Deloitte, one of the world's largest accounting firms, falsified corporate documents to help billionaire Roman Abramovich conceal assets and avoid taxes, according to a joint investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, BBC Panorama, The Guardian and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. The assets involved were worth more than $10 billion, the investigation said.
The investigation found that Deloitte Cyprus and Meritservus, a firm spun off from it, falsified at least 1,000 corporate documents for Abramovich. Employees are said to have backdated records by as much as five years, with Deloitte later approving the accounts in its capacity as an 'independent auditor.' The scheme allegedly allowed Abramovich to avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes.
The schemes involving Abramovich's assets are also said to have involved Eugene Tenenbaum, Abramovich's longtime right-hand man in London, and Demetris Ioannides, who headed Deloitte's Cyprus operation before later founding Meritservus.
One of the central episodes involved Kravin Investments, a Cyprus-registered company that was among the offshore structures through which Abramovich held his stake in the Russian oil company Sibneft. In 2003, Kravin received $3 billion as the first instalment in the sale of Abramovich's Sibneft shares. About $2 billion of that sum remained in Kravin's bank accounts, where it generated interest income and thereby created substantial tax liabilities. The investigation alleges the documents were manipulated to obscure the true ownership and tax position of these funds.
The findings draw on the Cyprus Confidential leak of corporate records, which has exposed the inner workings of offshore finance on the island. Leaked documents are said to show aides backdating paperwork and misrepresenting asset ownership in a strategy stretching back more than a decade, covering luxury assets including a London penthouse, a French chateau, a fleet of helicopters, private jets, multiple yachts and a supercar. Initial valuations of the hidden luxury assets were put at around $650 million, later rising to an astonishing $2 billion.
Abramovich, the former owner of Chelsea Football Club, has been sanctioned by the UK and other Western governments following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. His vast fortune, built on oil and metals assets acquired in the 1990s and 2000s, has been the subject of intense scrutiny from tax authorities and investigators.
The allegations raise serious questions for Deloitte, whose brand is built on trust and audit independence. The claim that the firm both helped falsify documents and then signed off on the resulting accounts as an independent auditor strikes at the heart of the audit profession's credibility. Deloitte has not publicly addressed the specific findings in detail.
The investigation is the latest in a series of revelations about the role of professional services firms in managing the wealth of sanctioned individuals. For regulators, the case underscores the difficulty of policing offshore structures where corporate service providers, auditors and asset managers may be drawn from the same organisations.