Revealed: oligarchs spied on UK lawyers who ran Serious Fraud Office cases

The Guardian

5 days ago

Oligarchs whose business empire was under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office spied on lawyers who ran some of the UK's most sensitive criminal cases.
The Guardian has obtained surveillance images of former SFO prosecutors taken by hired spies. Their goal is said to have been gathering information on the agency's activities, identifying its sources and gaining 'leverage'.
Backed with billions from Vladimir Putin's regime, the oligarchs were at the time waging an aggressive counterattack against an SFO investigation into suspected corruption and fraud, a major case the agency ultimately dropped.
Andy Slaughter, a Labour MP who chairs parliament's justice committee, said: 'It is deeply troubling that individuals with knowledge of serious fraud inquiries should be surveilled by the very organisations they have been investigating.' He added: 'The hunter has become the hunted.'
The surveillance began in 2019. It is unclear when, or if, it finished. As the law enforcement agency that takes on the toughest white-collar crime cases against multinational corporations and billionaires, the SFO often faces fightbacks by well-funded law firms and even cyber-attacks. But this is believed to be the first time surveillance of former SFO prosecutors has been revealed.
Lawyers for the oligarchs' mining company did not dispute that the surveillance took place. But they said any 'investigations' into the targets were lawful, undertaken in preparation for lawsuits it brought against the SFO.
On Saturday 7 March 2020, the spies pulled up in a car outside the home of former senior SFO prosecutor Tom Martin. At 10.39am, the target emerged from his front door wearing jeans and a Wolverhampton Wanderers hoodie. It was a momentous day: Martin was taking his young son to the football for the first time.
Martin had run complex, transnational bribery investigations at the SFO. Although he never worked on the oligarchs' case, he felt he would have been an attractive target for anyone seeking intelligence on the agency.
Known to his colleagues as a charismatic leader, Martin had brought an employment tribunal claim over his 2018 dismissal during a power struggle with American prosecutors – a claim he would win. It was apparent from press coverage that he knew the SFO's inner workings and had fallen out badly with its management.
Over years of pursuing powerful suspects, Martin had sometimes thought he was being watched. But none of his fears were confirmed. He said he was 'absolutely appalled' when the Guardian showed him surveillance images of his home taken by oligarchs' spies. 'I'm there with my lad,' he said. 'We're not fair game.'
Martin said that if operatives were seeking 'kompromat', the Russian term for compromising material that can be used to apply pressure, there was nothing to find, except perhaps his passion for model trains.
'It's an attack on the rule of law,' he said. 'You're not trying to defend yourself in a court, you're trying to shift the odds in your favour.'
The surveillance stretched across the country.
In a rural village, the oligarchs' operatives spied on Mike Walsh, a former Metropolitan police officer. After leaving the force in the late 1990s, Walsh switched to the private intelligence industry. One client had been in a fight with the oligarchs' corporation over some African mines. In May 2019, the spies traced Walsh, who was by then retired, to his home and photographed him as he put the bins out.
Other targets had held senior positions in UK law enforcement much more recently, as members of the very SFO team investigating the oligarchs' affairs.
James Coussey was awarded an OBE in 2010 after decades trying to convict the perpetrators of financial crimes. Three years later, he was recruited to the SFO for one last assignment: investigating suspected fraud and bribery at a mining company that had been among the most valuable listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Three oligarchs, known as the Trio, were the founders and largest shareholders of the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC). It owned mines from Kazakhstan to Congo extracting coal, chrome and cobalt. Every few days it made revenues bigger than the SFO's annual budget.
The team Coussey joined followed money trails between Swiss banks, African kleptocracies, ex-Soviet dictatorships and the Mayfair property market. In 2018, after five years on the case, Coussey called an end to his career. 'I don't think he really wanted to retire,' said Martin, his SFO colleague and fellow surveillance target. 'He loved his job and he did it in a really calm and classy way.'
