![]() ![]() DJC Accountants’ records were obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets and shared by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. In the case of Kallias & Associates, the documents were obtained from Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared them with Paper Trail Media and ICIJ. ![]() Leaked records from Cypcodirect, ConnectedSky and i-Cyprus were obtained by Paper Trail Media. The MeritServus and MeritKapital records were obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets. The providers are: ConnectedSky, Cypcodirect, DJC Accountants, Kallias & Associates, MeritKapital, and MeritServus in Cyprus. The 3.6 million leaked files at the heart of the Cyprus Confidential investigation come from six financial services providers and a website company. Hundreds of thousands of these records come from Ioannides’ own firm, MeritServus. The leaked documents detailing the Queens building are part of Cyprus Confidential, a cache of 3.6 million documents at the heart of a global investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 68 media partners. Years later, those increases have continued at a daunting pace. In 2017, a United Nations report warned that the “expanding role and unprecedented dominance of financial markets and corporations in the housing sector” were contributing to increases in poverty, evictions and homelessness around the world. This shift not only poses new challenges for authorities tracking money linked to Putin’s enablers, but has also raised complaints from tenants feeling the squeeze of a new breed of aggressive corporate landlord and from prospective home buyers who can’t navigate a market that feels out of whack. These days, an increasingly hot investment for the ultrawealthy are modest homes and apartment buildings like the one on 44th Street in Queens. The records provide vivid detail of a phenomenon affecting many millions of renters around the world, the extent to which secretive global investment structures have permeated the real estate market well beyond the luxury condos and beachfront mansions of the rich. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, the United Kingdom targeted the Cypriot offshore services provider, Demetris Ioannides, in a crackdown on financial professionals “who knowingly assisted sanctioned Russian oligarchs to hide their assets in complex financial networks.” Image: Justin Camererīehind the sale was a financial firm applying a highly analytic approach to profit-making, and a now-sanctioned financial fixer in Cyprus who made his wealth hiding money for billionaires in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. ![]() The apartment building on 44th Street in Queens, New York. But a trove of leaked records provides a rare view into the secret forces profiting from this deal and many like it. On its face, the building’s sale in 2014 was unremarkable: just another anonymous limited liability corporation entering a hot real estate market, raising rents and driving longtime tenants out. The firm had completed a painstaking analysis of the modest 44th Street building and concluded that under new ownership, its tenants could be charged far more in rent, making it far more in profit. It had come under close scrutiny of a private equity firm working with overseas investors quietly buying rental buildings in the New York area via shell companies - the faceless entities that move billions in secretive funds through the U.S. The life of an apartment building is always about change of one kind or another, but what was about to happen to the four-story building on 44th Street spoke to darker activities of war and covert finance happening a world away. There’s the constant soundtrack of planes taking off from nearby LaGuardia Airport. The block is lined mostly with two-story brick row houses, making it sunnier than many spots deeper into the city. The ground floor had a pizza-by-the-slice shop with red walls, a $5 lunch special and a neon sign advertising “hot pizza.” Upstairs, the building had been home to a construction worker, a union doorman who worked late shifts in Manhattan lobbies and someone who worked at a small bank down the street. A dozen blocks from the nearest subway stop and a world away from posh cafes, the apartment building on 44th Street in Queens was for decades the sort of New York City building that would attract little attention. ![]()
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