OCCRP Investigations

Key Findings

• Eric Whyte, a Canadian citizen, appears in documents from the Pandora Papers as the beneficial owner of companies set up in the British Virgin Islands that owned luxury properties in Russia and Europe.
• Some of these firms appear to have been used to hide Andrei Kostin’s ownership of an international portfolio of high-end real estate.
• The companies are connected to others, mostly registered in Cyprus, that own assets worth an estimated $130 million.

The son of a globe-trotting Canadian communist, Eric Whyte moved to the Soviet Union as a boy in 1966, and was educated at a prestigious school outside Moscow. Those are nearly all of the scant details publicly available about his life –– even “Champagne and Meatballs,” a book-length memoir by Whyte’s late father, Bert, only mentions his birth.

But while Whyte maintains a low profile, leaked corporate documents offer a clue about his activities over the past decade or so: He appears to be a frontman for sanctioned Russian banker Andrei Kostin.

Whyte owns companies registered in secretive offshore financial jurisdictions that hold luxury properties across Russia and Europe. Many of these assets have links to Kostin, a key Kremlin ally and head of the state-owned bank VTB.

A larger corporate network of firms with connections to Eric Whyte’s companies owns more properties, as well as investments and stakes in Russian retailers and restaurant chains — including Burger King and KFC — worth some $130 million.

“It looks very compelling that Whyte has been acting as a proxy for Kostin,” said Tamara Makarenko, a veteran of the business intelligence sector with extensive experience investigating oligarchs.

“The pieces of the puzzle… are reflective of how we know oligarchs have been hiding their wealth,” she said after reviewing OCCRP’s findings.

Kostin has good reason for wanting to disguise any riches he might have accrued during his 20 years as chairman of VTB: He is sanctioned in the U.S. and EU for his support of the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Whyte, Kostin, and VTB all declined to comment for this story. But Kostin did give a frank interview to CNBC in 2018 about the impact the sanctions were having on him personally.

He had been unable to travel to Bali for an International Monetary Fund meeting, he said, nor could he go skiing in Colorado. “Which is very unfortunate. The best snow [is] in Colorado –– a very good mountain,” he said.

Whyte Winery

During the Soviet years, members of the ruling elite often had summer houses in the sunny seaside town of Foros, on the Crimean peninsula.

After the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, a new breed of elite Russians rushed in. Multiple media outlets at the time reported rumors that Andrei Kostin had snapped up a luxury villa in Foros, along with a winery in the Alma Valley, 70 kilometers to the north.

“Winery executives won’t reveal who it belongs to, although the Russian media have speculated that it’s the president of one of Russia’s most powerful banks,” wrote Meinenger’s Wine Business International in 2015.

A grape vine at Alma had been personally planted by Vladimir Putin, the article reported, before noting that the winery’s Petite Arvine white was a “pleasant surprise.”

While the links to Kostin were never definitively proven, the European Union cited his ownership of the estate and winery when it imposed sanctions on him in 2014, saying he had backed “actions and policies that undermine the territorial integrity of Ukraine” and benefitted from the annexation.

Both the winery and the villa, it turns out, were kept in Whyte’s hands for years. One of Whyte’s offshore companies, Vargas Properties Ltd., controlled the Russian company that owns both the house and the winery.

But on March 14 this year, not long after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked another round of sanctions against prominent Russians, including Kostin, ownership of the properties was transferred to a Russian company whose owner remains secret.

That’s far from the only example of Whyte’s companies holding assets linked to Kostin. Whyte also owns two British Virgin Islands firms that have been involved in swapping Moscow properties linked to Kostin.

In a blockbuster investigation that made headlines around the world, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny showed how two luxurious apartments had been transferred to Kostin’s girlfriend, the glamorous pro-Putin TV host Nailya Asker-Zade. One was gifted to her by a senior VTB executive, while the other came from the bank itself.

But there was a middleman in the VTB transfer.

The year before Asker-Zade received the apartment in 2014, it was transferred to an offshore company registered in the British Virgin Islands, Erelson Investments Ltd.

