UK Offshore Property Registry Reveals Luxury Properties Owned by Armen Sargsyan's Family: Hetq

The northern bank of the River Thames on Cheyne Walk is home to many of London's wealthy residents, including Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and at least two members of the Rolling Stones.

In 2018, the OCCRP partner outlet Hetq uncovered other residents in the luxurious Chelsea neighborhood, where the wife and sons of Armenian President Armen Sargsyan were registered in a five-story brick house. The true ownership of the property was hidden behind an unknown offshore company registered in the British Virgin Islands.

Reporters have now discovered the name of that company, which, according to the offshore documents, is owned by Sargsyan's sister, Karine Sargsyan. Through various offshore companies, she manages four other valuable properties in London worth tens of millions of pounds.

For years, the properties owned by these five companies were concealed from the public. However, in 2022, the UK passed a law requiring offshore companies owning property in the country to disclose their true owners, which allowed journalists to uncover that Karine Sargsyan is named as the owner of the properties. Armen Sargsyan's two sons are also listed as “persons with significant influence or control.”

“The new transparency rules shed light on how political leaders around the world, including those in countries with serious governance issues, have considerable amounts of property in the UK through secret offshore companies,” said Juliet Sloan, head of the States and Regions program at Transparency International UK to OCCRP.

In response to a request for comment regarding the properties, Armen Sargsyan stated that during the 1990s, when he first entered public service, he decided to “entrust the wealth he earned from creating projects and video games to his sister.” In answering reporters' questions, Armen Sargsyan wrote that this decision implied Karine Sargsyan becoming the beneficiary of his created companies and hiring professional managers to oversee and invest in them.

“Some of these [investments] have been managed by companies based in the British Virgin Islands. This was a completely standard mechanism for managing wealth that was based on professional advice and expertise. Mainly, the properties you mentioned were purchased with the revenues from these investments,” he wrote.

If Armen Sargsyan was the true owner of the London properties, he was legally obligated to declare them in Armenia when he returned to politics in 2013 after serving in the private sector as Armenia's ambassador to the UK. However, the properties do not appear in Sargsyan's declarations from 2013-2022.

This is not the first time there have been significant omissions in Sargsyan's declarations. Hetq previously reported that the former president did not declare his position as director of a French company that owned property in Paris and that he held a secret bank account with his sister in Switzerland containing 10 million francs.

In contrast to his sister, who has worked as a physician in Armenian state hospitals for years, Sargsyan was a successful businessman for whom acquiring luxury real estate was not a challenge. In the early 1990s, he capitalized on the video game boom by co-founding the “Tetris-Wordtris” game, which became available on Nintendo's popular SNES and Game Boy systems.

The UK Companies Registry indicates that as of February 2022, his sons had gained “significant influence or control” in two companies registered in the British Virgin Islands that own two London properties. At that time, it was less than a month since Sargsyan's unexpected resignation from the presidency of Armenia.

“In 2022, when I left politics, and as my sister was approaching her 70th birthday, she transferred two properties to my sons while continuing to remain the owner of the rest,” Sargsyan told OCCRP.

After four years in office, Sargsyan mentioned among the reasons for his resignation that the president of Armenia lacks authority over key issues, as well as health problems that arose as a result of political “attacks” against him and his family.

He stepped down just days after receiving inquiries from Hetq and OCCRP reporters regarding an investigation that alleged he held a citizenship passport from St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean during his presidency. The Armenian Constitution prohibits the president from holding foreign citizenship.

The Armenian prosecutor's office informed OCCRP that authorities are currently investigating whether Sargsyan committed a criminal offense.

Before returning to public service in 2013, Sargsyan also held British citizenship during his time in the private sector, according to the UK Companies Registry. According to his spokesperson, Sargsyan renounced his British passport before being appointed as Armenia's ambassador in the UK that year, as required by Armenian law.

During his time in the private sector, Sargsyan held advisory positions in several European foundations and companies, including British Petroleum and the French telecommunications giant Alcatel Trade International AG. He also founded the consulting firm Eurasia House International.

Records from the property registry show that four of his family's five London properties were acquired during this period, from 2000 to 2008.

