The Quiet Dutchman

Situated behind a tall hedge, the two-story house on a quiet street in the fashionable Austrian ski resort of Kitzbühel is easily lost among similar Tyrolean chalets. But in this house, which is typical for the local architecture, according to local residents, there were unusual guests: the daughter of Russian President Vladimir Putin and her former common-law husband. Two locals even believe they saw Putin himself nearby.

Chalet in the fashionable Austrian resort of Kitzbühel. According to local residents, Putin's daughter, Maria Vorontsova, often stayed here

Journalists from Paper Trail Media and Der Standard, working in conjunction with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), visited Kitzbühel last month and spoke with local residents. Half a dozen of them had heard that Putin's daughter's family frequently visited the house.

It is difficult to verify these claims. But documents obtained by Important Stories, which we studied together with OCCRP and journalists from well-known international media, give reason to believe that the house was bought thanks to a loan from the company of Putin’s childhood friend, Arkady Rotenberg, who fell under US and EU sanctions after the Russian annexation Crimea.

“Oligarchs close to the Kremlin, such as Putin’s childhood friends the Rotenbergs, who made their fortune from government contracts, are known to sponsor the luxurious life of Putin’s family,” says Florian Horczycka, an expert on dirty money in Austria.

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This article is part of the Rotenberg Files project. What is this project and where are the other articles?

The “Rotenberg Archive” is a leak of more than 50 thousand letters and documents from the management company Evocorp, which worked mainly for Boris and Arkady Rotenberg. "Important Stories" shared this data with the world's leading media outlets, eventually working on the project with more than 60 journalists from 17 publications.

Thanks to the Rotenberg Archive we learned:

how the Rotenbergs’ manager helped them preserve foreign palaces and invest money in the West, despite sanctions (read here );

how the brothers’ chosen ones—citizens of the United States and Latvia—rescued the Rotenbergs and family assets during difficult sanctions times (read here );

how a major Moscow developer fooled everyone for years by denying any connection with the Rotenbergs (read here ).

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The chalet is owned by the Cypriot company Wayblue Investments, which bought it for almost 11 million euros in January 2013. Who owns Wayblue is a mystery: the Cyprus registry reports that it has been owned by Velidom Ltd since 2015. And who is behind it is unclear.

Austrian authorities say they were looking into who owns the house, but made no progress in their investigation last year. “The suspicion that this property is in the possession of a sanctioned person cannot be confirmed to date,” said Austrian Interior Ministry spokesman Harald Soerös. “If new evidence is discovered, we will submit a report to the appropriate authorities.”

But documents from the Dutch land registry, as well as reports from Cypriot companies, suggest that Kitzbühel residents may not be entirely wrong about the house being linked to Putin's eldest daughter, Maria Vorontsova, and her former common-law husband, Dutchman Jorrit Faassen.

Chalet in Kitzbühel

Emails and documents obtained by Crucial Stories and OCCRP show how the company that bought the Kitzbühel house may have received the money. The loan intended for her had to go through the Latvian bank of Arkady Rotenberg and his Cypriot company Olpon Investments.

The latter, back in January 2013, agreed to provide $11.5 million for the management of Rotenberg’s Latvian SMP Bank. Olpon's draft investment management agreement in 2016 stated that SMP Bank would in turn loan the money to Wayblue. In the same month, Wayblue purchased a house in Kitzbühel for 10.8 million euros. Wayblue's 2013 financial statements confirm the existence of such a loan and that the company now has a home.

“It is almost obvious that the cash flow had to be hidden,” said Stefan Blanke of the London-based think tank Royal Defense Studies Institute (RUSI). “Why else would such a design be chosen?”

In mid-2014, Rotenberg sold the Latvian SMP Bank to a management team, and it was renamed Meridian Trade Bank. In 2016, the bank transferred management of these investments to the Latvian company Cresco Securities. The loan was not repaid by Wayblue at that time.

Cresco owner Olev Schultz confirmed that his company took over management of the investment, but he said it terminated the agreement in 2021. Schultz admits he knew Rotenberg was behind Olpon, but denies working with any sanctioned individuals or companies. It is unknown whether the loan was repaid.

Schultz said he knew the names of Wayblue's real owners, but declined to reveal them.

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Tom Keating, director of the London-based Financial Crime and Security Research Center at RUSI, said the convoluted scheme to buy a house in Austria was typical of deals involving people close to the Putin family.

Although Rothenberg was sanctioned only a year after buying the [Wayblue house in Kitzbühel], he must have known that he was “in the crosshairs,” Keating believes: “These people think: 'I appear in the press quite often as a person who < ...> should be sanctioned, so I'm going to <...> reduce that risk."

Land near Amsterdam

Another real estate deal that investigators learned about leads to the Netherlands, to the former common-law husband of Putin’s daughter, Jorrit Faassen.

In the same year, 2013, that the chalet in Kitzbühel was purchased, the Cypriot company Gietrin Investments established the Dutch company Molenkade Ontwikkeling and acquired a plot of land in the suburbs of Amsterdam.

As with Wayblue, the real owners of Gietrin are a mystery. But these companies had other things in common. Both were serviced by the Latvian SMP Bank of the Rotenbergs. And the reports of the Cyprus Wayblue show that Gietrin lent Wayblue 750 thousand euros and was mentioned in the report as a “related party”. A related party relationship, in legal terms, means that one company has significant influence over the other (for example, they have common owners).

Documents from the Dutch Molenkade show that its director was the husband of Faassen's cousin, and in 2019 he was replaced by Faassen himself, who sold a plot of land in the suburbs of Amsterdam - Gietrin's only asset - to himself. This was after his relationship with Putin's daughter ended. That same month he liquidated Molenkade. In May 2023, the Dutch prosecutor's office seized this plot of land. The reason is unknown.

Were Faassen or Putin's daughter, Maria Vorontsova, the ultimate owners of the company that owns the house in Kitzbühel? The answer is unknown, but two local residents said that they saw cars with Dutch license plates in the area near the house, and four remembered that a Dutchman had stayed there.

A former neighbor told reporters that a woman named Maria regularly visited the house. “Her Dutch husband was often there too,” she added.

Editor: Maxim Solyus