Erelson Investments, it turns out, was owned by Eric Whyte.

Another offshore company owned by Whyte also acted as an intermediary in the transfer of a Moscow residence from VTB — this time to Kostin himself.

VTB transferred ownership of the property — a luxurious three-story townhouse in Moscow — to Whyte’s Laroy Enterprises in 2006. Laroy then transferred the property to Kostin in October 2015.

Kostin subsequently sold it to yet another offshore company, Angerston Holdings, in April 2016. Angerston financed the purchase by borrowing $7 million from VTB’s former subsidiary in Cyprus, RCB.

Anna Stylianou, an anti-money-laundering expert from Cyprus, said that until rules were tightened in 2018, many wealthy Russians transferred their properties to Cypriot companies, which offered secrecy as well as the opportunity to avoid taxes.

“Rental income from a property could be presented as dividend income in Cyprus, and thus non-taxable,” she said.

Cyprus was also a popular option because, until just last month, it didn’t have a publicly available database of ultimate beneficial owners — “so it was easy to hide Russian ownership,” Stylianou said.

Another Cyprus company owned by Whyte owns half of a luxury hotel in the Austrian Alps which has long been linked to VTB bank and Kostin. (Read OCCRP’s story about the hotel.)

And yet another offshore company, Bramsen Trading Limited, provides even more evidence tying Whyte to Kostin.

Bramsen was set up in the British Virgin Islands in 2010 by Kostin’s son, also named Andrei, who died the following year in a quad biking accident on a country road outside Moscow. At some point after that, Whyte quietly became Bramsen’s beneficial owner.

The transfer of the firm strongly suggests that “Eric Whyte is a proxy for Kostin,” said Florian Horcicka, an Austrian anti-money laundering expert.

From the British Virgin Islands to the Upper Volga

Bramsen Trading was liquidated in 2017, but before that it was the subsidiary of a Cyprus firm named Naderbord Trading Limited, according to Naderbord’s financial statements.

Since Whyte is listed in corporate documents as the full owner of Bramsen Trading, this means he must also be the owner of Naderbord.

“There can only be one beneficial owner,” said Martin Woods, an anti-money laundering expert, after reviewing documents related to Bramsen and Naderbord.

“There is a clear inference, if he is the beneficial owner of the BVI company, he has to be the beneficial owner of the Cypriot company.”

And if Whyte owns Naderbord, that also links him to a valuable property near Moscow, a multi-million-dollar countryside resort in the Tver region called Verkhnyaya Volga (“Upper Volga”).

The complex is operated by a Russian company, Sezon Oxoty (“Hunting Season”), which was part-owned by a company in Cyprus, Egern, that declared itself in corporate filings to have connections to Naderbord.

That company sold its stake in Sezon Oxoty for $58 million in 2016 — but the new owner is another Cyprus firm, Castelor Investments Limited, that also has links to the network of companies around Eric Whyte.

Whyte’s portfolio also includes two valuable properties in France, one of which also has a tie to Kostin.

He owns a luxury villa near St. Tropez through Cypriot company Gedsea Holdings Ltd and a French subsidiary. Gedsea acquired the property in 2009 from Roger Markus Ingold, a Swiss businessman reported to have been Kostin’s adviser, who also served as a director of the Swiss subsidiary of another Russian state bank led by Kostin.

French corporate records show Whyte owns a Paris property on the banks of the Seine — worth 6.2 million euros in 2010 — through another Cyprus firm, Hundbern Investments Ltd.

And he is the director of a Russian branch of a Cyprus company that owns a centuries-old merchant’s townhouse in Moscow that has been converted into high-end offices.

Click to explore some of the properties that have been owned by Whyte’s companies, or those in his network.

