Alexander Lukashenko was elected president of Belarus twenty years ago. He is the longest serving president in Europe. Some say he achieved this feat by a combination of social justice and authoritarianism. Tough but fair. Our investigation into the money flows around the inner circle of the Belarusian elite shows a murkier reality.



















Lukashenko and his cronies appear to have established a kleptocracy in Belarus, similar to that thought to operate in Russia, albeit on a smaller scale They rely on a maze of offshore entities to conduct their business, despite European sanctions. And they defraud ordinary Belarusians.







A country the size of Great-Britain and as populous as Belgium, Belarus receives less attention (online at least) than Andorra, a city-state in the Pyrenees mountains. But this is changing fast. Minsk worked in August as a peace broker in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The next presidential election is scheduled for 2015 and a number of representatives from the opposition already fear this vote will follow the same pattern of violence and repression that plagued previous elections. European journalists, lawmakers and citizens need to understand Belarus if they are to make sense of Eastern Europe in 2015. This is why we built The Belarus Network.



This investigation, funded by The Journalism Fund and by Canal France International was coordinated by Journalism++ and @Yakwala. It brought together a group of five journalists from as many countries, who mostly researched open source documents. Many articles have been written about the corruption of the Belarusian moneymen over the past twenty years, but there has been no systematic analysis of the data. We put the puzzle together and what it shows sheds new light on Belarus. The complexity of the maze is such that this task will likely never be entirely complete. To help journalists and observers, we have published a database of people and companies at Detective.io/detective/belarus-networks. Most links in the article lead back to the database so that you can check and further examine our sources. If you require any assistance, e-mail us at belarus-networks@Detective.io.





1. The Minigarchs

2. Foreign connections

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko and hockey star Vyacheslav Fetisov take part in a hockey game in Sochi on January 4, 2014.



MLukashenko is believed in academic circles to be pursuing autarky as a model of society for Belarus. When it comes to private money, nothing could be farther from the truth. The sale of the mobile phone company Velcom is an example of the kind of interactions between Lukashenko's cronies, international moneymen, European interests and tax heavens.



The mobile phone company was created in 1998 by Peftiev through his BelTelecom company and SBT, a Swiss company belonging to the Samawi brothers, two Syrian nationals. In 2007, the company's ownership was transferred to Austria's Mobilkom for EUR 1 billion. A group of Belarusian, Syrian and Austrian nationals profited handsomely from the sale. In order to avoid a public tender, BelTelecom sold its shares to SBT for EUR 400 million, which, in turn, sold them to Telekom for EUR 690 million. Net gain for the people involved: EUR 300 million in just a few days.



The very profitable sale did not mark the end of the Samawi's Belarus activities, quite the contrary. Through an offshore vehicle in Cyprus, they invested in several property development projects in Minsk. In the case of one, their son, Khaled Samawi - a well-known art-gallery owner in London, Beirut and Dubai - even opened an art gallery with the help from the daughter-in-law of none other than Lukashenko himself. (Contacted by e-mail, Khaled Samawi denied this, which was, in turn, reiterated once more by the Belarusian journalist that reported it).



Another key player in the Velcom sale was Martin Schlaff, a businessman from Vienna with ties to both the Austrian establishment and the Eastern European underworld. The sale of Velcom, which he masterminded, earned him a whopping EUR 1.8 million euro in consulting fees. He was not new to Belarus. In 2002, Schlaff, together with the Autrian Olympic Committee (AOC), organized a winter holiday for Lukashenko in the Alps. He went his capacity of head of the Belarusian Olympic Committee. Once there, he managed to talk business with Leo Wallner, the head of Casinos Austria, who incidentally was then the head of the AOC. We acted in the interest of the Austrian economy”

said Mr Wallner.





3. Europe's duplicity