News in Depth: Why Putin's telecom minister is in investigators' sights abroad; German and Swiss probes tag Leonid Reiman as owner of businesses he has overseen

Mr. [Leonid Reiman] "seemed an expert in 'oiling the wheels' and had no compunction about doing it," said Anthony Georgiou, a British businessman who owned a share in one of the ventures and claims he was cheated out of it. Mr. Georgiou's statement was part of a sworn affida...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Wall Street journal Asia
Main Author Gregory L. White, David Crawford and Glenn R. Simpson
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hong Kong Dow Jones & Company Inc 18.10.2006
Subjects
Annual reports
Communications networks
Corruption
Executives
Investigations
Money laundering
Oligarchy
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Summary:Mr. [Leonid Reiman] "seemed an expert in 'oiling the wheels' and had no compunction about doing it," said Anthony Georgiou, a British businessman who owned a share in one of the ventures and claims he was cheated out of it. Mr. Georgiou's statement was part of a sworn affidavit filed in court in the British Virgin Islands. Along with it, he provided a 1992 receipt for a $1.04 million "bonus" transferred to Mr. Reiman's Swiss bank account. Mr. Reiman denies that such a transfer ever took place and says the receipt is a fake. IPOC's fortunes also took off. Several companies it owned benefited from regulatory decisions by Mr. Reiman's ministry or from rich contracts with the state-controlled companies his ministry oversaw, according to a ruling of the Swiss commercial tribunal, which sits in Zurich. (The tribunal got involved because of IPOC's fight with Mr. [Mikhail Fridman] and Alfa; one of IPOC's option agreements called for arbitration of any dispute in Zurich.) Commerzbank executives considered Mr. Reiman to be the bank's client, said a person familiar with its handling of the matter. The bank did due diligence on him as "the economic beneficiary" of the assets, said an affidavit filed in the Privy Council, quoting a [Jeffrey Galmond] adviser. Mr. Reiman's explanation is that the bank's lawyers looked into whether it would be legal for him to get a stake in some of the companies in the late 1990s as part of a deal Mr. Galmond proposed but that such a transaction never happened.