Spiegel: the family of the head of Mosvodokanal, Alexander Ponomarenko, who is involved in recruiting “volunteers” for the war in Ukraine, makes money from real estate in Berlin

The family of the head of Mosvodokanal, Alexander Ponomarenko, runs the company Evanka Invest GmbH in Germany, which is engaged in real estate in Berlin. This is stated in a joint investigation by der Spiegel, OCCRP, the Swiss RTS, as well as the French Le Monde and the Austrian Standard.

In June, “Important Stories” found out that Mosvodokanal (among other Moscow budget organizations) was recruiting contract soldiers into the Ministry of Defense as part of covert mobilization. Recruits are offered fictitious employment with the signing of a contract for military service and additional payments from the company. More information about these schemes can be found here →

Mosvodokanal also released a video that describes how supposedly mobilized company employees are fighting in Ukraine, and the company itself purchases equipment for the military, including optics for weapons.

According to investigators, the son, daughter, stepson of the head of Mosvodokanal, as well as his partner Lyubov Komissarenko (Spiegel does not name her last name, but she previously appeared in Russian media) manage luxury real estate in the German capital. In particular, they own the Upscale residential complex Riverside Square near Berlin Central Station. The land under this complex alone is estimated at 22 million euros.

Also, one of Ponomarenko’s sons owns a company that rents out apartments near Potsdamer Platz in the center of Berlin. The capital of Germany is among the top 10 most expensive cities in Europe in terms of housing rental costs and is experiencing a real estate market crisis with an almost complete absence of vacant space.

The Evanka Invest GmbH website states that the company was founded by partners of “Ukrainian origin.” Spiegel writes that the company, the family of a Russian government official, claims that the majority of its shareholders and employees are native Ukrainians who suffer from Russian aggression and even provide housing to refugees.

Ponomarenko's companion, Lyubov Komissarenko, was actually born in Ukraine. Journalists write that she met Ponomarenko in 2003 and already in 2006 started a construction business and selling water supply equipment. Komissarenko’s business partner is Deputy Mayor of Moscow for Housing and Communal Services Pyotr Biryukov. Since 2014, Komissarenko’s companies have received orders worth more than 200 million euros from Mosvodokanal and the public sector.

Based on calculations from the anti-corruption database Rupep, journalists found that the Ponomarenko family withdrew from Russia and reinvested the same amount - more than 200 million euros. The Berlin network of companies of the “Sewer Clan,” as German journalists call the Ponomarenko family, received about 50 million euros of this amount from 2016 to 2022.

From documents leaked by hackers to the darknet, investigators established that the Ponomarenko family withdrew money with the help of a little-known Swiss asset management company, Finaport. From these papers it follows that both after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and after the outbreak of a full-scale war, Finaport served clients from among the Russian “elite”. Thus, the company’s services were used by the former Minister of Communications of the Russian Federation and former adviser to President Dmitry Medvedev, Leonid Reiman, as well as businessman Alexander Kondratenkov, who was accused of major theft in Russia.

In internal Finaport emails, reporters found employees bragging about how easily they were able to follow up on suspicious clients' financial transactions. The then CEO of Finaport, Helmut Schümperli, for example, wrote that the company needed 15–20 minutes to screen clients with “higher risks.”

Finaport documents also say that it was Komissarenko’s private assets that were used to finance the subsidiary company Evanka Invest. The Ponomarenko family has about $46 million in Swiss accounts.

Komissarenko told Spiegel magazine that she broke up with Ponomarenko and left Russia after the outbreak of a full-scale war. According to Ponomarenko’s partner, she is trying to sever economic ties with the Russian Federation and is bringing old projects to completion.