From Moscow to Paisley: How a blacklisted Russian oligarch secretly invested in Scottish car parks

In an abandoned Paisley car park, weeds and saplings have forced their way through the weathered tarmac.

Yet in another nearby parking bay, barely a space is free. Vehicles are jammed together on the asphalt while planes roar overhead. Despite their different fates, both car parks include spaces leased by a prominent Russian banker blacklisted by the US, but highly esteemed by his country’s president Vladimir Putin, from whom he has won many awards.

A decade ago, Nikolay Kosov saw an unlikely opportunity in Paisley’s car parks, snapping up spaces for lease at £20,000 each, as part of a scheme designed to profit from Glasgow airport customers.

He did so via Kitty Invest Corporation, a firm incorporated in the secretive tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.

Kosov has denied allegations that he worked for Russian intelligence. But he hails from a prominent KGB family – Kosov’s father was reportedly the top Soviet informer in Budapest, and a Russian news agency celebrated his mother as one of the 20th century’s “most extraordinary spies”. Until September 2022 Kosov chaired Moscow’s so-called “spy bank”, which was based in Europe, but rejected by the continent after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

During his tenure at the bank, he bought up property south of the border typically in line with an oligarch’s tastes – an apartment building in London's affluent Pall Mall and a £7.6m luxury flat in Kensington.

But in Scotland, the Russian oligarch invested in more unusual assets. Rather than a Highland estate or an Edinburgh townhouse, his firm took out long-term tenancies for 33 parking spaces across four Paisley car parks between 2014 and 2015.

It cost him £520,000, plus a modest annual rental fee, as part of an investment scheme which promised high returns courtesy of travellers seeking a space nearby Glasgow airport, and other busy UK terminals. In publicly available documents – filed as a requirement of Kitty Invest’s UK property ownership – the oligarch’s name does not feature. But The Ferret has obtained files which prove that, through a clandestine trust, Kosov still controls Kitty Invest’s assets, while his wife benefits from them.On the Scottish land register, the properties and their associates have not been registered at all, which prompted Scotland’s leading land expert to claim this absence is illegal.

An MP and anti-corruption campaigners said The Ferret’s investigation was “a shocking indictment of the many gaps in our defences against dirty money”. They argued Scottish and UK governments must further boost transparency to stop “Putin’s cronies” from “stashing their cash in our country.”Last week, The Ferret visited the Paisley car parks and found their fortunes to be mixed – half were bustling, the others derelict. To what extent Kosov profited from Scottish motorists remains a mystery.

In 2016, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) told car parking companies their scheme was “misleading” to investors and ultimately “illegal”. The firms agreed to reform it and allow investors to get their initial investment back.

But by 2019, the firms had gone into administration. The FCA has since raised tens of millions of pounds for shortchanged investors, partly through the sale of some of the scheme’s assets.

It is unknown whether Kosov’s firm has received – or is due – a payout.

Panic in Budapest

To manage the companies behind his properties, Kosov enlisted the services of Jacqueline Ollerenshaw, a British accountant living in Jersey.

Her role in Kosov’s affairs is made plain in leaked correspondence as part of the Panama Papers, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and made accessible to The Ferret.

In 2014, Ollerenshaw assured lawyers that she had “known and worked with Mr Kosov professionally since 1995”. “I meet him regularly, mainly in London, and also meet his family when they are in the UK,” she wrote. The accountant had even visited Kosov in Russia, at his central Moscow flat.

Ollerenshaw stated that the Kosovs were beneficiaries of Kitty Invest and other firms via family trusts, although contradicted herself in a 2016 email, in which she bluntly told lawyers there was “no ‘beneficial owner’ as far as the companies you work for are concerned”.

While Kosov’s firms were investing in UK property, the oligarch was serving as chair of Russia’s Budapest-headquartered International Investment Bank (IIB).

Dubbed Putin’s “Trojan horse” by a Hungarian MP, Kosov and the IIB maintained the institution was independent of the Kremlin. But its many critics thought otherwise. 

Meanwhile, between 2010 and 2016, Kosov was also a director of the London-based Russo-British Chamber of Commerce, which aims to facilitate and promote trade and investment between the two countries.

In 2021, independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that Kosov held the “absolute record” for the number of awards from Putin, mostly for contributions to banking and the IIB. Awardees are reportedly exempt from property taxes and receive monthly state payments.

The years ahead proved tricky for Kosov, however. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European countries began abandoning the IIB. According to leaked documents obtained by the Hungarian investigative outlet Direkt36, Kosov feared imminent sanctions.

His family planned to move £14m of assets from UK offshore tax havens to the UAE, and Kosov’s wife sent a draft transfer contract to Ollerenshaw, who provided comments. His fears were vindicated in April 2023 when the US sanctioned the IIB and its top officials – Kosov included.

