Important Stories and Paper Trail Media, together with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), released an investigation into the real estate of 50-year-old Svetlana Eliseeva. Journalists call her the mother of two children of Eduard Khudaynatov, the head of the Independent Oil and Gas Company (NNK), who is under EU sanctions.
In March, the Austrian newspaper Tiroler Tageszeitung spoke about a Russian woman who bought four villas in the city of Kitzbühel with a total cost of 26 million euros. According to the publication, no one lives in the chalets, but they are regularly cleaned. Austrian journalists named the owner of this property as “Svetlana E.” Important Stories, Paper Trail Media and OCCRP found out that the person in question is Eliseeva.
A woman bought her first villa in Austria in 2017 for 13.2 million euros, according to the country’s real estate registry data. A few minutes away there is a chalet in which Putin’s daughter Maria Vorontsova was repeatedly seen. Eliseeva bought two more houses for 6 million euros in 2018, and a fourth for 7 million in 2021.
A few months before the first transaction, Eliseeva received a Cypriot passport. Previously, she had tried to become a citizen of Malta: in this application from 2016, Khudainatov was named as the woman’s “partner”, and the application included his passport and bank details. Henley & Partners withdrew Eliseeva’s application because Khudainatov headed Rosneft in 2010-2012, which came under US and EU sanctions in 2014.
Eliseeva indicated in her application that she had never worked. Formally, since 1995, she was listed in companies associated with Khudainatov and his family, investigators write. So, in 2023, it received almost 43 million rubles from NOC.
In Russia, a woman owns real estate worth 4 billion rubles — apartments in the center of Moscow and land near Gelendzhik. The total cost of her houses in Russia and abroad is about 7 billion rubles, the investigation says.
After the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Khudainatov personally ended up on the EU sanctions list. In May 2022, the 140-meter yacht Scheherazade was confiscated in Italy for $700 million, which is associated with Vladimir Putin. Khudainatov is listed as the formal owner of the vessel. In total, according to the US Attorney's Office, eight yachts are registered to him.