\n<\/p>\n
Oligarchs whose business empire was under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office spied on lawyers who ran some of the UK\u2019s most sensitive criminal cases.<\/p>\n
The Guardian has obtained surveillance images of former SFO prosecutors taken by hired spies. Their goal is said to have been gathering information on the agency\u2019s activities, identifying its sources and gaining \u201cleverage\u201d.<\/p>\n
Backed with billions from Vladimir Putin\u2019s regime, the oligarchs were at the time waging an aggressive counterattack against an SFO investigation into suspected corruption and fraud, a major case the agency ultimately dropped.<\/p>\n
Andy Slaughter, a Labour MP who chairs parliament\u2019s justice committee, said: \u201cIt is deeply troubling that individuals with knowledge of serious fraud inquiries should be surveilled by the very organisations they have been investigating.\u201d He added: \u201cThe hunter has become the hunted.\u201d<\/p>\n
The surveillance began in 2019. It is unclear when, or if, it finished. As the law enforcement agency that takes on the toughest white-collar crime cases against multinational corporations and billionaires, the SFO often faces fightbacks by well-funded law firms and even cyber-attacks. But this is believed to be the first time surveillance of former SFO prosecutors has been revealed.<\/p>\n
Lawyers for the oligarchs\u2019 mining company did not dispute that the surveillance took place. But they said any \u201cinvestigations\u201d into the targets were lawful, undertaken in preparation for lawsuits it brought against the SFO.<\/p>\n
On Saturday 7 March 2020, the spies pulled up in a car outside the home of former senior SFO prosecutor Tom Martin. At 10.39am, the target emerged from his front door wearing jeans and a Wolverhampton Wanderers hoodie. It was a momentous day: Martin was taking his young son to the football for the first time.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Tom Martin, a former senior prosecutor at the Serious Fraud Office, in a surveillance picture taken in 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n Martin had run complex, transnational bribery investigations at the SFO. Although he never worked on the oligarchs\u2019 case, he felt he would have been an attractive target for anyone seeking intelligence on the agency.<\/p>\n Known to his colleagues as a charismatic leader, Martin had brought an employment tribunal claim over his 2018 dismissal during a power struggle with American prosecutors \u2013 a claim he would win. It was apparent from press coverage that he knew the SFO\u2019s inner workings and had fallen out badly with its management.<\/p>\n Over years of pursuing powerful suspects, Martin had sometimes thought he was being watched. But none of his fears were confirmed. He said he was \u201cabsolutely appalled\u201d when the Guardian showed him surveillance images of his home taken by oligarchs\u2019 spies. \u201cI\u2019m there with my lad,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not fair game.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Martin called the surveillance \u2018an attack on the rule of law\u2019.<\/span> Photograph: Supplied<\/p>\n Martin said that if operatives were seeking \u201ckompromat\u201d, the Russian term for compromising material that can be used to apply pressure, there was nothing to find, except perhaps his passion for model trains.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an attack on the rule of law,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re not trying to defend yourself in a court, you\u2019re trying to shift the odds in your favour.\u201d<\/p>\n The surveillance stretched across the country.<\/p>\n In a rural village, the oligarchs\u2019 operatives spied on Mike Walsh, a former Metropolitan police officer. After leaving the force in the late 1990s, Walsh switched to the private intelligence industry. One client had been in a fight with the oligarchs\u2019 corporation over some African mines. In May 2019, the spies traced Walsh, who was by then retired, to his home and photographed him as he put the bins out.<\/p>\n <\/span>A surveillance image of the former Met police officer Mike Walsh.<\/span><\/p>\n Other targets had held senior positions in UK law enforcement much more recently, as members of the very SFO team investigating the oligarchs\u2019 affairs.<\/p>\n James Coussey was awarded an OBE in 2010 after decades trying to convict the perpetrators of financial crimes. Three years later, he was recruited to the SFO for one last assignment: <\/strong>investigating suspected fraud and bribery at a mining company that had been among the most valuable listed on the London Stock Exchange.<\/p>\n Three oligarchs, known as the Trio, were the founders and largest shareholders of the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC). It owned mines from Kazakhstan to Congo extracting coal, chrome and cobalt. Every few days it made revenues bigger than the SFO\u2019s annual budget.<\/p>\n The team Coussey joined followed money trails between Swiss banks, African kleptocracies, ex-Soviet dictatorships and the Mayfair property market. In 2018, after five years on the case, Coussey called an end to his career. \u201cI don\u2019t think he really wanted to retire,\u201d said Martin, his SFO colleague and fellow surveillance target. \u201cHe loved his job and he did it in a really calm and classy way.\u201d<\/p>\n By then, the ENRC case had become one of the highest-stakes investigations in the SFO\u2019s history. It seemed that criminal charges were close. The SFO\u2019s prosecutors had interviewed one of the oligarchs, plus the son-in-law of another.<\/p>\n <\/span>James Coussey in a surveillance image with a time-stamp after his retirement from the SFO.