On July 10, Russian citizen Dmitry Artyakov was arrested in the Spanish city of Girona on the suspicion that he helped launder funds stolen via a tax rebate scheme exposed by Sergei Magnitsky. Artyakov, the son of former Samara Region governor Vladimir Artyakov, the current vice president of Russia’s state defense corporation Rostec, has been under sanctions by Ukraine, the United States, and Canada since 2022 — apparently, however, he was not on the European Union’s sanctions list, which allowed him to continue living in Girona.
The arrest of Artyakov was first reported by the All Exclusive project, citing a source in Spanish law enforcement. Searches of his Spanish properties and other investigative actions are reportedly ongoing.
However, Spanish prosecutors found “no signs of loan repayment” and concluded that the funds were linked to the Klyuev Organized Crime Group, which stole $230 million from the Russian treasury in an incident widely known as the “Magnitsky case.”
The indictment states:
“Between April 10, 2008, and October 29, 2009, the company Delco Networks, S.A. transferred €12,720,000 in 25 payments from Ukio Bankas to account number ES23 2030 0013 0335 0051 1964 belonging to Ms. Anna Kurepina, opened at Caixa de Girona. This same individual is also believed to have received €400,000 from Dino Capital, S.A., a company registered in Panama. Both companies were managed by Troika Dialog. Delco is based in the British Virgin Islands, and Dino is registered in Panama, both known tax havens. No payments were recorded from Ms. Kurepina to repay these loans. These same two firms, Delco and Dino, also transferred large sums to companies owned by Sergei Roldugin.”
Roldugin, a Russian cellist and longtime close associate of Vladimir Putin’s, first came to fame in 2016, when an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) indicated that he was likely one of the “wallets” masking high-level Russian officials’ ownership of assets outside of Russia. A 2019 indictment from Spanish prosecutors indicates that some of the stolen funds tied to the Magnitsky case ended up in an offshore account connected to Roldugin.
The Spanish investigation into Artyakov began following several appeals to the country’s attorney general from a lawyer representing Hermitage Capital, the firm that hired Sergei Magnitsky to investigate the tax fraud. Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 and eventually died in Moscow's Butyrka prison on Nov. 16, 2009 — one week before the legal limit for pretrial detention was meant to expire.
Magnitsky’s death sparked international outrage. He had been jailed and tortured after uncovering the tax fraud scheme that later made his name synonymous with Western efforts to sanction corrupt officials from authoritarian countries. Though not named directly, Magnitsky’s findings were the basis for a 2008 Bloomberg Businessweek exposé titled “Suspect Lawsuits Target Russian Financial Firms,” which described efforts to fraudulently reclaim millions in tax refunds tied to Hermitage Capital and Renaissance Capital.
Around the same time, the office of Hermitage founder Bill Browder was contacted by Igor Sagiryan, a fixer known in the 1990s for helping establish Russia’s first foreign bank during the tumultuous post-Soviet years in St. Petersburg, when Vladimir Putin served as deputy mayor. In the 2000s, Sagiryan held senior roles at Renaissance Capital and Troika Dialog. His connections and explanations have been previously documented by The Insider.
Lugovoy is also known as the convicted assassin of Alexander Litvinenko, as ruled in absentia by British and European courts. Following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Lugovoy helped establish Genbank on the peninsula, working alongside such criminal figures as Yevgeny Dvoskin and Vladimir “Tyurik” Tyurin (the latter’s stake was registered in his brother’s name).
Artyakov’s arrest in Spain marks a rare step forward in a series of legal proceedings initiated by Hermitage Capital across Europe. In France, investigative magistrate Renaud van der Meulen led a preliminary money laundering probe related to the Magnitsky case.
In Switzerland, authorities launched an inquiry in 2011 and froze accounts belonging to Vladlen Stepanov. Swiss federal prosecutor Patrick Lamon and his colleague Vincenz Schnell reportedly traveled on a plane provided by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office, vacationing on Lake Baikal with then-deputy prosecutor Saak Karapetyan — who later died in a helicopter crash. According to reporting by investigative journalist Andrei Zayakin, Schnell subsequently accepted hunting trips in Russia paid for by wealthy benefactors.
In a strange coincidence, Stepanov’s assets were unfrozen in 2020, and the Swiss investigation was closed. In a similarly strange coincidence, a preliminary probe into Swiss resident Ilya Traber never progressed to formal charges; that case was also under Lamon’s oversight.
