Gennadiy Bogolyubov
(Picture: Rex)A billionaire who lived in a £62.5 million London mansion has been hiding in his tracksuit in a bunker in Ukraine fearful of being targeted in a Russian hit, a court has been told.
Gennadiy Bogolyubov spent years enjoying his lavish home on Belgrave Square after moving to London in 2009 with his future wife Sofia.
He also invested in other properties, including a £20 million Belgravia mews house, a mansion in Eaton Place, and a £173 million office block at Trafalgar Square, as part of a high-spending lifestyle which also saw him enjoy the summer months on his yacht and fly as often as 15 times a month.
But the High Court has been told that Mr Bogolyubov – who is fighting legal claims that he and fellow oligarch Igor Kolomoisky defrauded billions of pounds from Ukraine’s biggest bank – is now a “frightened man” who has been forced to go into hiding in his home country because of the danger from Russian strikes and the threat that he will be targeted personally by Vladimir Putin’s forces.
His barrister Clare Montgomery QC told a hearing that the war has “rendered oligarchy a worthless concept in the Ukraine” and that Mr Bogolyubov “ends up as a man in his tracksuit leaving his home because he is frightened of being bombed.
“He has lost his bodyguards, it doesn’t appear that money would buy you bodyguards in the situation that appertains in Ukraine, and there he is faced with being on the Russian sanctions list, of being the subject potentially of the list for capture and either death or removal to Russia if the stories about the Russian hit list are true.”
Ms Montgomery added that Mr Bogulyubov had been “sufficiently frightened to leave his home in Kyiv” and had become one of millions of displaced Ukrainians, spending time in bomb shelters” amounting to hours a day.
Mark Howard QC, representing Mr Kolomoisky, said his client was also in danger as a “target” of the Russian president as he echoed Ms Montgomery’s call for the trial of the legal claim against the two oligarchs to be postponed.
“We know that President Putin has him within his sights,” he told the court in reference to Mr Kolomoisky. “He has become, as it were, President Putin’s sworn enemy.”
The judge, Mr Justice Trower, agreed to delay the trial until June next year on the grounds that the difficulties faced by the two billionaires in preparing their cases made a fair trial impossible this year.
The case involves claims, which are strongly denied by the oligarchs, by Ukraine’s Privatbank that Mr Bogolyubov, who left London in 2017 for Switzerland, and Mr Kolomoisky siphoned off vast sums through a complex string of financial transactions.
The alleged scam involved a series of deals in which loans were issued and used to make advance payments for “impossibly large” quantities of commodities — from tanker loads of apple juice to industrial cranes and diggers — that were never delivered.
Three English companies were among the hundreds used in what has been described in court as a “fraud of byzantine complexity” involving “rotten” lending and “fiendishly complicated money movements” that “had all the hallmarks of money laundering”.
Both Mr Bogolyubov and Mr Kolomoisky deny any wrongdoing and will fight the claim when the case finally comes to court.
