SIMMO HAD DISAPPEARED, EVAPORATED, it was not unusual in Belize where tropical swamps and shark infested waters abounded. It was not, however, the case of Igor Vishnevsky, his body, identified by a hotel room card found in a back pocket, had been found floating near the beach at the Coral Cove Resort on Ambergris Caye, and according to the autopsy had been exsanguinated—drained of all its blood.
All that was left of the Russian’s legs were a few shreds of flesh and shattered bone, a shark attack, concluded the police report, which didn’t explain the life jacket and what was left of a nylon rope knotted to it.
The Russian was suspected as having been part of a conduit that managed investments for highly placed Russian officials, buying and selling property, and channelling the profits to a Cayman Islands holding company that invested it in UK prime property.
Vishnevsky, according to the Mexican police, was resident in Cancun, where he had arrived some eighteen months earlier, travelling on a Cypriot ‘golden’ passport.
The Russian also held a Dominica passport under the Caribbean Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programme, which had set him back 100,000 dollars.
However, the Cypriot passport was much more interesting, allowing holders the right to live, work and travel freely in all countries of the EU as well as travel visa free to 176 other countries, including most countries of the Caribbean and South America, but required a much greater investment—two million euros in business or real estate.
Vishnevsky was one of several thousand non-EU citizens who had bought a Cypriot passport under the scheme, they were mainly Russians, but also Ukrainians, Chinese and Middle Easterners, all of whom had one thing in common—their wealth.
Theoretically they had clean criminal records, but that was difficult to ascertain given the means a small country like Cyprus had to investigate declarations, so apart from a summary check on the Europol data base, the rejection rate was almost negligible.
Amongst those who successfully applied for a Cypriot passport was Jho Low, the previous owner of Pat Kennedy’s mega yacht. Low had been behind the enormous financial scandal that ended up with the former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak in prison and billions of dollars missing from his country’s sovereign wealth funds.
Others included well-known Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska—owner of one of Russia’s largest industrial groups, or more shady businessmen like Ali Beglov who was sentenced to two years imprisonment in 1990 for racketeering and extortion in Saint Petersburg. Ali then entered the oil bunkering business and became the local representative of Lukoil, one of Russia's largest oil and gas corporations, and by the end of the decade he had become general manager of the Lukoil’s bunkering business which managed oil storage units in ports across Russia and abroad. In 2015, his business interests had expended into dairy products and his customers included Russia's Constitutional Court, the FSB, the State Duma, and the Federation Council.
Even more interesting was Mykola Zlochevsky, now living in Monaco, a former Ukrainian minister of ecology and natural resources, who also held a Cypriot passport. He had been accused of favouring his energy company, Burisma Holdings, which though based in Kyiv was registered in Cyprus. Burisma came to the attention of the US public after it emerged Joe Binden’s son, Hunter Biden, had been on its board of directors whilst his father was in charge of American policy in the Ukraine.
Vishnevsky’s mistake was to encourage top Russian government officials to invest in the luxury condominium and golf complex at Ambergris—near to the border with the Mexican Yucatan, which led to questions being raised by the opposition, led by Alexei Navalny, as to how they, not so richly paid officials could invest large sums of money in such valuable assets.
Vishnevsky was liquidated after the collapse of his real estate deals threatened to expose Sedov and VTB—known in banking and diplomatic circles as the Kremlin's bank, as being implicated in money laundering and the illegal transfer of funds via Cyprus and Belize, linked to subversive FSB, SVR and GRU operations—ranging across the geopolitical board—from London to Caracas, creating an embarrassing scandal at a moment when the opposition to Putin was on the rise.
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Wallace, through Demitriev and then Vishnevsky, had discovered an endless source of what seemed like easy money, which he moved through a complex web of companies and bank accounts that little by little escaped the control of Vishnevsky, who was leading a high life in Cancun entertaining a flow of highly placed Russian official discovering the Yucatan’s exotic pleasures—beaches, golf, cruises and the wonders of the Mayan civilisation. A breath of fresh air after the deprivations of Venezuela, now reminiscent of the USSR under Gorbachev and the economic collapse which Yeltsin had presided over. Wallace had persuaded the Russian everything was in order, it was the way things were done locally. And it was, business boomed, the tourist industry knew no limits, investors fought to buy land and build tourist resorts.
Who could have imagined the pandemic, a scenario from a Stephen King novel, the streets of Cancun were deserted, the usually packed shopping centres fell silent, the beaches emptied, and the Ambergris development went belly-up.
Wallace’s had not only invested the Russian’s money in local real estate, but also in Cancun, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, all of which were enmeshed in local corruption as cash flowed freely, driving up land prices with buyers fighting over sites as greedy politicians scrambled to get their snouts in the trough.
Dirty money was laundered as funds were shunted between accounts owned by obscure shell companies registered in Belize, Panama, the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus and other offshore tax haven, all of which enabled corrupt politicians and businessmen to hide massive sums of money from their governments.
Wallace, thanks to the companies Simmo set-up, had built a well oiled investment scheme on behalf of Vishnevsky’s Russian friends with companies registered in offshore jurisdictions that ploughed cash into real estate developments he targeted. In that way the money was not only laundered, it avoided taxation and shrouded the identities of the ultimate beneficiaries behind an opaque screen.
The trouble was Vishnevsky had become careless, too trusting, but above all, he like everyone else could have never imagined a pandemic, it was not in his or even the FSB’s gamebook.
Simmo had turned a blind eye to the true nature of Wallace's business and as a result paid the price. In a way he had been luckier than the hapless Igor Vishnevsky, who had ended up as shark bait, towed behind an outboard off the Belize Barrier Reef, the waves sown with bloodied pigs guts, guaranteed to attract the Bull Sharks lurking off the reef.
Though the Belize police did not go into details, it was technique known to them, a punishment for cheats and double-dealers, invented by the pirates and drug runners that plagued the frontier zone between Belize and the Mexican state of Quintana Roo.
‘Can’t blame them,’ confided the Police Commissioner when he reported the Russian’s death to the Chief Justice, ‘Vishnevsky must have tasted as rotten as his reputation...those sharks usually leave nothing.’