French billionaire Bernard Arnault, president and CEO of the luxury empire LVMHand Russian oligarch Nikolai Sarkisov are being investigated for alleged money laundering in a tourist town in the Alps, the Paris prosecutor’s office said Thursday.
According to this source, which confirms information from the newspaper The worlda report from the financial intelligence unit of the French Ministry of Economy on the operations of both magnates in the select ski town of Courchevel, known as a playground for oligarchs, was incorporated into the procedure.
Based on this report, the French newspaper claims that Sarkisov, 55, bought 14 real estate properties in Courchevel in 2018 for 16 million euros ($16.9 million) through a complex network of companies in France, Luxembourg and Cyprus.
Officially, the buyer was the La Flèche company. The oligarch’s name does not appear in its statutes, although he was the effective owner.
Through this firm he bought three other properties in the same ski resort for 2.2 million euros (2.3 million dollars) that generated a capital gain of 1.2 million euros to another company, Croix Realty, of the which is also the owner through another complex business network.