The Sunday Times published an intriguing piece reporting that the younger Yakunin has yet another mansion in London. And not just any mansion, but a huge house with 8 bedrooms, a swimming pool, and household staff.
Shortly after the article appeared, Andrei Yakunin’s representatives confirmed to RBC that the house really does belong to him. They said it was purchased as a “real estate investment” and is valued at £35 million.
As we all remember, the younger Yakunin is quite the investor. He “invests” in hotels near railway stations. He “invests” in the sale of electronic train tickets, “invests” in supplying geogrids to Russian Railways, “invests” in organizing Russian Railways conferences, and even in the magazines distributed on trains.
Andrei Yakunin hid this particular investment rather well. Despite his status as an investor, he registered the mansion not in his own name, and not even under his own company, VIY, but under yet another ownerless offshore entity from the British Virgin Islands.
The Sunday Times piece is fairly brief, so naturally we became very interested in finding out more about this £35 million mansion (about 3.5 billion rubles). The article mentions the name of the offshore company—Terphos Financial Corporation—as well as the fact that the Land Registry, the local property registration authority, discloses a list of offshore owners of British real estate.
We at ACF (the Anti-Corruption Foundation) have had this list for quite a long time, and we use it often and with pleasure.
Yakunin’s offshore company, Terphos, is easy to find on it, and from there it is quite simple to use the registry number to determine the exact location of Andrei Yakunin’s new mansion.
Here it is: 15 Acacia Road.
According to the official Land Registry extract for this address, the mansion was purchased by Yakunin’s company on March 28, 2013, for £23.3 million.
The full purchase amount was paid upfront, with no loans or mortgage. Just like that, the son of a serving state official bought a house in London for more than a billion rubles at the old exchange rate. And he did not even buy it to live in—he lives in neighboring Hampstead—but simply as a place to park money.
A representative for Andrei’s father, Vladimir Yakunin, said that the elder Yakunin had nothing to do with it and did not take part in acquiring the house.
Of course Vladimir Ivanovich did not personally take part in buying this mansion. But all of us did—those who buy electronic tickets, those who stay in hotels near railway stations, and everyone who rides the trains and commuter rail services of Russian Railways. The Russian government, the 100% owner of Russian Railways, also contributed on our behalf to the purchase of the mansion by funneling endless subsidies to the monopoly that made the Yakunin family billionaires.