By then, the ENRC case had become one of the highest-stakes investigations in the SFO's history. It seemed that criminal charges were close. The SFO's prosecutors had interviewed one of the oligarchs, plus the son-in-law of another.
The oligarchs and their company denied wrongdoing. ENRC's lawyers were on the counterattack. As part of a high court claim against the SFO, they alleged that Coussey had negligently mishandled evidence. A judge would find no 'knowing or reckless breach of duty'. But the legal action had revealed Coussey's identity as a member of the investigation team and put him on the oligarchs' radar.
In retirement, Coussey fell into ill-health. The spies' surveillance images of him are time-stamped: a Monday morning in February 2020. They show an elderly man outside his home, bald and bespectacled in a jersey and bodywarmer, pottering between the garage and a blue hatchback.
Coussey has since died. Martin called him one of the prosecutors of his generation. He was 'the most upright lawyer you could ever meet', albeit with a fondness for rude jokes. 'He's given his country immense service.'
Entrusted with powers to seize evidence, SFO prosecutors undergo security vetting. During his years at the agency, Martin was aware of 'near constant' cyber-attacks.
So sensitive was the oligarchs' case that Coussey and the rest of the investigating team worked from a restricted area of the SFO's headquarters off Trafalgar Square.
Sons of the Soviet Union's central Asian provinces, the Trio's path to riches began when two of them worked at a KGB business venture in Moscow during the fall of communism. They have used an assortment of private intelligence companies since arriving in London in the mid-2000s.
There were the former agents of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence and military services who set up Black Cube and Diligence, run by alumni of MI5 and UK special forces. These operatives targeted Neil Gerrard, a former ENRC lawyer who, a judge would later find, leaked to the SFO as he milked the oligarchs for fees. Both firms say they played no part in the surveillance of former SFO prosecutors.
That surveillance began in 2019, directed by Dmitry Vozianov, a Russian consultant who handles 'special situations' for oligarchs. Vozianov fends off threats to his clients' business interests, overseeing lawyers, spies and public relations experts. Faced with an SFO investigation, the Trio hired him.
For this covert surveillance operation, Vozianov deployed a decorated veteran of the parachute regiment. Damian Ozenbrook served in Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and the Balkans. After leaving the military, he set up his private intelligence company , Blue Square Global.
The goals of the surveillance Vozianov assigned to Ozenbrook were 'to know what was going on in the SFO', said a source with knowledge of the operation, and to find out 'what, if any, informants the SFO were using'. The source believes it was 'all about leverage'.
Vozianov did not respond to a request for comment. Lawyers for Ozenbrook's firm did not dispute that his operatives spied on former SFO prosecutors on Vozianov's instructions – though they said there had been no surveillance of serving SFO personnel.
The oligarchs' operatives also watched John Gibson, a barrister who had run the SFO's ENRC investigation for four years. Gibson left the SFO for a law firm in 2018. A letter he received two years later from ENRC's lawyers at the US firm Quinn Emanuel stated that he had been seen meeting a journalist in the National Theatre's underground car park in September 2020.
An SFO spokesperson said: 'We have been aware of the risk of surveillance for many years and our first priority is always the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues. We note that this report relates to surveillance of former colleagues following their departure from the SFO.'
In 2023, after a high court judge found the SFO had been wrong to accept leaked material from ENRC's lawyer at the outset of its investigation, the agency dropped the case. There was, it said, 'insufficient admissible evidence' to bring charges.
Two of the oligarchs have died during the long struggle with UK law enforcement, their stakes passing to their heirs. The Russian state banks that backed them are now under sanctions. Nonetheless, their corporation is due to receive millions from the public purse as damages.
While surveillance by state agencies is highly regulated – the SFO would have needed a warrant to conduct an operation like the oligarchs' – surveillance by private firms is not. Slaughter, the MP, said: 'Everything about this rings alarm bells, from the Russia links to the involvement of ex-security force operatives.' He said it raised 'wider issues for the government as to how it regulates private investigators'.