How Oligarchs Stash Money in Foreign Real Estate

This article is written by Government Accountability Project’s Investigator, Zack Kopplin, and was originally published here.

On his website, Virginia property lawyer Dan Withers boasts that he can make your money invisible. From offshore companies to private trusts, he offers “innovative legal strategies” to his mega-rich clients “for whom anonymity and protection from liability are of paramount concern.”

Hiding wealth is often done for illicit reasons, like tax evasion and money laundering, or at least sketchy ones like exploiting legal loopholes to keep down one’s tax bill. This service is especially attractive to foreign dictators and corrupt politicians who need to keep their citizens from discovering how much money they have stolen. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the harm caused by the financial secrecy industry has received more attention, but sanctioned Russian oligarchs and war criminals aren’t the only people with money to hide.

One of Withers’s clients appears to be the family of Nechirvan Barzani, president of Iraqi Kurdistan. The family has ruled this semi-independent region in northern Iraq as a quasi-monarchy for generations, piling up vast wealth from allegedly crooked oil, telecom, and real estate deals. In December, The American Prospect exposed how the Kurdish president’s cousin, Masrour Barzani, who serves as the region’s prime minister, was exploiting American corporate secrecy laws to hide an ...

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