taking his younger son to the soccer for the primary time.Tom Martin, a former senior prosecutor on the Severe Fraud Workplace, in a surveillance image taken in 2020.Martin had run advanced, transnational bribery investigations on the SFO. Though he by no means labored on the oligarchs’ case, he felt he would have been a beautiful goal for anybody searching for intelligence on the company.Recognized to his colleagues as a charismatic chief, Martin had introduced an employment tribunal declare over his 2018 dismissal throughout an influence wrestle with American prosecutors – a declare he would win. It was obvious from press protection that he knew the SFO’s internal workings and had fallen out badly with its administration.Over years of pursuing highly effective suspects, Martin had typically thought he was being watched. However none of his fears had been confirmed. He stated he was “completely appalled” when the Guardian confirmed him surveillance pictures of his residence taken by oligarchs’ spies. “I’m there with my lad,” he stated. “We’re not honest recreation.”Martin known as the surveillance ‘an assault on the rule of legislation’. {Photograph}: SuppliedMartin stated that if operatives had been searching for “kompromat”, the Russian time period for compromising materials that can be utilized to use stress, there was nothing to search out, besides maybe his ardour for mannequin trains.“It’s an assault on the rule of legislation,” he stated. “You’re not attempting to defend your self in a courtroom, you’re attempting to shift the chances in your favour.”‘Probably the most upright lawyer you might ever meet’The surveillance stretched throughout the nation.In a rural village, the oligarchs’ operatives spied on Mike Walsh, a former Metropolitan police officer. After leaving the power within the late Nineties, Walsh switched to the personal intelligence business. One shopper had been in a combat with the oligarchs’ company over some African mines. In Might 2019, the spies traced Walsh, who was by then retired, to his residence and photographed him as he put the bins out.A surveillance picture of the previous Met police officer Mike Walsh.Different targets had held senior positions in UK legislation enforcement rather more just lately, as members of the very SFO staff investigating the oligarchs’ affairs.James Coussey was awarded an OBE in 2010 after a long time attempting to convict the perpetrators of monetary crimes. Three years later, he was recruited to the SFO for one final task: investigating suspected fraud and bribery at a mining firm that had been among the many most dear listed on the London Inventory Trade.Three oligarchs, referred to as the Trio, had been the founders and largest shareholders of the Eurasian Pure Assets Company (ENRC). It owned mines from Kazakhstan to Congo extracting coal, chrome and cobalt. Each few days it made revenues greater than the SFO’s annual price range.The staff Coussey joined adopted cash trails between Swiss banks, African kleptocracies, ex-Soviet dictatorships and the Mayfair property market. In 2018, after 5 years on the case, Coussey known as an finish to his profession. “I don’t suppose he actually needed to retire,” stated Martin, his SFO colleague and fellow surveillance goal. “He cherished his job and he did it in a extremely calm and stylish approach.”By then, the ENRC case had develop into one of many highest-stakes investigations within the SFO’s historical past. It appeared that prison prices had been shut. The SFO’s prosecutors had interviewed one of many oligarchs, plus the son-in-law of one other.James Coussey in a surveillance picture with a time-stamp after his retirement from the SFO.The oligarchs and their firm denied wrongdoing. ENRC’s legal professionals had been on the counterattack. As a part of a excessive courtroom declare towards the SFO, they alleged that Coussey had negligently mishandled proof. A decide would discover no “figuring out or reckless breach of responsibility”. However the authorized motion had revealed Coussey’s identification as a member of the investigation staff and put him on the oligarchs’ radar.In retirement, Coussey fell into ill-health. The spies’ surveillance pictures of him are time-stamped: a Monday morning in February 2020. They present an aged man exterior his residence, bald and bespectacled in a jersey and bodywarmer, pottering between the storage and a blue hatchback.Coussey has since died. Martin known as him one of many prosecutors of his era. He was “probably the most upright lawyer you might ever meet”, albeit with a keenness for impolite jokes. “He’s given his nation immense service.”‘All about leverage’Entrusted with powers to grab proof, SFO prosecutors bear safety vetting. Throughout his years on the company, Martin was conscious of “close to fixed” cyber-attacks.So delicate was the oligarchs’ case that Coussey and the remainder of the investigating staff labored from a restricted space of the SFO’s headquarters off Trafalgar Sq..Sons of the Soviet Union’s central Asian provinces, the Trio’s path to riches started when two of them labored at a KGB enterprise enterprise in Moscow throughout the fall of communism. They’ve used an assortment of personal intelligence corporations since arriving in London within the mid-2000s.There have been the previous brokers of Mossad and different Israeli intelligence and navy providers who arrange Black Dice and Diligence, run by alumni of MI5 and UK particular forces. These operatives focused Neil Gerrard, a former ENRC lawyer who, a decide would later discover, leaked to the SFO as he milked the oligarchs for charges. Each corporations say they performed no half within the surveillance of former SFO prosecutors.That surveillance started in 2019, directed by Dmitry Vozianov, a Russian marketing consultant who handles “particular conditions” for oligarchs. Vozianov fends off threats to his purchasers’ enterprise pursuits, overseeing legal professionals, spies and public relations specialists. Confronted with an SFO investigation, the Trio employed him.For this covert surveillance operation, Vozianov deployed a embellished veteran of the parachute regiment. Damian Ozenbrook served in Afghanistan, Northern Eire and the Balkans. After leaving the navy, he arrange his personal intelligence firm , Blue Sq. International.Do you have got details about this story? E mail tom.burgis@theguardian.com, or (utilizing a non-work cellphone) use Sign or WhatsApp to message +44 7721 857348. For probably the most safe communications see theguardian.com/tipsThe objectives of the surveillance Vozianov assigned to Ozenbrook had been “to know what was occurring within the SFO”, stated a supply with data of the operation, and to search out out “what, if any, informants the SFO had been utilizing”. The supply believes it was “all about leverage”.Vozianov didn’t reply to a request for remark. Attorneys for Ozenbrook’s agency didn’t dispute that his operatives spied on former SFO prosecutors on Vozianov’s directions – although they stated there had been no surveillance of serving SFO personnel.The oligarchs’ operatives additionally watched John Gibson, a barrister who had run the SFO’s ENRC investigation for 4 years. Gibson left the SFO for a legislation agency in 2018. A letter he obtained two years later from ENRC’s legal professionals on the US agency Quinn Emanuel acknowledged that he had been seen assembly a journalist within the Nationwide Theatre’s underground automobile park in September 2020.An SFO spokesperson stated: “We now have been conscious of the danger of surveillance for a few years and our first precedence is at all times the protection and wellbeing of our colleagues. We notice that this report pertains to surveillance of former colleagues following their departure from the SFO.”In 2023, after a excessive courtroom decide discovered the SFO had been mistaken to simply accept leaked materials from ENRC’s lawyer on the outset of its investigation, the company dropped the case. There was, it stated, “inadequate admissible proof” to convey prices.Two of the oligarchs have died throughout the lengthy wrestle with UK legislation enforcement, their stakes passing to their heirs. The Russian state banks that backed them at the moment are below sanctions. Nonetheless, their company is because of obtain thousands and thousands from the general public purse as damages.Whereas surveillance by state businesses is very regulated – the SFO would have wanted a warrant to conduct an operation just like the oligarchs’ – surveillance by personal corporations isn’t. Slaughter, the MP, stated: “Every little thing about this rings alarm bells, from the Russia hyperlinks to the involvement of ex-security power operatives.” He stated it raised “wider points for the federal government as to the way it regulates personal investigators”.