Family of former KGB spy owns €8m Sandyford firm

A company in Sandyford, Dublin, with assets of €8 million, is owned by the family of a former KGB spy who is one of the closest associates of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

Among the assets owned by the company is a seafront villa in the New Golden Mile area of Estepona, in the Costa del Sol in southern Spain.

Holytown Ltd, with an address in the Beacon South Quarter, Dublin, is owned by a British Virgin Islands (BVI) company that is, in turn, owned by the stepdaughter of sanctioned Russian businessman Sergey Chemezov (69), and her grandmother.

Chemezov has been the chief executive of the giant State-owned military industrial conglomerate Rostec since 2007, when he was appointed to the position by Putin.

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Last month the authorities in Spain seized a €110 million superyacht because of its association with Chemezov

The two men have been close since they served together as KGB spies in the 1980s in Dresden, in what was then East Germany. Chemezov is considered to be one of the few powerful figures in Russia who continues to be close to the president.

Chemezov and Rostec have been on the EU and US sanctions lists since the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014.

Chemezov's stepdaughter, Anastasia Ignatova, and her mother, Chemezov's second wife, Yekaterina Ignatova, were added to the US sanctions list last month.

Leaked documents shared with The Irish Times by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) show that Anastasia Ignatova and her grandmother, Liudmila Rukavishnikova, are the owners of BVI company Penimar Holdings, which in turn owns Holytown.

Last month the authorities in Spain seized a €110 million superyacht because of its association with Chemezov. The vessel is owned by a BVI company that is in turn owned by 35-year-old Anastasia Ignatova.

The leaked documents show that the Chemezov family owns a number of BVI companies that, in turn, own assets worth more than €300 million.

The ICIJ has made public a trove of new information about offshore and shell companies linked to Russian owners.

The data has been added to the ICIJ’s publicly accessible Offshore Leaks Database. It comes from the Seychelles-based Alpha Consulting, which specialises in providing offshore services to Russian clients.