The prosecutor's office linked the shooting of the founder of the Party to fraudsters

As Kommersant learned, the first deputy prosecutor of Moscow, Alexander Kozlov, decided to combine two high-profile criminal cases - the murder of the founder of the Party and Domino retail chains, Alexander Mineev, who was shot with a machine gun in January of this year in Korolev, near Moscow, and the largest in the history of the capital's law enforcement agencies, a scam - a raider takeover of two dozen shopping centers. The prosecutor believes that both crimes are directly related and were committed by the same people.

According to Kommersant's information, Alexander Kozlov recently issued a resolution to confiscate criminal case No. 1627 from the police, which they had initiated under Part 4 of Art. 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (fraud on an especially large scale) regarding the theft by unknown persons of ownership rights to 21 metropolitan shopping centers (110 thousand square meters of retail and office space, the approximate market value of which today exceeds $1 billion), and its transfer to further investigation in the Main Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee for the Moscow Region, where the murder of the famous businessman Alexander Mineev is being investigated. According to prosecutor Kozlov, the investigation of murder and real estate fraud should be conducted within the framework of a single criminal case, since now “there are sufficient grounds to believe that these crimes were committed for selfish reasons by the same persons.”

As Kommersant previously reported, Alexander Mineev was killed on January 22 of this year. Bandits ambushed a businessman at one of the Korolev intersections. The businessman had no chance to survive: the killer, who fired from a Kalashnikov assault rifle at point-blank range through the side window, literally riddled him. At the scene, experts found 27 shell casings.

It turned out that shortly before his death, Alexander Mineev, through his representatives, contacted the police with a request to protect his business from raiders, which led to a fraud case being opened. Mr. Mineev was a very wealthy man. The chain of stores selling household appliances, “Partiya,” founded by him, has been the absolute market leader for a long time. The businessman also owned the Domino chain of stores, where he established trade in expensive clothing, shoes and luxury furniture. When demand for household appliances fell in the early 2000s as a result of market saturation, many sellers went bankrupt. Due to falling profitability, "Party" was also closed. And soon the Domino network ceased to exist. But Alexander Mineev only became richer from this. The fact is that, while developing his trading empire in the 1990s, he did not rent premises, but acquired them. As a result, he found himself the owner of a huge amount of commercial real estate, the prices of which have risen in the last decade.

At the beginning of December last year, Alexander Mineev discovered that the shopping centers no longer legally belonged to him. The real estate ownership system created by the businessman was very complex and confusing, which is what the criminals took advantage of. The ownership of all real estate was registered in 19 Moscow LLCs, which were owned by four offshore companies established by nominal owners in Belize and the Seychelles. The ultimate beneficiary of offshore companies through a trust agreement, according to law enforcement officials, was Mr. Mineev himself. At the same time, all payments from tenants were accumulated in the accounts of the management company Eurasia LLC, which Mr. Mineev also owned through an offshore scheme.

As the investigation established, in mid-November 2013, unknown persons based on forged documents submitted to the Federal Tax Service No. 49 replaced directors in all of Mr. Mineev’s companies and made changes to the constituent documents, as a result of which new offshore companies, uncontrolled by the businessman, became the owners of the companies.

Alexander Zheglov

Murder and raiding turned out to be one thing - Kommersant Newspaper No. 63 (5336) dated 04/14/2014