Moscow’s Ties to the Georgian Regime Ran Through Kensington and Chelsea

On 23 December 2013, five men broke into a house in Switzerland. Prowling the villa’s hallways, situated on the uber-exclusive shores of Lake Geneva, they took only photographs, later releasing the images to the world as a cursory catalogue of the building’s contents. 

Among those items were hand-woven oriental rugs, an 18th-century jewel-encrusted Quran, and priceless paintings by celebrated Soviet-era artists – many of them believed to have been lifted from the State History Museum in Tashkent, more than 6,000km away. 

The men were no ordinary burglars, but dissidents opposed to the tyranny of Uzbekistan’s then-president, Islam Karimov. The home was one of many belonging to the premier’s daughter, Gulnara Karimova, herself a businesswoman, diplomat, popstar and, as was fast emerging, alleged head of a criminal syndicate at the heart of one of the largest corruption cases in history.

Precipitated by a bitter rift with her father, Karimova’s fall from grace was swift. Chief among the allegations to come would be that her organization, known only as ‘The Office’, had solicited hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes from Russia’s largest telecoms provider, Mobile Telesystems (MTS), in exchange for access to the Uzbek market.

So damaging were the revelations that investors later sued MTS, with one UK private equity group – Hunnewell Partners, headquartered in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea – leading a charge through the US courts after claiming to have sustained losses to its stake in the Russian communications giant as a result of the scandal.

The problem? Technically, it hadn’t. Drawing on leaked corporate documents, public records and court proceedings, Byline Times can now reveal the London firm appears to have in fact been acting on behalf of one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted confidants: Roman Abramovich.

Not only shedding fresh light on the former Chelsea FC owner’s long-running efforts to conceal his interests from Western authorities, these findings further provide a window into Abramovich’s apparent ties to yet another autocratic, post-Soviet regime.

Because Hunnewell isn’t just a British private equity group. Its founders are also close enough business partners of Georgia’s very own ‘pro-Russian’ ruling oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, for critics to view the firm as a crucial enabler of the spiralling human rights crisis that has engulfed the South Caucasian country since the outbreak of war in Ukraine. 

“Hunnewell Partners is primarily a political player in Georgia,” said Hans Gutbrod, a professor of public policy at Tbilisi’s Ilia State University. “Exercising a significant hold on the Georgian economy, it’s a company that could only operate with Ivanishvili’s blessing, and in turn also works directly for his interests.”

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The Fall of Googoosha

Born 1972, Gulnara Karimova was once one of the most powerful people in Central Asia. The eldest daughter of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, who ruled the repressive former Soviet Republic with an iron fist until his death in 2016, she rose to become not only her country’s Deputy Foreign Minister, but also its Permanent UN Representative.

At one time tipped as her father’s most likely successor, her passions were perhaps more varied than your average dictatorial heir-apparent. A self-styled “poet, mezzo-soprano, designer and exotic Uzbekistan beauty,” per her Twitter bio, she would also establish her own fragrance, fashion and jewelry lines, penning ill-fated screenplays and releasing duets with the likes of French actor Gérard Depardieu.

It was just four months after the launch of her debut album (Googoosha, her father’s pet name for her) that the clouds began to gather. In September 2012, a journalistic investigation found that a Swedish telecoms provider had paid $320 million to an obscure company controlled by Karimova’s associates. A quid pro quo, the reporters claimed, for her influence in securing access to the Uzbek market.

That story marked the beginning of the end for Karimova. Over the next decade, her assets and dealings came under intense scrutiny across more than a dozen countries as part of a massive international probe into allegations of bribery and financial crimes worth $1.5 billion. Spanning Hong Kong, Dubai, France, Switzerland and the UK, where it included residences in Belgravia, Mayfair and Surrey, her property empire alone stood just shy of $250 million.

By the time of the break-in at Lake Geneva in 2013, the Uzbek first daughter was already on the back foot, claiming to be the victim of a conspiracy by her country’s top security chief to oust her from her father’s favour and bury her on corruption charges.

If true, it would appear to have worked. First convicted of money laundering and fraud by the Uzbek courts in 2017, she has more or less remained in prison since.

Contacted for this story, Karimova’s lawyers noted the facts of her case remain contested. They said that since she first came under investigation in Switzerland in 2013, no tribunal has found her guilty, and that a court which heard the case found “there was no evidence she was a public agent and, therefore, that she could be corrupted.”