Key Findings

• Hotel Tannenhof, an expensive ski resort in the Alps, has publicly presented itself for years as being owned and run by an Austrian couple.
• Records obtained by OCCRP show that it was in fact owned by Russian state bank VTB until 2015.
• After that, the hotel was transferred to two Cyprus companies whose owners were shielded by nominees.
• Cyprus’s new register of ultimate beneficial owners, which became accessible to the public only last month, reveals that half the hotel is owned by Eric Whyte, who appears to be a proxy for VTB’s chairman.
• The other half is owned by a Cypriot accountant who also has links to VTB.

Hotel Tannenhof in Austria’s elite St. Anton am Arlberg ski area, perched high in the Alps, is as exclusive as it is lavish. Touted as a “luxury bolthole,” it comprises seven large suites, with the most expensive going for around $6,000 per night, and almost twice as many staff as guests.

A concierge service caters to guests’ every whim, while a gourmet restaurant offers dishes like Tyrolean prawn with caviar, and pheasant with chanterelle. Staying there is “as if your closest billionaire friend decided to create a fabulously luxurious and yet personal Alpine retreat,” a British travel journalist wrote.

According to multiple media reports, Hotel Tannenhof is owned and run by the husband-and-wife team of Axel Bach and Judith Volker, who are said to have completely rebuilt it in 2011 before it opened to guests the following year.

In a 2017 interview, Bach said an unexpected inheritance had helped him “realize his philosophy” of hospitality, implying that he used the windfall to buy the hotel. “The notary was searching for me for one and a half years, and asked me what I would now do with all the money!” he said.

Another story published the same year reported that Bach and his wife sold an estate in Italy to buy the hotel. Staff were also told that Bach and Volker owned the facility, according to the hotel’s former chef, James Baron.

Austrian and Cypriot corporate records tell a very different story. Between 2010 and 2015, Hotel Tannenhof was actually owned by Russian state-controlled bank VTB, which has been dubbed President Vladimir Putin’s “piggy bank.”

The U.S. and EU sanctioned VTB in 2014 in response to Russia’s invasion of the Crimean peninsula. The following year, Hotel Tannenhof’s ownership structure changed.

Before the sanctions, VTB had owned it through a subsidiary in Cyprus, ITC Consultants (Cyprus) Ltd. which in turn owned another Cyprus firm, Persifa Ltd., which owned the hotel.

But in 2015, ownership of the holding company Persifa passed to another Cyprus company, Cahulia Ltd.

The owner of Cahulia was hidden behind corporate nominees, making it impossible to know who was really behind the hotel.

However, three years later a new Austrian law entered into force requiring all companies to declare their ultimate beneficial owners, or UBOs for short.

This would have forced Hotel Tannenhof to reveal the true owner of Cahulia. But the hotel appears to have taken advantage of a loophole stating that any Austrian company owned equally by two ultimate shareholders has no beneficial owner.

Around the time the law was brought in, Cahulia sold 50 percent of the hotel’s holding company to another Cyprus firm, Aktien Enterprises Ltd, for the nominal sum of $584, giving them both equal stakes. As a result, Austria’s beneficial owner register does not show who really owns Hotel Tannenhof. It only reveals the directors: Axel Bach and another corporate nominee.

Florian Horcicka, an Austrian author and expert on money laundering, called this “a prime example of financial constructions by oligarchs.”

“As long as no official investigations into money laundering have started, it will not be possible to force the two managing directors to testify. And even if they did, they wouldn’t have to tell the truth as the accused.”

But maintaining this secrecy was also dependent on Cyprus’s corporate secrecy laws, which allowed the real owners of companies to be hidden behind nominee structures.

That all changed last month, when — after years of pressure from the European Union and corporate transparency campaigners — Cyprus unveiled its own registry requiring the true owners of companies to declare themselves publicly for the first time.

The owner of Aktien Enterprises, it turns out, is a man named Eric Whyte — a Canadian citizen who appears to have spent years fronting for VTB Chairman Andrei Kostin, helping hide his ownership of properties and other valuable assets across Russia and Europe.

“Until recently, we didn’t have a UBO [ultimate beneficial owner] registry that was operational, so it was easy to hide the Russian ownership,” said Anna Stylianou, an anti-money laundering expert in Cyprus.

