Green Trace LLP was incorporated on 17 May 2007 to the little known firm of Maurice J Bushell of Clifton Street, London who have only incorporated a few LLPs in their time. It’s original Designated Members were a pair of Singapore entities called Heedway PTE Limited and Medway PTE Limited.
Checking on Companies House, this same pair were Designated Members for two other Limited Liability Partnerships, called Food Tech Industries LLP and Weddell Trace LLP. Food Tech dissolved in 2014 having stopped making any filings at Companies House since 2012 however Weddell Trace LLP was active until 2016. Moreover, when Medway and Heedway resigned as Designated Members in 2009 they were replaced by the well-known duo of Ireland & Overseas Investments Ltd and Milltown Corporate Services Ltd who feature strongly in just about every laundromat story ever written.
Weddell Trace was incorporated on the same day and at the same time as Green Trace and consequently they have consecutive Company Numbers (OC328523 and OC328524 respectively). Food Tech was incorporated a few months later in October.
A further check on OpenCorporates reveals that Medway PTE and Heedway PTE were themselves only incorporated in March 2007 (two months prior to Green Trace and Weddell Trace) and that they were incorporated on consecutive days 13 and 14 March). They have both since been struck off but no date is given. OpenCorporates also tells us that they were Designated Members to a total of 17 UK LLPs, the reason only three of those come up on a Companies House search is that OpenCorporates maintains an archive of UK entities whereas the beta CH website only goes back the last six years.
Over the next four years, Green Trace LLP proceeded to file dormant accounts although, notwithstanding that, it still changed registered address three times and acquired a new set of Designated Members, Heedway and Medway terminating their appointment on 14 October 2010 to be replaced by a new pair of legal entities called Creotellco System Limited and Dixote Invest Limited, both registered to an address in Limassol, Cyprus. Four years later, in 2014, they resigned to be replaced by Scotmax Import Limited and Trioton Services Limited, also based in Cyprus but this time to an address in Nicosia.
By this time, Green Trace LLP had started trading and their accounts for 2012 and 2013 show commission income of £7,752 and £14,468 respectively. Which appear to be quite modest amounts for a company that has changed offices from Clifton Street, London EC2 to Western Road, Sevenoaks, and then to Wilbury Way, Hitchin, from whence to Churchill Court, Station Road, North Harrow.
But that wasn’t the end of the changes as it moved again in 2013 to 175 Darkes Lane in Potters Bar. Which meant that, by the time it filed it’s accounts for 2014 it was at its fifth registered address and on its third set of Designated Members. Not content wit that, the accounts, which showed a commission income of £15,591 were signed by our old friend Ali Moulaye on behalf of Scotmax Import Limited.
Unusually for an Ali Moulaye company, Scotmax Import (along with Trioton Services) appears to be the Designated Member for Green Trace and no other.
In 2016, with the advent of the Person with Significant Control requirements, Green Trace LLP registered Amrulia Abruzov, from the Luhansk (or Luganskaya) region of Ukraine as the person with significant influence or control over the company. Mr Abuzov must have been quite shy because I can find no other trace of him on the internet, neither can I track down his given address of Truda Street, Sverdlovsk , Luhansk, Ukraine although, coincidentally, there is a Truda Street in the Sverdlovsk district of Yekaterinburg in Russia, an easy mistake to make.
In the event, Mr Abuzov only remained in control of the company for 9 months before handing over control to a Mr Petr Cechmanek from the town of Prostejov in what is now called Czechia (formerly known as the Czech Republic). The good news is that his address is real! Here it is.
Even better, he has a Facebook page giving his address as Prostejov and his date of birth as October 1971 both of which agree with the Companies House filing (although he spells his last name Ceechmanek). Sadly, he neither has any Friends on Facebook nor has he ever mentioned that he is the owner or controller of a UK Limited Liability partnership.
Which is a shame because, as we are about to see, things started to change for Green Trace a couple of years ago following an article I wrote called “Who is Ali Moulaye and why does it matter?” which happened to mention the company in passing. The article was published in October 2017 and, on something of a whim, I returned to the Companies House filings for Green Trace in August 2018 where I was somewhat surprised to see that, in the interim, it had filed a whole stack of amended accounts. Four years’ worth in fact!
So what had changed? Not the declared commission income which was still the same for each of the four years concerned (2014 to 2017 – respectively £15,591, £27,492, £19,048 and £22,178) but what had been missed off first time around was the “Net Non-Current Assets” figure. Easy to do when they were a mere £44,875,591 in 2014, £65,559,269 in 2015, £56,974,433 in 2016 and finally £60,436,361 in 2017.
