This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The vice-president of Russia’s Olympic Committee set up a secret offshore company and opened a bank account in Monaco months before he was drafted in to deal with the series of doping allegations that have rocked Russian sport, the Panama Papers reveal.

Viacheslav Aminov was appointed in November to a new committee whose aim was to repair the damage done to Russia by recent doping scandals, and win back the trust of the international community.

Aminov got the job in the wake of a devastating report by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), which found that Russia had a “deeply rooted culture of cheating” and had effectively “sabotaged” the 2012 London Olympics.

Wada recommended a full ban on Russia from international competitions. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) will decide next Friday, 17 June, whether to ban all Russian athletes from this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio, a move Moscow is desperate to avoid.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aminov is president of Russia’s Modern Pentathlon Federation and a vice-president of the International Modern Pentathlon Union. Photograph: Alamy

But these disclosures will raise new questions about whether Aminov was a sensible appointment, why he chose to open an offshore account at that time, and whether he should have been allowed to do it in the first place.

While there is no suggestion he has done anything wrong, Aminov has been a controversial figure.

An oligarch with strong Kremlin connections, he was arrested in 2000 after allegedly trying to bribe the FSB’s then boss, Nikolai Patrushev. He offered him $50,000 in return for a top interior ministry post, Russian newspapers reported. Aminov was convicted and given a suspended one-and-a-half-year sentence.



Aminov is the president of Russia’s Modern Pentathlon Federation. He is also a vice-president of the International Modern Pentathlon Union, based in Monte Carlo and the tax haven of Monaco. He has held these posts since 2009 and 2011 respectively. Wada says Russian doping was rife during this period.

The Guardian has discovered Aminov approached Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers scandal. He wanted to set up an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands. Its purpose, according to leaked emails, was “holding a bank account in Monaco”.

Mossack Fonseca duly set up a company for Aminov called Tabera Global Ltd. It provided nominee or “sham” directors. But the law firm’s Geneva branch discovered Aminov was a politically exposed person, or PEP, because of his role as “vice-president of Russia’s Olympic Federation”.

It told Aminov’s lawyers in Monaco it needed more information. While it is not illegal for PEPs to hold offshore companies, they are subjected to extra checks.

Aminov came back with a copy of his Russian passport and a utilities bill from his home in Moscow.



He also got HSBC private bank in Geneva to write him a reference.

In 2015 the bank was fined £28m by Swiss regulators for “organisational deficiencies” which facilitated money laundering and tax evasion.

The HSBC letter described Aminov as a valued customer since 2008 and a person “of good standing”. In February 2015 he got a second reference from LGT bank in Zurich, after moving his account there from HSBC.

Still, Mossack Fonseca wanted to know more about the origin of the money – described as “business profits” – going into Aminov’s new offshore structure. It also asked for a letter of indemnity, meaning it would be compensated in the event of legal action.

The firm carried out further checks and found an article on www.rumafia.com, a website that curates scurrilous biographies of Russian public figures. It described Aminov as a “lobbyist and shadow entrepreneur” and cited his 2001 attempted bribery conviction by Russia’s supreme court.

Mossack Fonseca marked this paragraph with a yellow highlighter.

Aminov responded indignantly. His aides in Moscow sent an angry email: “With all due respect that I attached to your company and its reputation, I sincerely hope that you are not taking seriously in consideration such a website!

“This person is the president of the international pentathlon organisation & don’t you think that you should give him more credit than the information you found on a website where not even the administration are disclose [sic] ... Therefore, we ask you to provide trustful sources from official administration.”

The message appeared to work. In late October 2015, Mossack Fonseca emailed Aminov to say everything was OK.

Two weeks later the Russian Olympic Committee announced that Aminov had been appointed to the new coordination committee for the “re-entrance” of Russian athletics into the IAAF.

Other members include the committee chair, Gennady Aleshin; the Olympic synchronised swimmer Olga Brusnikina; and the chief of Russia’s badminton federation, Sergei Shahray.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vitaly Mutko. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

Last year Russia’s sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, described the doping allegations as “a political hit job”. On Wednesday, Mutko faced fresh claims from Germany’s ARD channel which broke the original doping story.

It said that in 2014 Mutko covered up a positive doping test by a Russian premier league footballer. Additionally, Russian coaches who had been banned for life for their role in doping were still secretly taking part in training sessions, it added, screening undercover footage.

Mutko has previously denied wrongdoing and said Moscow had “worked consistently over the past five or six years” to tackle the problem of doping.

Latterly, the Kremlin has been on a charm offensive. Ahead of the IAAF’s verdict next Friday it has hired the western PR firm Burson Marsteller and acknowledged that serious mistakes have been made.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Wada report recommended that Mariya Savinova (L), who won 800m gold at London 2012, and Ekaterina Poistogova, who finished third, be banned for life along with three other Russian athletes. Photograph: Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images

Aminov’s brother Vadim also features in the Panama Papers in connection with a web of offshore firms. The brothers jointly hold shares in another BVI company, Egner Enterprises SA, managed by lawyers in Lausanne.

In 2014 Russian Forbes put their fortunes at $750m and $700m respectively. The brothers own a private freight operator, NefteTransService, that works closely with Russian railways.



Aminov did not reply to emails seeking comment.

President Vladimir Putin has spoken repeatedly about the need for “de-offshoreisation” and has urged patriotic Russians to bring their money home from abroad. Many of his inner circle, however, pop up in the Panama Papers. They include his best friend, Sergei Roldugin, a humble cellist, who is linked to $2bn worth of money flows offshore from Russian state banks.

The Papers also show the close connection in Russia between sport, politics and cash. Last week it emerged that the rights to world chess were sold to a Russian multi-millionaire and model agency owner, David Kaplan, who registered the company in the name of his Israeli-based nephew.

What are the Panama Papers? A guide to history's biggest data leak Read more

Aminov leads a typical oligarchic lifestyle. He owns a luxury flat in Moscow, a house in Cannes, and recently divorced from Olga, his wife of 30 years. His two daughters, Masha and Liza, feature in Russian Tatler and are frequent visitors to London.

In the 1990s Aminov was close to the oligarch Boris Berezovsky and to Boris Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin. He also knew Alexander Litvinenko, the FSB officer who was murdered in 2006 with a radioactive cup of tea in a hit “probably approved” by Putin.