Real estate in the UK and France and companies around the world of the ex-president of Armenia are registered in the name of relatives

Cheyne Walk runs along the north bank of the Thames . Many wealthy Londoners settled here. Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, once lived here, as well as at least two members of the Rolling Stones.

In 2018 Hetq, OCCRP’s Armenian media partner, discovered that the wife and sons of then Armenian President Armen Sarkissian live in this fashionable area. The president’s relatives were registered in a five-story brick mansion. Ownership of the property was registered to an opaque company registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI).

And now reporters have found out who is behind this company. Formally, the owner of the mansion turned out to be Karine Sargsyan, Sargsyan’s sister. Through various offshore structures, it owns four other luxury properties in London, which are worth tens of millions of pounds.

For many years it was unknown who owned these five companies. But in 2022, the UK passed legislation requiring offshore firms that have property in the country to disclose the names of their beneficial owners. This is how journalists learned that ownership was registered in Karina. And two of Sarkissian’s sons were listed as having “significant influence or control” in two companies.

“New transparency rules reveal that political leaders in troubled countries own large amounts of real estate in the UK through offshore companies,” Juliet Swann, peoples and regions program manager at Transparency International UK, told OCCRP.

When Sargsyan was asked about this property, he replied that, having entered the civil service in the 90s, he “decided to entrust his fortune, earned from developing software and video games, to his sister.” Among other things, he made her the beneficiary of the companies he founded and hired professional managers to manage and invest. This is stated in his written response to journalists’ questions.

“Some of them (investments) belonged to companies registered in the British Virgin Islands,” Sargsyan noted. “It was a completely standard set of mechanisms for asset management, on which professional advice and expert opinion were obtained. Most of the income from these investments went towards the purchase of the property you mentioned.”

If the real owner of the London property was Armen Sarkissian, then he was legally obliged to report it to the Armenian government when he returned to politics in 2013. (Before that, he was an entrepreneur for some time.) But this property is not reflected in Sargsyan’s declarations for the period from 2013 to 2022.

Other journalistic investigations showed that Sargsyan’s declarations did not mention other assets. Hetq already wrote that the ex-president secretly held the post of director of a French company that owned real estate in Paris, and together with his sister kept a secret account in a Swiss bank in which 10 million francs were stored.

Unlike his sister, who worked as a doctor in state medical institutions for many years, Sargsyan himself was a successful entrepreneur and could easily afford to buy luxury real estate. In the early 1990s, he made a fortune from the craze of video games, inventing Wordtris, a variant of Tetris that was released on the popular Nintendo SNES and Game Boy gaming systems.

According to corporate records, as of February 2022 (that is, less than a month after Sarkisian suddenly left his post) his sons became persons with “significant influence or control” in two BVI companies. Two properties in London were registered in these companies.

“In 2022, when I left politics and my sister was almost 70 years old, she gave two properties to my sons, leaving the rest for herself,” Sargsyan told OCCRP.

The purchase price of the two properties – one of the Cheyne Walk mansions and the Evelyn Mansions apartment – is not publicly available but is now valued at at least £6 million, according to online property databases. The other two mansions were bought in 2006 and 2008, with a total cost of £24 million.

At the end of 2023, Karine Sargsyan declared her fifth property. This is an apartment in central London that another BVI registered company purchased in 2018. Now its cost is estimated at 789 thousand pounds sterling.

Sarkissian told OCCRP that the property “was not initially purchased at such a high price,” but did not specify how much the family paid for the purchase.

“The fact that the property has become more expensive over the years indicates a wise investment, not the extravagant spending that you seem to suggest,” he said, adding that “some of the property” was bought on credit.

Documents show that the buildings at 12-14 Cheyne Walk did have a mortgage, but the loan was registered in 2018, ten years after the purchase.

The first document concerns the change of shareholders. In May, Tatevik Sargsyan transferred her 1% stake in the company to Hayk Sargsyan, who, together with his aunt, became the owner of VH Estate. In this document, Tatevik Sargsyan is indicated as a resident of London, and Hayk is indicated as a person living in a house that was purchased through the VH Estate company (Osh Avenue, 2). The second document is an updated charter of the company, according to which Hayk Sargsyan is both its co-owner and director.

The official website of the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan reports that at this meeting a number of investment programs were discussed that should be implemented in the country’s agricultural sector.

At the moment, Sargsyan and his family members are involved in the following business projects and companies.

In 2006-2007 The Knightsbridge Group of Companies, owned by the Sargsyans, has created over two dozen companies with the same name in various European countries and offshore zones. More than a dozen of them have already been liquidated. Only the Sargsyans themselves know the purpose for which these companies were created and liquidated several years later.

Some companies of this Group are involved in the Russian business projects of the Sargsyans. In particular, the company Knightsbridge Holding Limited, registered in Gibraltar, still owns 30% of Investment and Construction Alliance LLC. Knightsbridge Associates (Asia) Limited, registered in Hong Kong, is the sole owner of RS Electronics LLC, registered in 2012 in St. Petersburg. The Knightsbridge group also had shares in a number of other liquidated Russian companies. […]