Their comments refer to earlier legal proceedings against the Swedish telecoms company and its executives accused of bribing Karimova, in which a judge found the former first daughter could not be included “in the narrow circle of bribeable persons according to Swedish law” because she was not formally in charge of government decisions regarding Uzbekistan’s telecoms sector.

“The trials in Uzbekistan are disgraceful,” her lawyers added. “Her rights were never preserved. She was once even ‘tried’ in her own kitchen. Gulnara Karimova keeps fighting with all her energy to prove her innocence.”

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Payback Time

Of the alleged bribes paid by three international telecom giants, the largest sum came from MTS, forking out roughly $420 million to entities believed to have been ultimately controlled by Karimova between 2004 and 2012.

As a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the Russian group subsequently found itself liable for prosecution in the US over the scandal. But in March 2019, MTS entered into an arrangement with American financial authorities to avoid trial by admitting the charges and paying a penalty of $850 million.

While prosecutors trumpeted the settlement as a victory over corruption in global markets, investors were less convinced. The firm’s stock price had taken repeated hits as a result of the allegations. People had lost money, and they wanted it back.

The lawsuit landed two weeks after the penalty was announced, and in September of that year, Hunnewell Partners was appointed lead plaintiff, with the UK group’s stated losses of at least $13 million affording it “the largest financial interest” of any party involved, per documents from those proceedings.

Though the courts eventually dismissed Hunnewell’s pursuit of damages in March 2021, and again at appeal the following April, partly on the grounds that MTS didn’t appear to have deliberately deceived investors, there was little reason for a judge to question whether the London firm had itself sustained those losses.

Because the finer details of its claim would remain hidden until a massive hack saw millions of documents released from inside an offshore service provider, MeritServus, almost 9,000km away in Cyprus.

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A Light in the Dark

Combing the data from the MeritServus leak, Byline Times can reveal that before joining the lawsuit against MTS, Hunnewell had entered into an ‘assignment agreement’ with another Cypriot company: Pro-Alpha Investments Ltd.

Signed and dated May 22nd, 2019, the document states Hunnewell would assume nominal “rights, title, ownership and interest” in a tranche of MTS securities that were in reality held by Pro-Alpha until November 2018, when they’d been transferred to yet a third Cyprus firm, Pro-Beta Investments Ltd.

Under these terms, Hunnewell would then act as a “true and lawful attorney-in-fact” for Pro-Alpha, “in any and all claims, demands, and causes of action [over] violations of the U.S. federal securities laws” by the Russian telecoms giant.

Basically, the deal, otherwise known as a ‘proxy’ arrangement, allowed Hunnewell to serve as a kind of stand-in for Pro-Alpha in the MTS lawsuit. The Cypriot firm could thereby pursue damages for money lost before the US courts, but without having to identify itself as the party behind proceedings. Hunnewell, in exchange, was promised 10% of any eventual payout.

Other MeritServus documents show both Pro-Alpha and Pro-Beta in fact represented only the first links in a shifting chain of corporate ownership, leading up through at least six different entities before arriving at the controlling interest behind it all: Abramovich.

At the time of the assignment agreement with Hunnewell, the former Chelsea FC owner had already featured on a list of 210 “enablers” of the Vladimir Putin regime, released by the first Trump administration back in 2018. Hunnewell’s appeal against the initial ruling on the MTS lawsuit also ran on until April 2022, roughly six weeks after Abramovich was sanctioned by the UK following the launch of Putin’s full-scale invasion.

“We have a situation whereby a UK business could have helped win money for someone sanctioned for his association with Putin and owning enterprises of strategic importance to the Russian war in Ukraine,” Steve Goodrich, head of research and investigations at Transparency International UK, said after reviewing the documents obtained by Byline Times. 

A spokesperson for Hunnewell described the MTS lawsuit as a “perfectly normal claim” and their role in the action as a “conventional litigation-funding arrangement.” They also noted Abramovich wasn’t sanctioned by the UK at the time the agreement was reached, and denied having any dealings with him during the period or even being “aware of him having any involvement (if true) in the claim.”

“Hunnewell Partners has no business dealings or investments, directly or indirectly, in Russia,” the spokesperson said. “We have no connection to Roman Abramovich, and we categorically reject any suggestion of wrongdoing. [We are] unequivocally pro-Western and pro-Ukraine. We had an office and employees for several years in Kyiv and continue to have close friends and colleagues there.”

