This story, reported this weekend, began Thursday last, at the tony unit 4102 of Trump Tower III, in Sunny Isles Beach, Miami FL. The FBI raided the apartment seeking further evidence into something. The owners of the condo were identified as two Russian businessmen, partners in a shell company MIC-USA LLC..
The target of the search, Unit 4102, is owned by a shell company, MIC-USA LLC, which is controlled by Oleg Sergeyevich Patsulya and Agunda Konstantinovna Makeeva, according to state records.
At the time a spokesperson for the company (Oleg’s wife, Rosa Pereira) offered little better than a metaphorical “can’t talk, I dunno” shrug.
Mr Patsulya’s wife, Rosa Pereira, who is also listed on the corporate paperwork for the shell company, told the Herald she was aware of the raid.
“I can’t talk about it,” she told the paper. “The lawyer [for my husband] said not to talk to anyone. ... I have no idea what it’s about.”
The FBI were even less transparent, keeping mum on their target and goals.
That changed today. As reported in the NY Times (free link here), the Russian couple are charged with evasion of trade sanctions with Russia, imposed since the war in Ukraine was unleashed by Putin, centering on exports of US-made aerospace parts via a complex set of intermediaries and routes.
Last August, Oleg Patsulya, a Russian citizen living near Miami, emailed a Russian airline that had been cut off from Western technology and materials with a tempting offer.
He could help circumvent the global sanctions imposed on Rossiya Airlines after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by shuffling the aircraft parts and electronics that it so desperately needed through a network of companies based in Florida, Turkey and Russia.
“In light of the sanctions imposed against the Russian Federation, we have been successfully solving challenges at hand,” Mr. Patsulya wrote, according to a criminal complaint filed Friday with the U.S. District Court in Arizona.
Apparently, the efforts of Oleg Patsulya and his business partner were quite successful, while they lasted. Millions of dollars worth of the parts, made by the likes of Boeing, Honeywell and Airbus — amongst others — all made their way to Russia. Passage was eased by transiting the exports through Russia friendly hands in Turkey, the gulf states and elsewhere. While some of the sales simply transferred parts of US origin already on the shelf offshore, others were first sold, direct from the US, into the friendly intermediary’s hands.
In any event, all of their efforts have now been halted. Thursday Oleg Patsulya and his business partner were arrested by the FBI, then later charged with violating U.S. export controls and international money laundering.
Some important evidence of Patsulya’s work came via aggregated import-export data gleaned by Import Genius, using a mix of aggregated public and private trade information. It is known that the Patsulya’s efforts is not the only example of a group or individual actively working to skirt trade sanctions associated with aerospace parts (and doubtless other classes of materials, equipment and technology).
Thus, it is highly likely that Patsulya’s arrest may not be the last of the type. Merely one of the first.