Thread by @ZackKopplin

Hidden Russian oligarch money has gotten a lot of attention recently, but @basmoose and I dived into another secret set of investments worth hundreds of millions: nearly 300 properties connected to Iraqi Kurdistan's Barzani family.

This is the story, for @TheProspect
prospect.org/power/how-olig…

The first set we found in Northern Virginia, which has been a place that the Barzani family has previously stashed money. The first hint was from a public data broker. It listed the Kurdish President as living at this very expensive Virginia address.

But, there's something fishy about this address online. The names of the owners of this $7 million property are "withheld by request," a service provided by the Fairfax county assessor's office, but also useful to maintain anonymity for people like Barzani.

The only real hint is that the mailing address for this property redirects to the law office of a Virginia property lawyer.

And boy is his website something. He's all about helping rich people hide their money. (He did not respond to requests for comment)

Seriously though, go take a look at this dude's website. It reads like a parody. "The Law Office of Dan Withers can make the ownership, management, use and disposition of your assets invisible."

dan-law.com/about-us.html

And that's when we noticed something weird. Three other addresses surrounding this property were also all connected to this lawyer. Two through trusts and the other through an anonymous LLC.

At that point, @basmoose went down the county courthouse to get the actual sale documents for these houses. What we found is that the properties were passed through two interlinked trusts, the Dulaney and Mottrom trusts.

And we finally got a name on the properties. The 1224 address had been put into this trust by a Nabila Mustafa.

Who is Nabila Mustafa? It's another name for Nabila Barzani, the wife of Nechirvan Barzani, the President of Kurdistan.

But while looking for the owner of those four properties, we also found a few more connected to this lawyer. Same setup, names withheld, using proxies, including the same lawyer, Withers, along with a man we confirmed was employed by Barzani through a source

These properties were centered around something called the Blue Ridge Trust. We found the President's brother, Abbas, transferring property into this trust

All together these 7 properties came out to a little over $24 million, some had been sold and some were still owned. It's not a small bit of money and we've got the full property documents posted to DocumentCloud

documentcloud.org/app?q=%2Bproje…

But there was another cache of records we were sitting on and it makes $24 million look like chump change. Investigative nonprofit @C4ADS (and always thanks to the great @IsaacZukin) got ahold of a massive Dubai property leak called Sandcastles

c4reports.org/sandcastles

They shared the data for a ton of properties connected to the Barzanis. In the past, I've hinted at what this data contains. We had houses connected to Mansour Barzani, the brother of the Prime Minister, and his partner, Sodabeh Khoshdaman, but there was a much bigger cache

The largest Iraqi property owner we could identify was Salar Hakim, the uncle, through marriage, of Nechirvan Barzani. Hakim is the chairman of the Kurdistan International Islamic Bank, which is widely understood as a Barzani bank.

You can see how this works from the great work of @bdfne

https://twitter.com/bdfne/status/1474303007558979592

Salar Hakim owns at least 288 apartments in Dubai. He owns near enough entire floors of parts of the Burj Khalifa complex. (These numbers are probably an undercount, but it's what we could confirm.) We also got a confirmation from Hakim.

How was this confirmed? Funny story, there was a cell phone number associated with Hakim’s properties in the C4ADS database. I thought it was his property broker’s number but when I sent it a WhatsApp message it was the man himself

He appears to have blocked my number this morning, but before he did that he confirmed he owned the properties

Anyway, let's dive into the properties. They're very fancy. We've got 75 at The Grand Creek Harbour by Emaar (someone smarter than me might figure out the connection between failed Emaar investments in the KRG and these properties)

It's hard to put exact values on the properties because size, location, amenities can change their value. But here's a pricing chart for the Grand during construction, topping out around a million USD (for people who pre-bought, like presumably Hakim did)

I also don't think this accounts for stuff like really prime real estate, penthouses etc. Anyway, on this scale, you can probably put the Dubai properties in the $100 mil to $200 mil range

Anyway where else did Hakim own properties. He owns a bunch in the similarly named Grande by Emaar

dubai-grande.ae

He also owns a bunch of properties in the Address tower, the Dubai mall, the Residences, and a scattering of a ton of other skyscrapers. Largely, these properties were developed by Emaar

Anyway, all this raises the question, how did Hakim purchase all these properties? Nothing in his bank's financial documents appear to indicate he could afford them. Quick analysis from KIIB's 2020 annual report

Basically, this suggests that the money didn't come from Hakim's salary, so where did it come from? This is the essence of what we describe in the article as a Laranja scheme, taken from Brazilian corruption scandals.

In this case, Hakim would be a laranja, or a proxy, for his more powerful relatives to put a barrier between them and their assets in case of discovery (like this article)

Oh good, the fake affair allegations have already restarted