Exclusive:
Records of Elena Chirkinyan’s time at Oracle Capital Group were recently removed from her online CV – she was sanctioned last week as a “key member of an international money laundering network”
One of the kingpins of a Russian money laundering network appears to have worked for a Tory donor.
Elena Chirkinyan, 36, was listed online on LinkedIn as working at Oracle Capital Group, which has offices in London, Moscow, Kazakhstan and a string of tax havens. Oracle Capital describes itself as “the ultimate service for high net worth individuals and their families”.
It donated £8,400 to the Conservative Party’s Spring Lunch in 2012, when the former Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron was party leader. Oracle founder Denis Korotkov-Koganovich donated another £16,450 the following year.
Chirkinyan’s LinkedIn page was edited over the weekend to remove any reference to Oracle but it previous stated she has worked there for five years. The 36-year-old was last week sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control as a “key member of an international money laundering network”. She has not been arrested and it is believed she may be living in Dubai.
Rheian Davies, legal director of the Good Law Project, said: “UK politics is incredibly vulnerable to dirty money and the influence of malign interests. The Tory government has often welcomed questionable donations but these revelations raise urgent questions for Oracle Capital. What did it know about Chirikinyan’s moonlighting?”
The UK’s National Crime Agency identified Chirkinyan as the second in command of TGR, one of two Russian operations at the heart of this global “criminal enterprise”. Together with Smart, run by glamorous Siberian-born businesswoman and magazine cover star Ekaterina Zhdanova, TGR helped launder huge sums of cash for drugs gangs around the world, including the UK.
The NCA’s Director General of Operations Rob Jones said: “Pretty much everything bad you can find in terms of organised crime has been supported by this platform. For the first time, we have been able to map out a link between Russian elites, crypto-rich cyber criminals, and drugs gangs on the streets of the UK. The thread that tied them together – the combined force of Smart and TGR – was invisible until now.”
The crooked laundromat swapped criminal cash for cryptocurrency swindled by high-profile Russian hackers through ransomware attacks including on British schools, hospitals and businesses. The US authorities said Chirkinyan, who is a Russian national, “is considered a decision maker within the TGR Group”. Last year, she was involved in “obfuscating the transfer of funds out of Russia ” for state TV firm RT and this money was “most likely to support the activities of a UK-sanctioned Russian-language media organization in the United Kingdom ”.
Chirkinyan also is accused of working with Zhdanova to “obfuscate the source of Russian client funds to purchase real estate property in the United Kingdom”. With other TGR Group members she arranged handovers where cash – which the NCA said was derived from UK street gangs – was swapped for a crypto currency called Tether.
The dirty cash was then laundered clean by TGR through cash-rich businesses like launderettes and construction firms. After passing through a series of shell companies, often linked to Dubai, the laundered money entered the global banking system and was used to buy assets around the world.
Chirkinyan appears to have joint Russian and Armenian nationality but has spent much of the last two decades in England. According to her LinkedIn profile, Chirkinyan went to school in Moscow before attending Caterham School in Surrey for sixth form, where fees start at £26,565 a year for day pupils or £55,455 for boarders.
She studied economics and business at university in London before joining Oracle Capital Group in 2019 as a “business development specialist”. She is fluent in Russian and English, but also speaks Armenian and French. Alon Gook, former Head of HR and Compliance at Oracle Capital Group, was briefly a director of TGR Solutions, when it was part-owned by Chirkinyan’s boss George Rossi, who was also sanctioned this week.
Oracle Capital Group was founded in 2002 offering services to the superrich, including immigration help, company set up and property investment. It was founded by Kakakh wealth manager Denis Koganovich-Korotkov who was later sued for £165m by the daughter of the former president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev over the fortune he helped her transfer out of the central Asian country. A spokesperson for Koganovich-Korotkov said: “The unfounded allegations were denied and an amicable settlement was reached.”
When we called Oracle to ask if Chirkinyan was still employed, their London phone number went unanswered and the voice mailbox was full. The company did not respond to our emails.
