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The funds “in some cases” form the top of a chain of holding companies that lead to the actual businesses. One such example includes Meridian Petroleum, a “domestic oil and gas consultancy
in Kazakhstan, [which is] owned by a Dutch company that is owned by
a Cyprus company which, in turn, is owned by one of the Cayman funds,” OCCRP relates.
On the other hand, there are cases, when the name “Meridian” does
not show up “anywhere in the pub- licly available chain of ownership of a
layers of ownership,” the report notes.
Finally, there are cases where Meridian’s businesses are run by “nominee owners or by completely parallel structures which lead to separate, seemingly unrelated, offshore holdings”.
The group’s operations
“Meridian’s modus operandi is more about acquiring existing businesses than building them from scratch,” OCCRP reported. “Over the years, the company has operated and often sold for profit everything from oil and gas
piecing through Meridian’s web of offshores to find the main areas from which it makes its billions.”
“Today, it controls over a dozen oil and mining fields around the world – from Alaska to Africa to Australia,” the report added.
Meridian also controls a major Kazakh- stani rail transportation company that leases wagons and provides mainte- nance services to Kazakh state-run
oil and gas companies.
“The group also made hundreds of millions in real estate, largely in Russia and Kazakhstan. When it sold the St. Petersburg Galeria Mall to Morgan Stanley for $1.1 billion, this was, at the time, the largest Russian real estate deal ever,” the report said. “Last year’s Panama Papers leak shows that it also acquired half of another Kazakhstani real estate empire, Capital Partners, which built and sold projects like Moscow’s Metropolis mall – one of the largest in the country – and the Ritz Carlton hotels in Moscow and Almaty.”
“Meridian used a large portion of the Kazkommertsbank’s deposits to fund project after project”
given business”, where only its role as “beneficial owner” can only be found in obscure reports. “For example, TengizTransGaz, a major Kazakhstani transportation service provider, has no mention of ‘Meridian’ in any of its four
companies to glitzy malls to second-tier airports to vast transportation compa- nies. The company’s shareholders have built a business empire, the full extent of which has been unexplored until today. OCCRP reporters spent months
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