Germany arrests 5 for illegal exports to Russia, including to arms companies

KARLSRUHE, (Germany): Germany has arrested five people for exporting goods worth at least 30 million euros ($35 million) to Russia, including to more than 20 arms companies, in violation of EU sanctions, prosecutors said Monday.

The suspects allegedly used a company based in the Baltic Sea port city of Luebeck to arrange about 16,000 shipments to Russia in recent years, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.

The investigation, including raids at additional locations, was conducted by customs agents in cooperation with Germany’s foreign intelligence service BND, said the office, based in the western city of Karlsruhe.

The prosecutors said the procurement network “was presumably operated by Russian state agencies” and that the recipients included “at least 24 listed arms companies in Russia”.

Newspaper Bild named the company targeted as Global Trade, and showed masked customs officers searching the premises in an industrial area and carrying away boxes of seized evidence.

Among those arrested was the trading company’s managing director, partially identified as German-Russian dual national Nikita S.

“Since at least the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, he and the other accused used the company on numerous occasions to clandestinely procure goods for Russian industry and export them to Russia,” prosecutors said.

“To conceal the transactions, the accused used at least one other shell company in Luebeck, sham customers in and outside the European Union, and a Russian company as a recipient, in which Nikita S. also holds a position of responsibility,” they said in a statement.

“The aim of this operation was to circumvent European Union embargo regulations,” prosecutors added, without detailing what goods were allegedly illegally exported.

The other suspects arrested were partially identified, in keeping with German privacy rules, as German-Ukrainian Artem I. and German nationals Boris M. and Eugen R.

Another German-Russian dual national, Daniel A., was also detained in the raids carried out by the Customs Criminal Investigation Office.

The suspects were arrested on charges of belonging to “a criminal organisation engaged in export business in violation of the Foreign Trade and Payments Act”.

They will on Tuesday face an investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice, who will serve the arrest warrants on four of the suspects and decide whether to also remand in custody Daniel A.

Officers also searched sites in the cities of Frankfurt and Nuremberg and two other locations, in an investigation targeting five other suspects who are currently at large, the statement said.