Transactions involving the world’s second-richest person French billionaire Bernard Arnault investigated over suspected money laundering

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

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  French billionaire Bernard Arnault and Russian Oligarch Nikolai Sarkisov are under “preliminary investigation” for their alleged involvement in “transactions likely to constitute money-laundering offences,” the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office told CNN.

  The prosecutor’s office said they added a memo from the French economy ministry’s financial intelligence watchdog (Tracfin) related to real estate transactions involving both Arnault and Sarkisov to an ongoing preliminary investigation into the Russian oligarch’s operations in France, which started in 2022.

  Le Monde, citing the memo, says SNC Croix Realty made a 1.2 million Euro profit upon the sale of the units they had bought a year earlier.

  Le Monde adds the investigation will have to “determine the reason for this apparent incongruity,” as well as “explain the need for Mr. Arnault to call on Mr. Sarkisov as an intermediary in these transactions.”

  “The change in the final beneficial owner of the real estate acquisitions (…) tends to conceal the exact origin of the funds, to complicate the transactions and the identification of the real purchaser, and to reflect a desire to conceal the actual beneficiary of all these transactions, i.e. Bernard Arnault,” Tracfin investigators wrote in the memo, fuelling their suspicions of “money laundering.”

  Sarkisov’s team told Le Monde that the Russian businessman was “not at all personally involved” in these transactions and that at the time “there were no known business links between the two men.”

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