The IIB allowed Russia to boost its intelligence in Europe, and could act as “a mechanism for corruption and illicit finance, including sanctions violation,” argued the US Treasury.

Meanwhile, Kosov’s son Pavel, who met Putin in 2022, was sanctioned in Ukraine for his senior role in a large Russian state-owned firm. The Kosovs were not hit by UK sanctions, however.

Trusts and transparency

Back in Britain, Westminster fast-tracked a new Economic Crime Act in the aftermath of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine to “crack down on dirty Russian money in the UK”.

A key tenet was a new publicly accessible Register of Overseas Entities where foreign entities who own UK property must declare their beneficial owners.

However, owners can stay hidden if their assets are registered in the name of a trust, or a company owned by a trust. In the latter scenario, the trust’s name does not need to be publicly disclosed. Kosov’s property ownership is a case in point.

While two firms linked to him were added to the register – Coolbury Properties Limited in 2022 and Kitty Invest in 2023 – the oligarch’s name does not appear beside either. Instead, it is Ollerenshaw, Kosov’s accountant of years past, and other appointed representatives of the unnamed trusts behind these firms who are publicly listed.

The Ferret confirmed the name of the entity behind Kitty Invest as the Kitty Trust and obtained further information from the UK Government. Kosov is listed as a settlor – someone able to put assets into the trust – while his wife, Natalya, is the listed beneficiary.

The couple’s correspondence address is that of a luxury chalet in an Swiss alpine village famous for its ski resorts.

The Ferret was only able to obtain this information by submitting a £55 application to the UK Government requesting details about a trust which owns UK property. The name of the trust must be stated in the application, even though there may be no public record of the trust’s existence – or any clues linking the trust and its property. 

The Ferret was able to track down information about the Kitty Trust because it was named in leaked Panama Papers documents.

Transparency International UK said the Westminster government must urgently scrap the need for applicants to provide the name of a trust, or “continue to allow sanctioned individuals to hide behind these structures”.

‘Shocking indictment’ of UK’s ‘dirty money’ defences

Whether in Paisley or Pall Mall, the Kosovs still own other UK property. An opulent Kensington flat is held by the Nibiru Trust – another Kosov-linked entity overseen by Ollerenshaw – title deeds obtained by Transparency International UK show.

An application submitted in August indicates the flat may be being sold or transferred to another party. While the Pall Mall apartments have been sold off, the Kosov-linked Coolbury Properties still owns the building.

Joe Powell, the Kensington MP and former chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax, claimed that around four in ten properties in Kensington and Chelsea alone are owned via trusts.

“So it’s no surprise to me, but nonetheless deeply concerning, that we have yet more trust-owned property allegedly controlled by someone with ties to Vladimir Putin,” he said.

In Scotland, property owners and long-term tenants are legally required to enter on the Register of Persons Holding a Controlled Interest in Land (RCI), although a range of exemptions mean not everyone has to feature. Searching for Kitty Invest and its properties on the RCI draws no results. But land reform expert Andy Wightman said none of the exemptions apply to Kitty Invest, meaning those responsible for the offshore firm have committed an offence by failing to register.

“These are remarkable revelations and underscore the need for far better transparency over the control of land,” he said.

“The current RCI is not monitored for compliance and hence many people who should have registered have not done so. There have been no prosecutions for such failures.”

Transparency International UK’s Juliet Swann argued that if Westminster does not take “prompt action” to improve transparency around trusts, “an opportunity exists for Scotland to carve its own path to trust transparency by re-imagining the RCI as an anti-corruption tool."

Liberal Democrat MP Susan Murray called on the Scottish and UK governments to work together on boosting transparency. "The UK should be hitting Putin, and the oligarchs who do his bidding, where it hurts – in their wallets by ending the Russian free-for-all in our country,” she said.

"There needs to be a complete register exposing foreign property owners to stop Putin’s cronies stashing their cash in our country.”

Dr Helen Taylor, deputy director of Spotlight on Corruption, noted that Kosov’s firms are incorporated in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), a UK overseas territory of which the UK still retains ultimate responsibility.

“The UK government urgently needs to end the BVI’s role as a backdoor for dirty money flows and tackle the professional enablers who exploit loopholes to shield suspicious wealth from public scrutiny,” she argued.

“From Pall Mall to Paisley, it is far too easy for the true owners of property to hide behind secret trusts and offshore structures,” added Taylor.

“The fact that a Kremlin-decorated oligarch stills holds significant property interests in the UK is a shocking indictment of the many gaps in our defences against dirty money”. 

Jacqueline Ollerenshaw did not respond to requests to comment. Nikolay Kosov could not be directly reached.