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Diana pavel faceboof7/26/2023 ![]() In 2014, he was arrested by federal agents in an unrelated matter as he disembarked from a plane at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport. He lives in Holmdel, New Jersey, an upscale enclave southwest of Manhattan, and owns a number of US companies which control assets in Russia with well over US$ 1 billion dollars in turnover, including Avilon. This circle is tight, and we stumble upon it time after time.”Ībout 90 percent of Avilon Automotive Group is equally split between Alexander Varshavsky and Kamo Avagumyan. While this conflict of interest may technically not be illegal under Russian law, watchdogs decry this as a common Russian pattern, wherein taxpayers' money flows to those with close ties to the elite.Įlena Panfilova, vice president of Transparency International-Russia, said the Avilon case “once again shows there is an inner circle of elites in Russia bound by such affiliations. ![]() The cases show that even as Avilon was benefiting from state contracts with various security agencies in Russia, one of its owners was a business partner of the high-ranking officials who ran those same agencies. ![]() Over the last six years, the company has won state contracts worth at least 17 billion rubles (US$ 286 million at the current exchange rate), which does not include significant additional contracts for service and maintenance.īut the lawsuits, filed in US federal and state courts in 2016, revealed previously hidden details about the firm. ![]() High-ranking officials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Federal Security Service (the former KGB), the Presidential Administration, and the General Prosecutor's Office ride in Avilon cars. Its customers include average citizens, well-heeled private clients, and government and law enforcement agencies. The Avilon Automotive Group, which has sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cars to the Russian government and state organizations, has been in business since 1997 and is one of the leading Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Hyundai and BMW dealers in Russia. (Photo: Pavel L Photo and Video / )įor years, the Avilon owners’ dealings were hidden in a maze of corporations registered in various notorious tax havens, including Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, and the Marshall Islands - as well as the US state of New Jersey.īut Chaika’s connections to Avilon were uncovered in part when reporters for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting project (OCCRP) obtained court files from a pair of lawsuits filed in the US by warring investors. The Avilon complex and the Avilon-Plaza building in Moscow (left), which contains a former office of Probusinessbank. The broadcaster said the images shown in the program, which was made by its history department, have been “carefully and sensitively selected” and that the identities of those in the car had been blacked out.The owners of the Avilon Automotive Group, a top Russian dealer in luxury vehicles that does substantial business with law enforcement agencies, have secret business connections with relatives of Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, his deputy, and a senior ex-official of the Investigative Committee, a top-level police agency. Very few of the photos taken by paparazzi and passers by on the night of the crash in August 1997 have surfaced in the media, and many were confiscated as evidence by the French legal authorities in the aftermath of the crash in the Pont d’Alma in Paris. Newspapers here have reported that the program features previously unpublished photographs of the princess receiving medical attention from a doctor as she lay dying in the back of the black Mercedes S-class vehicle in which her lover, Dodi Fayed, and the driver, Henri Paul, also were killed. It will broadcast “Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel” next week, to mark the 10th anniversary of her death. The broadcaster, which earlier this year stoked controversy with the fictionalized assassination of President George Bush in “Death of a President,” has denied the program is sensationalizing Diana’s death and has described the film as “responsible.” Channel 4 on Monday said it will go ahead with the broadcast of a film showing previously unseen photographs of Princess Diana in the car crash that killed her in 1997, despite anger from her friends and criticism from politicians. Princess Diana is seen in a 1995 file photo.
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