Aktien Enterprises

In addition to being owned by Kostin’s alleged proxy, Aktien Enterprises has several other links to VTB and its chairman.

• It was listed in financial documents as a “related party” to a British Virgin Islands company called Globular Holdings — which, in turn, was listed as a related party to several Cyprus firms linked to Kostin, and sent them interest-free or unsecured loans.
• In September 2019, Aktien Enterprises bought into another Cypriot company called Gesford Holdings Limited, purchasing 9 percent of its shares. Gesford Holdings, the Cyprus UBO register reveals, is owned by Natalia Solozhentseva, once a director at VTB’s former subsidiary in Cyprus, RCB.
• A company connected to Gesford Holdings, Eralmor, has a close association with Kostin. Eralmor owns a $3.8 million apartment in Moscow that belonged personally to the VTB chairman until 2016.
• Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny published an investigation in 2019 arguing that Kostin was behind the Cyprus company, and had simply transferred his apartment to himself.

Kostin, a Putin loyalist, has allegedly amassed a personal fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars during his 20 years at the helm of VTB.

The U.S. and EU sanctioned Kostin in 2018. Both the bank and its chairman also faced fresh Western sanctions this year after Russia invaded Ukraine. This means that anything owned by either VTB or Kostin in Europe would be subject to seizure by authorities — unless the connection were hidden.

Horcicka, the Austrian money laundering expert, said the setup raised questions about whether Hotel Tannenhof was secretly controlled by Kostin.

“Somebody put a lot of effort in hiding the real ownership,” he said.

The other Cypriot company behind the hotel, Cahulia, is owned by Rois Potamitis, an accountant in Cyprus who is managing partner at the consultancy and accountancy firm BDO.

Potamitis also has a connection to VTB: He is listed as the trustee of the two trusts that own Mitarva Limited, one of the companies that took over VTB’s former Cyprus subsidiary, RCB. (In an investigation published in April, OCCRP showed how VTB appeared to have shifted the bank’s ownership to opaque Cyprus companies to evade sanctions.)

Asked about his link to the hotel, Potamitis confirmed by email that he owned part of it through Cahulia. His email message also showed that he had referred OCCRP’s question to Andrey Vedenkov, first deputy CEO of RCB, before replying.

“I should confirm info,” he wrote to Vedenkov.

In a follow-up message, Potamitis said he had emailed Vedenkov by mistake because he was typing on his iPhone, and that he was not acting “on behalf of anybody” in his ownership of Cahulia.

Presented with reporters’ findings, Bach did not dispute that VTB had owned Hotel Tannenhof until 2015, but he declined to comment on why he and his wife were described in media reports as having bought the hotel themselves.

Bach told OCCRP that Kostin had stayed at the hotel as a guest, but did not own it.

However, he refused to name the hotel’s current owners, referring to them only as “a private individual who later sold a stake in the hotel to another private individual.” He declined to give further details, saying only that “both of these people are not Russian by birth or passport,” and did not respond to follow-up messages asking whether he was referring to Eric Whyte and Rois Potamitis.

“[T]he sanctions against him [Kostin] or the VTB Bank, which he heads, have no direct or indirect connection with the hotel,” Bach added.

Judith Volker declined to comment. Neither Kostin nor VTB responded to requests for comment.

Graphics by Edin Pašović (OCCRP).

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Three winters ago, a carpenter from the richly forested Russian region of Karelia embarked on an ambitious snowshoeing trek. In the third week of his journey, as he picked his way through the snow-covered trees that fringe the shores of Lake Ladoga, he stopped to chat with some local fishermen.

Startled by an unusual structure that he spotted punctuating the gray-and-white landscape across the ice, he wondered aloud about the unusually shaped “recreation center.”

The building was a far cry from the usual humble timber huts built by locals. Its wooden walls swooped and curved in all directions, interrupted by large sheets of glass.

The fishermen laughed. The building, they said, was known to everyone around the lake as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “dacha” — the Russian word for a rural vacation house — and they were surprised the carpenter did not know about it.

