When the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a complaint last month for forfeiture of a Russian businessman’s U.S. real estate, it was taking action against an alleged violator of U.S. sanctions.
In the crosshairs were two condominiums in a wealthy enclave outside Miami, Florida, that officially were registered to a Delaware company. In fact, prosecutors say Russian tycoon Viktor Perevalov was using the firm to conceal his ownership.
But Perevalov wasn’t the only one dodging sanctions.
His business partner, Valery Abramov, whose bank accounts are mentioned in the complaint, also owned property in Florida and simply transferred it to his wife after being added to the U.S. economic blacklist, a Voice of America investigation has found.
That likely violated the sanctions.
Brian O’Toole, a former U.S. Department of Treasury official and an expert on sanctions, believes that Abramov’s transaction with his wife should not have been possible and the transfer should not remove blockable interest in the property.
But when malign actors routinely create new firms and find new ways to evade restrictions, enforcing sanctions can sometimes seem like a “gigantic game of whack-a-mole,” he said.
Abramov and Perevalov did not respond to requests for comment from Voice of America. The DOJ also declined to comment.
“Kings of State Procurement”
Abramov and Perevalov are co-founders of VAD, AO, a Russian company that has earned billions of dollars building roads for the Russian state.
According to media reports, the businessmen met while university students in St. Petersburg, Russia and decided to go into business together. They registered VAD — an abbreviation for “High-Quality Roads” — in 1994.
Abramov serves as the company’s CEO, while Perevalov is his deputy.
Their first job was repairing the grounds of a vegetable warehouse. Since then, VAD has experienced a meteoric rise, winning tenders to construct federal highways across northwestern Russia.
They were so successful that the Russian version of Forbes magazine regularly listed the men on an annual “Kings of State Procurement” list.
Since the late 1990s, both men have also owned real estate in southern Florida. At least one of Perevalov’s children, his youngest daughter, is a United States citizen who lists her hometown as Miami on her Facebook page.
The two men and their company were sanctioned by the United States in 2018 after VAD received a contract worth $2.3 billion at the time to construct the Tavrida highway in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
But that initially did little in practice to freeze their American assets.
According to the confiscation complaint, in 2008, Perevalov and his wife had purchased two condos as investment properties at One Bal Harbour, an elite residential complex in Bal Harbour, Florida.
After Perevalov was sanctioned, he transferred the condos to 1616 Collins, LLC, a newly incorporated company in Delaware, a state favored by many U.S. businesses because of its “tax benefits, privacy, expediency, simplified structure and the corporation court,” according to Forbes.
Miami Dade County property records show that the company paid $1.4 million for each condo.
On paper, the firm’s only beneficiary was Perevalov’s U.S. citizen daughter, a minor at the time. Despite that, Perevalov remained the actual owner of the property, the forfeiture complaint states.
After the transfer, a local real estate professional continued to rent out the apartments for Perevalov and deposit rental income into 1616 Collins’ bank account. Between December 2018 and February 2023, the firm’s account received more than $288,000 in deposits from the realtor’s company, prosecutors allege.
Beyond covering taxes and utilities, the rental income was “also used to promote the existing plan of transactions with the Defendant’s Properties and to conceal the fact that Perevalov was the true beneficial owner of the Defendant’s Properties,” the complaint states.
Although the complaint does not name the realtor, property records make his identity clear: Roman Sinyavsky, the owner of Miami VIP Properties, a company specializing in luxury real estate.
Sinyavsky received power of attorney for Perevalov and Abramov, allowing him to carry out financial transactions on their behalf. The realtor was also listed as a manager of 1616 Collins LLC, prosecutors say.
Sinyavsky signed the warranty deed transferring the condos to 1616 Collins as Perevalov’s attorney-in-fact.
There are no indications Sinyavsky has been charged with a crime. He declined to comment for this story.
Beyond the Complaint
The VAD executives’ investments in Florida extended beyond Perevalov’s One Bal Harbour condos. So did their alleged evasion of sanctions.
Searching the Miami Dade County Property records, VOA found that Perevalov had disposed of another condo just months before being sanctioned, while Abramov transferred one five months after.
Neither of these properties was mentioned in the forfeiture complaint and it’s not clear whether the DOJ will be able to do anything about it.
Property records show that, in 1998, the Perevalovs purchased a condo in the elite Bella Vista Mid Rise North building in Aventura, Florida for $840,000. In November 2017, two months before Viktor Perevalov was sanctioned, they sold it for $1.2 million.
It’s unclear whether Perevalov anticipated that he would soon be blacklisted, although prosecutors have suggested that media reports of impending U.S. sanctions against Russia influenced a Russian oligarch, VTB Bank Chairman Andrei Kostin, to allegedly conceal his U.S. real estate.
In 1998, Abramov and his wife Elena bought a condo for $1.11 million in the 2600 Island Boulevard – Residence du Cap building, located in Aventura not far from the Perevalovs’ apartment.
In June 2018, four months after he was placed under sanctions, Abramov transferred his share in this property to his wife, according to property records.
That transfer likely should not have been allowed under sanctions. “At no time were the Defendant Properties, the Abramov Accounts, or any other property belonging to Perevalov and Abramov, exempted from the sanctions. OFAC never issued a license for anyone to transact with, or on behalf of Perevalov and Abramov," prosecutors wrote in the complaint.
Nine months later, Elena Abramova sold the apartment for $1.24 million, according to property records.
How did Abramov manage to transfer the property despite being on the economic blacklist? According to O’Toole, the former Treasury official, not everything is cut and dried in the world of sanctions.
Compliance works more effectively in highly regulated areas of the economy — for example, in the banking sector. So-called “non-banking financial institutions” do not always carefully vet their clients.
“The OFAC regulations simply say do not violate sanctions,” O’Toole told Voice of America. “They don't say you must check every day. They don't say you must check when a transaction is occurring.”
Unlike in the case of Perevalov’s Bal Harbour condos, this time the DOJ likely won’t be able to file for forfeiture of the real estate.
On a technical level, if Abramov’s transfer of the condo to his wife violated the sanctions, then all further transactions with the property may be legally void, said sanctions expert O’Toole.
In practice, it gets more complicated.
The condo’s current owners appear not to have any connections with the Abramovs and probably were unaware that the property was frozen under sanctions. It is unlikely the DOJ would want to seize it from them.
“It’s hard to imagine the U.S. government would go all in on that,” O’Toole said.