<\/span><\/p>\n The oligarchs and their company denied wrongdoing. ENRC\u2019s lawyers were on the counterattack. As part of a high court claim against the SFO, they alleged that Coussey had negligently mishandled evidence. A judge would find no \u201cknowing or reckless breach of duty\u201d. But the legal action had revealed Coussey\u2019s identity as a member of the investigation team and put him on the oligarchs\u2019 radar.<\/p>\n In retirement, Coussey fell into ill-health. The spies\u2019 surveillance images of him are time-stamped: a Monday morning in February 2020. They show an elderly man outside his home, bald and bespectacled in a jersey and bodywarmer, pottering between the garage and a blue hatchback.<\/p>\n Coussey has since died. Martin called him one of the prosecutors of his generation. He was \u201cthe most upright lawyer you could ever meet\u201d, albeit with a fondness for rude jokes. \u201cHe\u2019s given his country immense service.\u201d<\/p>\n Entrusted with powers to seize evidence, SFO prosecutors undergo security vetting. During his years at the agency, Martin was aware of \u201cnear constant\u201d cyber-attacks.<\/p>\n So sensitive was the oligarchs\u2019 case that Coussey and the rest of the investigating team worked from a restricted area of the SFO\u2019s headquarters off Trafalgar Square.<\/p>\n Sons of the Soviet Union\u2019s central Asian provinces, the Trio\u2019s path to riches began when two of them worked at a KGB business venture in Moscow during the fall of communism. They have used an assortment of private intelligence companies since arriving in London in the mid-2000s.<\/p>\n There were the former agents of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence and military services who set up Black Cube and Diligence, run by alumni of MI5 and UK special forces. These operatives targeted Neil Gerrard, a former ENRC lawyer who, a judge would later find, leaked to the SFO as he milked the oligarchs for fees. Both firms say they played no part in the surveillance of former SFO prosecutors.<\/p>\n That surveillance began in 2019, directed by Dmitry Vozianov, a Russian consultant who handles \u201cspecial situations\u201d for oligarchs. Vozianov fends off threats to his clients\u2019 business interests, overseeing lawyers, spies and public relations experts. Faced with an SFO investigation, the Trio hired him.<\/p>\n For this covert surveillance operation, Vozianov deployed a decorated veteran of the parachute regiment. Damian Ozenbrook served in Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and the Balkans. After leaving the military, he set up his private intelligence company , Blue Square Global.<\/p>\n Do you have information about this story? Email tom.burgis@theguardian.com, or (using a non-work phone) use Signal or WhatsApp to message +44 7721 857348. For the most secure communications see theguardian.com\/tips<\/p>\n The goals of the surveillance Vozianov assigned to Ozenbrook were \u201cto know what was going on in the SFO\u201d, said a source with knowledge of the operation, and to find out \u201cwhat, if any, informants the SFO were using\u201d. The source believes it was \u201call about leverage\u201d.<\/p>\n Vozianov did not respond to a request for comment. Lawyers for Ozenbrook\u2019s firm did not dispute that his operatives spied on former SFO prosecutors on Vozianov\u2019s instructions \u2013 though they said there had been no surveillance of serving SFO personnel.<\/p>\n The oligarchs\u2019 operatives also watched John Gibson, a barrister who had run the SFO\u2019s ENRC investigation for four years. Gibson left the SFO for a law firm in 2018. A letter he received two years later from ENRC\u2019s lawyers at the US firm Quinn Emanuel stated that he had been seen meeting a journalist in the National Theatre\u2019s underground car park in September 2020.<\/p>\n An SFO spokesperson said: \u201cWe have been aware of the risk of surveillance for many years and our first priority is always the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues. We note that this report relates to surveillance of former colleagues following their departure from the SFO.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2023, after a high court judge found the SFO had been wrong to accept leaked material from ENRC\u2019s lawyer at the outset of its investigation, the agency dropped the case. There was, it said, \u201cinsufficient admissible evidence\u201d to bring charges.<\/p>\n Two of the oligarchs have died during the long struggle with UK law enforcement, their stakes passing to their heirs. The Russian state banks that backed them are now under sanctions. Nonetheless, their corporation is due to receive millions from the public purse as damages.<\/p>\n While surveillance by state agencies is highly regulated \u2013 the SFO would have needed a warrant to conduct an operation like the oligarchs\u2019 \u2013 surveillance by private firms is not. Slaughter, the MP, said: \u201cEverything about this rings alarm bells, from the Russia links to the involvement of ex-security force operatives.\u201d He said it raised \u201cwider issues for the government as to how it regulates private investigators\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oligarchs whose business empire was under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office spied on lawyers who ran some of the UK\u2019s most sensitive criminal cases. The Guardian has obtained surveillance images of former SFO prosecutors taken by hired spies. Their goal is said to have been gathering information on the agency\u2019s activities, identifying its sources<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[3767,5075,2541,1008,8615,4515,7138,8616,8034],"class_list":{"0":"post-15014","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-cases","9":"tag-fraud","10":"tag-lawyers","11":"tag-office","12":"tag-oligarchs","13":"tag-ran","14":"tag-revealed","15":"tag-spied","16":"tag-surveillance"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018The most upright lawyer you could ever meet\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018All about leverage\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n