Curious to get a closer look, he crossed the frozen inlet on his snowshoes, passed by the house, and kept going. There were other structures on the territory, too, including a traditional Russian sauna — and that was where he was stopped by a security guard. “Caught him by the banya,” he said into his walkie talkie.

The guard told the carpenter he was trespassing on private property and took him to a security post, where his passport information was copied.

When he asked whether the house was indeed Putin’s dacha, the guard remained silent. But the strangeness of the encounter had the carpenter convinced that he had stumbled into a place used by the president.

“Starting from the fishermen and ending with the guards, everyone had that special look, as if you know a peculiar secret and can’t help but want to tell,” he recalled.

The peculiar secret of the “Fisherman’s Hut” — as the house was once named on the website of the architecture firm that designed it — has also been probed in several media reports, starting with an expose by television network Dozhd in 2016 that first linked the structure to the Russian president.

Dozhd found that the building and surrounding land belonged to several companies owned by Yuri Kovalchuk, a close Putin ally and the major shareholder of Bank Rossiya, nicknamed “Putin’s Bank” because of its reputation for serving the president’s interests.

But these companies also have another connection, OCCRP found. They are tied to an email domain, LLCInvest.ru, that unites dozens of firms connected to members of Putin’s inner circle. The domain is hosted by a web provider with close ties to Bank Rossiya. And the companies that use it hold billions of dollars in assets linked to Putin, including the Fisherman’s Hut.

OCCRP obtained thousands of leaked emails from two construction companies in charge of developing the land surrounding the building. Their correspondence shows how the LLCInvest companies work together.

The land around “Putin’s dacha” is owned by three different companies whose directors use the LLCInvest.ru domain — Prime, Onega, and Master — as well as one individual, Mikhail Dedov, who also uses an LLCInvest email. But the actual construction of the complex was directed by employees of an obscure nonprofit organization, Revival of Marine Traditions.

From the outside, this nonprofit has no formal or legal link to the Karelian property, and there is nothing in its annual reports that suggests its work includes managing a holiday house. The only clear tie to the other companies is that it’s also linked to the LLCInvest.ru domain.

Other assets linked to Putin — including a vast palace on the Black Sea and another holiday villa in Russia’s northwest — are also managed by companies using LLCInvest emails that seemingly have nothing to do with the properties themselves.

Fire and Water

The leaked emails also contained floor plans, blueprints, interior design plans, and other materials that provide never-before-revealed details on the astonishing luxury of the “Fisherman’s Hut” complex, which is growing to include more than just the distinctive wooden structure featured in the media.

Satellite images show that the construction of the spectacular main house was already in full swing by April 2011. Designed by the Evgeny Mercuryev architectural studio, the building was completed by August 2012 and won several awards for its design.

But the owners of this bayside land didn’t stop with just one “hut.” In 2013, another structure on the site began going up. It was entered into the Russian land registry in 2018 as a “barn,” but judging from the lavish blueprints obtained by OCCRP, its inhabitants are certainly not cows.

The futuristic two-story building features vast indoor-outdoor spaces that look like they were made for entertaining. A spacious open-plan dining area measures more than 200 square meters, separated by a glass partition from a restaurant-style kitchen where guests can watch chefs at work using its grilling equipment, tandoor, Japanese-style teppan, and smokehouse.

An architect’s rendering of the “barn” — actually a lavish pavilion that looks made for entertaining.

The home also has its own private brewery. It’s stocked with 345,000 euros’ worth of Austrian brewing equipment that can produce 47 liters of beer per day.

On the second floor of the building is a tea room with stunning views of Lake Ladoga. On the other side, a glass wall affords a view of the brewery.

Next to the building are two small swimming pools. From the house a small path leads to a natural waterfall that flows into the bay, where there is a cozy secluded gazebo. The waterfall used to be a popular tourist attraction, but now the area is off limits to the public.

It is difficult to estimate the cost of this bespoke facility, but one document showed that in June 2015, the general construction work alone — not including furniture, interiors, or lighting — was estimated to cost 187 million rubles (about $3.5 million at the time).

