Deloitte wrote in a September 2005 email that “certain changes will have to be made to the accounts (bank account balances, interest income, profit and loss account)” because of the backdated changes to Kravin’s assets.
So Deloitte was apparently advising on the falsification of financial records. The evidence suggests it allowed Abramovich’s company to evade millions in tax.
Andrew Mitchell KC told us the scheme was “straightforward” tax evasion. “If it happened in England and it was in the millions, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs would be thinking about a prosecution,” he said.
Cypriot MP Christos Christofides said that if tax had been evaded, then “we have to see how we can get our money back and how, if some people are guilty, they have to pay the price according to our law.”
In addition to the documents which Deloitte helped to backdate, Abramovich’s advisers at MeritServus falsified a third set of records. This involved the oligarch’s huge business fortune – more than $10bn – held by a company called Electus Investments in Cyprus.
MeritServus backdated documents to make it look like Electus did not own the fortune.
It used another Abramovich company with exactly the same name of Electus Investments, but this time based in the more secretive BVI, where accounts did not have to be made public.
Emails show that in 2006, MeritServus acknowledged that the fortune was owned by Electus Cyprus. But again it proposed to rewrite the past, this time “to transfer the beneficial ownership to Electus Investments in the BVI” and make it look as though the change had happened three years earlier.
MeritServus signed and backdated documents which falsely purported to show the BVI company had owned the $10bn fortune since 20 November 2003. So when the accounts of the Cypriot company with the same name were made public, it appeared to have assets worth just $145,000.
Roman Abramovich’s billions had been made to disappear.