Abramovich’s legal representatives did not respond to an emailed request for comment in time for this story’s publication.

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Big Business and Bad Sushi

Go too fast and you’ll walk right by 6A Pont Street. Nestled in the quiet avenues of Kensington and Chelsea, the building’s entrance stands sandwiched between a wine merchant and dry cleaners, almost obscured from view beneath the overhang of a concrete stairwell. 

UK corporate records suggest the address is a fairly recent change of venue for Hunnewell, whose story begins not with the Pro-Alpha deal in 2019, but the 2008 death of Abramovich’s onetime business partner, Georgian tycoon Arkady Patarkatsishvili. 

‘Badri’ to his friends, a liberal smoker and heavier drinker, Patarkatsishvili made his vast fortune in Moscow during the frenzy of market liberalization that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Instantly recognisable by his shock of white hair and chevron moustache, it was his bodyguard, Andrey Lugovoy, whom the Kremlin hired in 2006 to carry out the sensational assassination of Russian dissident Alexander Litvenenko at a Japanese restaurant in London. “There’s no such thing as a former KGB agent,” Patarkatsishvili chuckled about his former henchman in a subsequent interview about the killing.

Once kingmakers in Moscow’s cutthroat penumbra between industry, politics and the criminal underworld, Patarkatsishvili and his closest associate, fellow oligarch Boris Berezovsky, had protected their partner Abramovich during a spate of street wars for control of Russia’s aluminium trade in the 1990s. They were also fond of boasting how they’d helped engineer Putin’s first presidential victory in 2000.

The pair’s honeymoon with the dictator did not, however, endure. Within months, Berezovsky began to attack Putin over proposed constitutional reforms, spiralling into an outright political war that would last the rest of the oligarch’s life. 

Spooked by backlash from the Kremlin, Patarkatsishvili eventually decamped to Tbilisi, soon to busy himself re-establishing his influence amid the new realities of his native Georgia following the Rose Revolution of 2003.

That also didn’t last. After initially throwing his backing behind the country’s nascent United National Movement (UNM) government, his own political ambitions gradually saw him run afoul of the South Caucasian nation’s new, pro-Western President Mikhail Saakashvili, to whom he suffered a resounding electoral defeat in 2008 just weeks before dying of a heart attack at his luxurious second home in the British countryside. 

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Kidnappings, Forgeries and Secret Wives

The aftermath of Patarkatsishvili’s death was a trying time for his family, spared barely a moment to mourn his passing before the wolves began to circle. Indeed, it was only days after he’d been found dead at his Surrey mansion that his widow, Inna Gudavadze, received a visit from Joseph Kay.

Patarkatsishvili’s half-first cousin (their mothers were half-sisters) and business advisor in New York, Kay told Gudavadze he was in possession of the billionaire’s will, which appeared to appoint Kay as executor of his estimated $13 billion estate. He also informed her the family would only inherit a share of that wealth, revealing for the first time the existence of Patarkatsishvili’s secret second wife, living in Moscow together with their 14-year-old son.

If Kay’s claims were met with skepticism from Patarkatsishvili’s family, they encountered only aggression from his closest business partner. Berezovsky fought back, and viciously, even accused of drugging Kay’s attorney and secretary in March 2008 to then fly them on a private jet to Belarus, where they were arrested, convicted and jailed on charges of industrial espionage and forgery, based partly on Berezovsky’s own testimony at a closed trial. 

Though the UK courts would eventually rule the will was a total fake, kindness toward the family would not seem to have registered among Berezovsky’s motives. He soon launched his own legal proceedings against them, claiming to be entitled to as much as half of Patarkatsishvili’s empire.

That suit was dropped in 2012, after the judge presiding over a related action he’d brought against Abramovich ruled he was an unreliable witness of highly questionable character. The following year, he was found dead in his Berkshire home – apparently a suicide by hanging, given there were no signs of a struggle, though the coroner later recorded an open verdict.

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Rescue, for a Price

Patarkatsishvili’s family eventually found help in navigating the whirlwind of cloak-and-dagger intrigue that had followed his death from his former UK wealth management firm, Salford Capital Partners. 

Established in 2001 by a former employee of the Russian Finance Ministry, Salford had, in Patarkatsishvili’s later years, relied heavily on the work of a Georgian-US businessman, Irakli Rukhadze, in managing their share of the late oligarch’s assets. 

