Notaries consider Sánchez’s measures to confiscate Russian oligarchs insufficient

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Registration on the yacht Tango, anchored in Palma de Mallorca, which belongs to a Russian oligarch.

The General Council of Notaries (CGN), an organization that represents the more than 2,800 Spanish notaries at a national level, has sent a letter to the Presidency of the Government demanding new legal measures to be able to confiscate the fortune of the Russian oligarchs in Spain considering insufficient those agreed so far by the Executive.

According to what they assure EL MUNDO government sources, the notaries have contacted the coalition government that presides over Pedro Sanchez to propose the adoption of several specific measures that complement Royal Decree Law 6/2022 of March 29, through which urgent actions were adopted within the framework of the National Plan to respond to the economic and social consequences derived from the war in Ukraine.

Public notaries argue that with the current legal framework, only direct action can be taken once morest assets in Spanish territory on behalf of natural or legal persons. Therefore, they emphasize that there is no capacity to block, for example, the sale of companies or their shares, nor to extend the measures to the direct environment of the Russian oligarchs. That is, to their figureheads, managers or direct relatives.

In this way, the CGN requests that a new Royal Decree be issued by which it is allowed to immediately block onerous transmissions, for example any sale, or free, such as donations, as well as any other legal business. For this, they demand that the Government impose the obligation that these operations be recorded in a notarial document in the case of corporations.

And it is worth remembering that currently Spanish legislation only requires the notarial public document in the constitution, increase or reduction of capital and dissolution or liquidation of these entities. But, in no case, in the transmission of shares. In such a way that, for practical purposes, these operations are opaque. Along these lines, notaries stand out who cannot help freeze the assets of Russian oligarchs if there is no possibility of knowing who is involved in the transmissions carried out by their companies.

In parallel, the General Council of Notaries demands that its professionals be legally empowered not to authorize public documents that affect the direct environment of the Russian oligarchs. To this end, it is proposed that a list be drawn up by the Centralized Body for the Prevention of Money Laundering of the CGN with information provided through judicial and administrative sources.

The public notaries state, in short, that today there is hardly the possibility of noting the prohibition of disposing of a property in the property registry. Which constitutes a clearly ineffective measure considering that even if said prohibition exists, any Russian businessman affected by it can without any problem sell the company in whose name the property is circumventing the sanction.

Likewise, the General Council of Notaries reminds the Executive that it is not the first time that the need to establish these measures to combat money laundering in our country has been claimed. This hole in the Spanish mercantile structure was already revealed by the International Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in 2014 when reviewing the Spanish money laundering prevention system.

Money laundering

This international organization, which brings together 37 jurisdictions, has already warned that Spain has a problem in stopping the laundering of funds with the transmission of the shares of public limited companies that are not listed on the stock exchange. In fact, he highlighted in this sense “the little transparency” of these transmissions since “the registered shares of said companies can be transferred directly without any control being applied or there being an obligation for a notary to intervene.”

At the moment there is no country in our environment that does not comply with the FATF recommendations, which must be implemented in the Spanish case by the Ministry of Justice, coordinated by the Minister Pilar Llop.

However, with the limited legal tools that notaries currently have at their disposal, they have already sent the Money Laundering Prevention Service (Sepblac) a first provisional report with the properties of Russian hierarchs detected in Spain and that have already been frozen.

As this newspaper has been able to learn, the Centralized Body for the Prevention of Money Laundering of the CGN has already communicated to Anti-Money Laundering the location of operations of 14 individuals included in the lists drawn up by the European Union. In turn, operations have been identified in notarial deeds of 88 individuals linked to the former.

As for the Spanish legal entities found, eight have been reported. In the case of foreign legal companies, seven distributed between countries have appeared as UK, Switzerland, Lithuania The Liechtenstein. Along these same lines, 29 properties have been reported in the name of Russian oligarchs in our country, either directly or through one of their companies (11) or linked to their relatives (18). On the other hand, the mooring of a yacht has also been reported on the list.

The Spanish action once morest the Russian tycoons derives from the decision of the European Council, that it has not only condemned “with the utmost firmness the unprovoked and unjustified military aggression that the Russian Federation has carried out once morest Ukraine”. It has also proceeded to “impose restrictive measures that affect both this State and the funds and economic resources of the people who support and benefit from it, as well as the people and entities that provide it with substantial sources of income and that in the end they support the invasion of the Ukraine».

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