The companies registry indicates that each property belongs to a separate company registered in the British Virgin Islands. One of these companies owns the five-story brick building on Cheyne Walk, while another owns the neighboring property on the same street. A third company owns a flat on the third floor at Evelyn Mansions, just ten minutes from Buckingham Palace. Another company owns a property in Malberri, a mansion in the affluent Virginia Water area of London. The neighboring house belonged to Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbekistan's late dictator Islam Karimov. The mansion was seized by the UK's Serious Fraud Office in August.

The purchase prices for two of the properties—one of the Cheyne Walk mansions and the Evelyn Mansions apartment—are unknown, but according to online real estate databases, they are currently worth at least £6 million. The other two mansions were acquired in 2006 and 2008, at a total cost of £24 million.

At the end of last year, Karine Sargsyan declared the fifth property, an apartment in central London, which she is the actual owner of, acquired in 2018 by another company registered in the British Virgin Islands. Its current value is £789,000.

Sargsyan told OCCRP that the properties “were not originally purchased at their current high values,” although he did not specify how much his family paid for them. “The appreciation of these properties over the years indicates more about smart investments than what seems to be extravagant spending,” he said, adding that “some of the properties” were purchased on credit.

Data indicates that a mortgage was taken out for the properties at 12 and 14 Cheyne Walk, but it was recorded in 2018, ten years after the purchase.

Karine has also had corporate assets belonging to their family. Recent leaked documents from corporate service providers in Cyprus revealed that Karine was listed as the actual owner of a company called Twoford Business Limited from 2008 to 2020. This company imports and licenses major international brands like Pepsi, Nestle, and Carlsberg in Armenia, Georgia, and Uzbekistan. Documents from 2020 show that Twoford was renamed Revery Group Limited, and in August 2020, Karine transferred its ownership to her nephew, Haik Sargsyan, under a trust management fund.

Although the company’s documents indicate that Karine was the owner for a short time—from 2008 and again during 2012-2020—Revery's website states that Haik founded the company in 2015.

The ownership transfer documents for Revery Group reveal some of the company's business partners. All have connections to Sargsyan, while none have ties to his sister, suggesting she may have acted as her brother’s trustee regarding the ownership of the company until its transfer.

The transfer documents include a letter from a Swiss law firm addressed to a Russian bank. It presents the ownership structure in one of the companies in which Revery invested. It indicates that Revery owns shares in Moscow's TPF Kaskad LLC, whose main business is leasing and managing real estate and which generated approximately $3 million in profit in 2022.

Through various funds and offshore companies, Kaskad has three other investors, all connected to Sargsyan, but none related to Karine: the Italian billionaire Cremonini family, which supplies hamburger meat to McDonald's and Burger King in several countries and provides food services on passenger trains across Europe, Russia, and Turkey. When Cremonini's Inalca S.p.a. company first signed a food deal with the Russian Railways in 2014, Sargsyan participated in signing the agreement as the president of Knightsbridge Group, a partner of Cremonini in Eurasia.

Other connections include Diaspora businessman Haik Didizyan, who passed away this year and supported Sargsyan's “Yerevan My Love” charitable foundation aimed at preserving the architectural heritage of Armenia’s capital and helping underprivileged children. When Didizyan and his wife opened a school in Yerevan, Sargsyan was there for the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Another connection is Almas Sultangazin, who is Kazakhstan's 40th richest businessman according to Forbes' 2023 list and a partner of Dariga Nazarbayeva, the daughter of former Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev. Sargsyan's ties to Nazarbayeva are extensive; from 2002-2005, they were co-directors at Sargsyan's Eurasia House International consulting business, and in 2002 they co-founded the annual Eurasian Media Forum in Kazakhstan. At a charity event organized by Sargsyan in 2010, where Prince Charles was in attendance, Nazarbayeva even sang Kazakh and Armenian folk songs.

In his response to OCCRP, Sargsyan confirmed that Haik founded the company, but added that it “once existed in other forms.” He stated that his “family initially invested” in the company but that he did not hold shares that needed to be disclosed to Armenian authorities. “During my time in office, I had no declarable interests,” Sargsyan stated.

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