In Georgia, this had been no easy task, and a test of Rukhadze’s mettle. A series of leaked US diplomatic cables from the time, published by Wikileaks, reveal he bore much of the brunt of President Saakashvili’s ire against Patarkatsishvili, primarily in the form of criminal investigations into alleged influence peddling by the billionaire’s companies. At one point, his car was bombed, though no suspects were ever charged.

It was therefore Rukhadze, along with two other wealth managers in the group’s orbit, UK citizen Ben Marson and Russian national Igor Alexeev, who were assigned to help the family in tracking down and reclaiming Patarkatsishvili’s assets. It was also, for Salford, an expensive mistake. 

By 2011, the trio had broken away to represent the billionaire’s widow and children independently via a new company, Hunnewell Partners, going on to earn an estimated $260 million in bounty fees from his estate over the coming years.

In the end, it was a perceived slight that Salford chose not to suffer lying down. In 2016, a group of Hunnewell’s old colleagues sued for cutting them out of the deal with the family. The UK High Court eventually ruled Hunnewell had indeed engaged in a “commercial conspiracy” to breach fiduciary duties to their former associates, ordering them to pay out roughly $170 million in damages. 

The spokesperson for Hunnewell described this as a “technical ruling from the UK High Court,” adding both that judgment and a subsequent Supreme Court ruling on appeal “made no findings of dishonesty or fraud, and in fact, rejected large parts of Salford’s original claims.”

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The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Documents from the Salford lawsuit shed light on Hunnewell’s encounters with Roman Abramovich during the UK firm’s early days. Rukhadze in particular appears to have been crucial in negotiating loans of almost $300 million from the Russian oligarch to the family, and by 2017, Hunnewell was receiving funding for a separate litigation against the Royal Bank of Scotland from Tri Star Capital Ventures, a British Virgin Islands offshore now known to have been controlled by the former Chelsea FC owner. 

Hunnewell’s spokesperson said the firm is unable to comment on work done for former clients on their behalf, but noted the loans from Abramovich “relate to dealings more than a decade ago.” They said that Tri Star Capital Ventures was not owned by the Russian oligarch, and described their arrangement as “a perfectly proper and normal business dealing with that company for a brief period many years ago.”

Beyond this, the Salford complaint also reveals on how Hunnewell went on to establish itself as one of the most politically-connected firms in Georgia, using their proceeds to buy out a number of Patarkatsishvili’s former holdings in the South Caucasian nation – among them Imedi TV, the country’s largest broadcast network – and co-investing with the man now widely considered Georgia’s éminence grise, Bidzina Ivanishili.

“Ivanishvili has single-handedly hijacked Georgia’s democracy, and is leading the country down a path of subjugation to the Kremlin’s interests,” said Sergi Kapanadze, a former politician and founder of Tbilisi think-tank Georgia Reform Associates. “He’s destroyed all democratic institutions in the best Russian tradition, arresting opposition, capturing courts and all branches of governance while attacking civil society.”

Much like Abramovich, Patarkatsishvili and Berezovsky, Ivanishvili made his fortune in Moscow during the 1990s, and it was his political party, Georgian Dream, that in 2012 finally ousted the pro-Western government of President Saakashvili, who’s currently languishing in jail on corruption charges brought by Ivanishvili’s administration.

Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, it’s also believed to have been on Ivanishvili’s orders that his government has lately embarked on a violent descent into authoritarianism, shunning longstanding international partners in an effort to reorient a once Western-facing former Soviet Republic back toward Moscow’s orbit. 

Today, Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi remains host to ongoing protests against the results of October’s rigged parliamentary elections, as well as the government’s decision less than a month later to effectively nix the nation’s constitutionally-mandated bid for EU membership, despite more than 80% of the public’s support for EuroAtlantic integration.

Demonstrators, many of them nursing bitter memories of Georgia’s own war with Russia in 2008, have shared harrowing stories of brutalization, even torture at the hands of Ivanishvili’s security services. Opposition politicians, civic activists and journalists are frequent targets of arrest and prosecution, many of them charged with offenses that carry multi-year jail sentences. 

Amid these abuses, critics have routinely accused Hunnewell of using its control of Georgia’s largest television network to amplify state propaganda, not only justifying Georgian Dream’s massively unpopular “pro-Russian” rhetoric and trajectory, but also legitimising attacks against political opponents, even violence visited on peaceful protesters.