That’s quite a large amount to forget.
At this point you’re probably asking what Green Trace LLP had invested in to have such a large amount of Net Non-current assets. And the answer is Green Trace SIA a Latvian company specialising in the sale of climate equipment throughout the Baltics and beyond. Thanks to the database maintained by Lursoft we can also identify that Green Trace LLP had invested just under £6,000,000 in share capital in two tranches, £2846 in 2010 and a further £5,973,216 in 2013.
By another strange coincidence, at almost the exact moment I published my follow up article “ A Curious Case of Amended Accounts” in August 2018, Green Trace LLP was withdrawing its investment and handing over control to someone else. Who was that someone else?
Thanks to the registry, accessible through Lursoft, we can find out.
Initially, control of the Green Trace SIA was handed over in its entirety to a company called Hilton Inter Corp located on the 19th Floor of Global Plaza Tower, 50th Street, Panama City. This is the same address as a company called Cascado AG which, on paper at least, was owned by Latvians Stan Gorin and Erik Vanagels and which has been much in the news in relation to various money laundering schemes most recently as the owner of Quantus Limited a British Virgin Island company at the heart of the Troika Laundromat story broken by the OCCRP early in 2019.
There is no suggestion that Hilton Inter Corp is associated in any way with Cascado. In fact, Lursoft makes clear that Hilton Inter Corp is actually owned by another company called Formond Inc of the Marshall islands which is in turn owned by two Russians, Sergey Velichko and Mikhail Timoshenko.
This is already interesting, not least because the main account signatory for Formond Inc (which is, or has been, the Designated Member – along with Primecross Inc – for more than 600 UK LLPs) between 2012 and 2017 was none other than the aforementioned Ali Moulaye. And checking on OpenCorporates reveals that not only is Formond (according to the Lursoft filing) the owner of Hilton Inter Corp but that it is also the director along with Primecross Inc and Entervox AG another company which acts as Designated Member to a number of UK LLPs and which has published accounts signed by Ali Moulaye.
But there’s a further twist here because in an article published recently on the RNZ (Radio New Zealand) website – https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/389888/marshall-islands-boots-out-companies-implicated-in-russian-scandal – the head of the Trust Company of the Marshall Islands, the firm that manages all Marshall Islands corporate registrations, is quoted as saying that Primecross and Formond had been kicked off the register.
Why? Because they were the designated members for another UK entity called Lantana Trade LLP, the company allegedly owned by Igor Putin, cousin of Vladimir Putin, president of Russia and which was the company that triggered the entire Danske Bank Estonia saga when whistleblower Howard Wilkinson noticed that Lantana Trade LLP was filing dormant accounts whilst millions of dollars was flowing daily through its account with Danske in Estonia.
Does that remind you of anything?
Since then Hilton Inter has itself bowed out and handed over control directly to Messrs Timoshenko and Velichko (on 15 October 2018, only two months after taking over from Green Trace LLP). Sadly, their names are both reasonably ubiquitous in central and eastern Europe so it is difficult to track them down with any degree of assurance.
One thing worth noting though Is that, although Green Trace have apparently given up their ownership of Green Trace SIA, they must still be in business somewhere as they have recently (April and May 2019) made two further filings with Companies House. The first (in April) was to advise that they had, yet again, changed their registered address. Along with many others, they have moved from the notorious 175 Darkes Lane to the less well known 61 Bridge Street, Kington, Hereforsshire.
The second was the annual confirmation statement (which asserted there had been no changes in the company). The latest set of accounts (filed in February 2019 and signed by Kang Dong-Hee are also interesting, They declare the interest which Green Trace LLP had (as it then existed) in Green Trace SIA but also in three other companies.
- Techform Trade LLP
- Corconel Limited
- Dlegit Alliance Ltd
And now things get complicated.
Techform Trade LLP was originally incorporated with Ireland & Overseas Acquisitions Ltd and Milltown Corporate Services Ltd as its Designated Members, followed by Intrahold and Monohold and others, finishing up currently with two companies called Corconel Limited and Melcon Services Limited, both of Limassol in Cyrpus. Corconel Limited is, as noted above, also a company in which Green Trace has invested. But what about the strangely named Dlegit Alliance Limited?
A quick check on OpenCorporates reveals that one if its directors is none other than Melcon Services Limited the other Designated Member for Techform Trade LLP. Oh what a tangled web they weave!
NOTE: One of the significant contributors to the underlying data and connections, identified within this article was Caspian’s “Entity Investigator”. More information about this new and exciting technology here.
Hiding in plain sight - my search for money launderers 