ABERDEEN’S abandoned Broadford Works is owned by an executive at a Russian bank sanctioned by the US.
The Herald has revealed that the former textile mill is officially owned by Ferness Investments Holdings Limited (FIH), but the beneficial owner of the Guernsey-based company is Andrey Kosolapov.
Mr Kosolapov is a senior figure at Absolut, a financial services and banking giant based in the Russian capital of Moscow.
Originally from Orsk, the 51-year-old is a Cypriot citizen in UK corporate filings.
While the UK has not sanctioned the bank, US authorities did so last year as part of restrictions on Russia’s financial services sector. There is no suggestion that Mr Kosolapov has been personally invovled in any wrong-doing.
FIH was officially resgitered as a foreign entity in February 2023, with its beneficiaries named as an opaque Cypriot trust and a Spanish woman called Carmen Gonzalez.
Mr Kosolapov was named as sole beneficiary a year later, before the filing was made public in April.
Transparency International, an anti-corruption campaign, flagged the declaration first.
Juliet Swann, Transparency International UK’s Nations and Regions Programme Manager, said: “While recent property transparency reforms are showing their worth, loopholes remain. It is still possible to list a trust as the ultimate owner of property, obscuring those who control or benefit from the land from public view.
“Together, Westminster and Holyrood could close these gaps. Failure to do so risks displacing secrecy from offshore companies into trust structures, leaving us in the dark about who owns important parts of Scotland.”
Plans to turn the complex into homes and student flats have been dropped.