“The instrumentalisation of Imedi TV goes beyond the personal political preferences of its owner,” said Tamar Kintsurashvili, executive director of Georgian press watchdog the Media Development Foundation. “It is the primary vehicle for a state-run propaganda apparatus that uses troll factories, administrative resources, and a variety of TV and internet platforms to discredit opponents and disseminate false anti-Western narratives.”

Rukhadze himself has repeatedly appeared on broadcasts in support of Georgian Dream and to rail against Saakashvili’s UNM party, still the country’s largest opposition force, whose return to power he claims it his “mission” to prevent by “all legal methods.”

Rejecting these claims, Hunnewell’s spokesperson said Imedi TV had always supported political pluralism and democracy in Georgia. They noted that the network was the target of a media crackdown during Saakashvili’s presidency, and that it continues to oppose UNM “because of the abuses of human and civil rights” under the previous administration. 

Adding that the broadcaster’s “views on certain issues may not be to everybody’s tastes, in the same way that is true of many leading newspapers and TV stations in the UK,” they insisted the network remains “editorially independent” and firmly rejected allegations of pro-government propaganda and anti-Western bias in its output. They said “both Mr Rukhadze and also Imedi TV have stated repeatedly on the record that EU membership would be good for Georgia and for business.”

They further said that Hunnewell takes “allegations of threats and physical violence against journalists, including those at Imedi, and other civil actors, very seriously. There is no place for intimidation in Georgian society, regardless of whether it comes from supporters of Georgian Dream or opposition groups.”

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All Roads Lead to London

Hunnewell’s perceived support for Georgia’s authoritarian government has now made it the target of growing calls to see both Rukhadze and Imedi TV, like Ivanishvili and members of his government, targeted with international sanctions for their alleged role in the country’s ongoing political and human rights crisis.

“Imedi TV is for sure one of the most powerful instruments Georgian Dream has in pushing its narrative and positions, manipulating public opinion while dismantling democratic institutions and consolidating authoritarian rule,” said Natalie Sabanadze, Georgia’s former ambassador to the EU. “If there is a political decision that sanctions should target not only Ivanishvili himself but a wider group of key enablers, then Imedi would definitely fall into that category.”

Those calls appear to be gaining traction in the UK. At least two MPs, Lib Dem James MacCleary and Labour’s Blair McDougall, have pushed for action against Hunnewell, with McDougall in particular asking “whether it is time for a National Crime Agency investigation” into the group during a House of Commons session last December.

“It is deeply concerning that a British-based company is actively involved in undermining legitimate opposition and peaceful protests in Georgia through its running of the pro-Russian Imedi TV,” MacCleary told Byline Times. “This outlet parrots Putin’s propaganda and works to bolster the authoritarian Georgian Dream government.”

The spokesperson for Hunnewell described calls from “well-meaning but misinformed champions of democracy from outside Georgia” for either investigations or sanctions as “completely unfounded, with no basis in either law or in fact.” Noting Imedi TV’s popularity in Georgia, and that there are “dozens of rival TV stations that viewers are free to choose from,” they added that “any attempt to stifle or censor it is deeply anti-democratic in nature.”

“Imedi TV is certainly not ‘pro-Russia’ and neither is it a mouthpiece for the Georgian government,” they said. “Both allegations are entirely false.”

MacCleary nevertheless insisted that “London remains, clearly, too attractive an option to pass up for the individuals behind these types of ventures,” stressing the UK “urgently needs more comprehensive registers, detailing what these companies are and what their assets are being used for. If the government is serious about supporting democracy and human rights abroad, it should take action on this immediately.”

After all, financial authorities currently estimate more than £100 billion, or 40% of the world’s dirty cash, is laundered through British-registered companies each year, with illicit actors exploiting skilled networks of professional enablers – law firms, private banks, wealth management groups, even estate agents – to protect their interests and spirit away funds under cover of regulatory darkness.

Amid this continuing shroud, facilitated by an absence of stringent safeguards and harsher penalties for abuse, who knows what secrets will continue to lurk behind the City of London’s towering glass facades, or indeed the brick terraces of the capital’s other high-end neighbourhoods, like Kensington and Chelsea. 

Research and reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Civil Society Foundation, formerly the Open Society Georgia Foundation, via Tbilisi think tank Civil Idea