Cornucopia
Page 58
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Tarasov had no precise idea of the total value of his overseas assets, but they were certainly well in excess of one billion pounds sterling, possibly two. It was complicated, they were scattered across the planet from Panama to Hong Kong.
But what was the use of all that wealth if he were to end up poisoned like Alexander Litvinenko or Alexander Perepilichny. The first by polonium, the second by gelsemine. The latter, a Russian businessman, was found dead outside his home in Surrey, in 2012, returning from his daily jogging session. Initially his death had been put down to natural causes, an accident due to heart failure. Subsequently, a toxicology report indicated the existence of traces of a deadly poison in the dead man’s stomach.
The poison was identified as coming from gelsemine, a plant found in China containing a toxic compound related to strychnine. The substance was well known to specialists and writers of whodunits, more notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the celebrated creator of Sherlock Holmes, who had experimented by ingesting a small amount of gelsemine. In 1879, in a letter to the British Medical Journal the author described the symptoms, which included persistent diarrhoea and severe headaches.
Gelsemine, a favourite tool of Chinese and Russian killers, had been used to silence whistle blower Alexander Perepilichnyy, who had almost certainly been targeted after exposing a scandal related to the Magnitsky affair.
Sergei Magnitsky, a thirty seven year old Russian accountant and auditor specialised in civil law with a Moscow law firm, had unmasked officials in a case of massive tax fraud and money laundering, only to be thrown in jail himself, where he later died as the result of a savage beating by prison wardens and left dying in a pool of his own urine.
What intrigued Swiss investigators was how a modest Moscow tax official, with a declared family annual income of under forty thousand dollars, could own a three million dollar sea front villa in Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah, the artificial palm shaped island in the Persian Gulf, one of the world’s most exclusive pieces of real estate and home to the super rich.
The answer lay with Alexander Perepilichny, an investment banker specialised in offshore finance, a key witness in a conspiracy, involving Russian officials, relating to fraudulent tax claims, fraud and money laundering. Perepilichny had been actively assisting Swiss prosecutors in their investigations into a series of bank accounts thought to have been used by tax officials and their families who for some unexplained reason had suddenly become extraordinarily rich.
The two hundred million dollar fraud had been originally uncovered by Magnitsky, who had been hired by a British investment fund, Hermitage Capital Management, to investigate the case. The result of Magnitsky's findings pointed to a number of Russian Interior Ministry officials and underworld figures as being behind the scam.
Whatever the details, such cases justified Tarasov’s fears, it was the irrefutable proof of the existence and determination of the Kremlin’s killers and evidence that no one was beyond the long reach of Putin and his executers.