The Russian businessman based in Gran Canaria, Vladimir Kokorev, has accepted this Monday in the Las Palmas Court a sentence of two years and three months in prison - time he has already served in preventive detention - and a 20 million euro fine after confessing that he laundered 58 million undeclared from his businesses with Equatorial Guinea between 1999 and 2012.
The defense of the Kokorev family and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office have formalized before the court an agreement by which a conformity sentence will be issued that also imposes on the businessman's wife, Yulia Maleeva, one year and eleven months in prison and a fifteen million fine, but exempts the couple's son, Igor, who until this Monday was also being prosecuted in the case, from any responsibility.
Vladimir Kokorev's tax advisor, Juan Arencibia, and his sisters Margarita and María Luisa, have accepted sentences that also prevent them from entering prison: one year in prison and a fine of 500,000 euros for the former and six months in prison and a fine of 10,000 euros each for his sisters.
The agreement sentence also includes the confiscation of all assets and accounts seized from the Kokorev family to cover the value of the imposed fines and compensations.
Suffering from health problems for some time, Vladimir Kokorev has appeared at this hearing by videoconference from a bed.
The businessman has admitted to committing the acts that the Prosecutor's Office finally imputes to him, which has modified its indictment by understanding that the order to extend the case issued by the instructor in February 2020 was untimely, so the subsequent proceedings have been annulled, explained the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor of Las Palmas, Javier Ródenas.
In addition, he has taken into account as a mitigating factor the "extraordinary" delays that have occurred in this process that has lasted 16 years since it began and that had "two dead times" not attributable to the defenses, said the prosecutor, who also reminded journalists that Vladimir Kokorev is still immersed in a National Court proceeding for arms trafficking with Equatorial Guinea.
According to the prosecutor, the accused "executed in the chain of corporate entities (that they owned) numerous acts of legal camouflage to disguise and try to conceal the primary origin of the money obtained from the negotiation, preparation and execution of the trade of buying and selling cargo and passenger ships and other goods sold to the Republic of Equatorial Guinea".
This commercial activity was "never" declared, as well as the activity and the very purpose of returning the millionaire flows initially deposited in the Nordea Bank (Denmark) bank until their conversion into real estate assets.
The accused Vladimir Kokorez and Juan Arencibia designed, managed, constituted, executed and accepted the use of a corporate network integrated by a conglomerate of commercial companies that operated with each other simultaneously or superimposed in time.
This network intended to safely channel the millionaire profits generated by Vladimir Kokorev's illicit activity originating from the defrauding of the Spanish Public Treasury of the profits obtained from contracts in the Republic of Equatorial Guinea.
In addition, all the companies were controlled by Vladimir Kokorev and his wife Yulia Maleeva.
And the participation of Juan Arencibia, from 2004, was decisive, because as an expert in financial advice, he provided the Kokorevs with a series of banking operations aimed at taking advantage of funds whose criminal origin he knew, the prosecutor's brief states.
Once the accused Juan Arencibia is informed of the millionaire amounts of money that he had to advise them on, they all connived in the creation of a financial mechanism abroad destined to collect that money generated by trade in the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, not declared in Spain, so that it could act in an apparently legal manner.
And for this they did not hesitate to put Juan Arencibia's sisters in charge of several companies as sole administrators for the purpose of appearing as screens for the Kokorev family's companies, who really controlled the financial flow of the untaxed profits at all times, add the facts recognized by the defense.
And in all the created network, it is not recorded that the Kokorevs' son has had any participation in the events.
