Russian Oligarch Hired Spies to Surveil Girlfriend in Major US Cities
by Scott Stedman and Jackie Singh
This piece originally appeared in Forensic News on August 1, 2022.
The Russian oligarch who once purchased one of Donald Trump’s properties for $95 million hired a team of private agents to spy on a romantic partner in New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles in late 2015, according to a trove of thousands of pages of documents acquired by Forensic News.
Dmitry Rybolovlev, a multi-billionaire businessman who made his fortune in the Russian fertilizer industry and now owns the football club AS Monaco, used an offshore company to pay the private intelligence company, Arcanum, more than $1 million per month.
The agreement between Arcanum and a company represented by Rybolovlev’s personal attorney, Tetiana Bersheda, was signed in the middle of 2015. The contract is the first hard evidence in the public domain proving that Rybolovlev has turned to human intelligence sources to covertly gather information on those in his circle.
It was previously reported by Intelligence Online and other outlets that Arcanum conducted work for Rybolovlev in his high-profile art dispute against Yves Bouvier, but the surveillance on his romantic partner has never been revealed.