Farm-Fresh Ingredients for a Vast Kitchen

Most of the nearby land was zoned as farmland until the Fisherman’s Hut was built, and it is largely still used for agriculture.

Next to the Fisherman’s Hut is a trout farm. A local resident told OCCRP that you can buy live trout right out of the hands of a security guard at the dacha — if the VIP guests are not on the premises, of course.

The site has also grown to include a cattle farm where steers are raised to produce Kobe beef. But the beef appears to be a more precious commodity than the trout — none of the locals interviewed by OCCRP remembered being able to buy it.

OCCRP reporters managed to reach the director of the company that owns the farms. He said he didn’t know anything about the private villas that surround it — and had no idea that the ultimate owners of the company, and some surrounding properties, were Kovalchuk and his wife.

“Kovalchuks?” he asked with surprise.“Where am I and where are the Kovalchuks? I can tell you about baby trout and the beauties of the Karelia region.”

In 2021, a separate building containing a two-story, 600-square-foot professional kitchen was added to the property. The first floor houses fish, meat and vegetable storage and prep areas with spaces for baking, cold and hot meals. The second floor appears to house kitchen staff, featuring four modest bedrooms with folding beds.

The area is still being developed. In April 2021, activists from a group that advocates for public access to coastlines reported that a new road to the property was being built in Ladoga Skeri National Park, and large-scale logging was underway.

In the summer of 2021 construction started on a new house in the area, also fronting Lake Ladoga, according to documents in the leaked emails. (It is not clear whether it has been completed.)

Although it goes by the modest name “Garden House,” the project is lavish, with interiors made of semi-precious stones like lapis lazuli and labradorite. A large swath of the floor is covered in $110,000 worth of Fior di Bosco marble.

A designer’s rendering of the interior of Garden House, featuring a brass console topped with labradorite.

The plumbing fixtures in each of the house’s six bathrooms are projected to cost more than 3 million rubles (around $46,000). A single bidet faucet is priced at 700,000 rubles ($10,800), while a shower handle is estimated at 300,000 rubles (over $4,600).

On the ground floor of the Garden House there are six bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and dressing room. In the center of the building, an indoor pool comes with its own decorative waterfall, flowing from the house’s first floor.

Three architects interviewed by OCCRP described the interior as “premium” and “luxe.”

“You can build such a project only with an unlimited budget,” said one.

“The whole house is covered in semi-precious stone — the sink is stone,” another said. “For me it’s the same category as having a golden toilet,” another said.

According to the leaked documents, a high-end Russian interior design agency, FullHouseDesign, is leading the project. The company’s owner told OCCRP that she has no memory of any such involvement, but took issue with the idea that marble floors were extravagant.

“If you look at our website there are many projects where we use marble floors, as would any other respectable architectural agency.”

She said she could not comment on how much the Garden House might have cost. But a price calculator on FullHouseDesign’s website suggests that the minimum cost would be around 12 million rubles (around $188,000) for the design work alone.

Asked to respond to OCCRP’s findings on the LLCInvest companies, including the ones that own and operate the Fisherman’s Hut, the Kremlin answered only: “The President of the Russian Federation is not linked or affiliated in any way with the assets and organizations you mentioned.”

Local residents told OCCRP the entire bay is usually accessible by road, but gets blocked off by a barrier guarded by federal protection officers when VIP guests are visiting. Local social media groups sometimes publish warnings about the closures.

“Locals serve there as guards only when the site is empty,” one local fisherman told OCCRP. “When high-level guests visit, locals are usually replaced by FSO [federal protection service].”

Even when the bay is open, some said, the large numbers of security cameras on shore discourage visitors.

“It’s scary,” one person said.

In the region of Karelia, meanwhile, the median monthly salary in December 2021 was 64,000 rubles ($860) — far less than the cost of a single shower handle in the bathroom of the Garden House. Still, a local who spoke to OCCRP said he didn’t have a problem with the dacha or its owner.

“I just don’t like it when the road to the bay is closed,” he said.

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