San Juan, Puerto Rico – A federal judge in New York granted the lawyers of a Russian woman permit on Monday to issue citations to access the financial records of Antigua and the Prime Minister of Barbuda and other officials involved in the sale of a megayacht that his father had abandoned.
Lawyers must first notify Prime Minister Gaston Browne and others before serving the citations at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and Clearing House Payments Co. based in the United States CO.
“The financial records will speak for themselves,” said Martin De Luca, with Boies Schiller Flexner Llp.
She is one of Yulia Guryeva-Motlokhov’s lawyers, who states that she is the legitimate owner of Alfa Nero Megayacht, who remained anchored out of old for a couple of months before the local government took it and sold it last year.
Browne did not immediately respond to a message to comment on the judge’s decision.
Guryeva-Motlokhov’s lawyers alleged in a presentation on March 11 in a federal court that Browne’s administration has not published documents related to the sale of $ 40 million from the yacht, once owned by Andrey Guryev, a Russian businessman who founded a fertilizer company and worked in the Russian government.
He was sanctioned by the United States Department of the Treasury in August 2022, and the Megayacht was removed from the list of sanctions in June 2023 so that ancient could liquidate it.
Old opposition leaders have also demanded details of how yacht sale revenues were spent.
Browne has said that the details related to the sale of yachts are public. On Sunday, he sent the Associated Press several documents that, according to him, showed those details.
“This is an irrefutable evidence that the statement that $ 10 million in income is missing is manufacturing,” he wrote in a message, referring to claims made in the presentation of March 11.
However, the key information was written in bank payment forms that made it difficult to confirm the details of loans and advances.
Browne also accused Guryeva-Motlokhov of defamation.
In July 2024, Browne’s wife, Maria Browne, Minister of Housing of Antigua, told the old newspaper that the income was used to pay the government’s debt. Days before the report was published, the prime minister had said that his administration was considering using the money to build a resort.
Guryeva-Motlokhov’s lawyers are looking for documents and information related to wire transfers and other transactions involving prime minister and six other people, as well as 12 entities, in the last five years.
Attacked people include Browne, his wife, his son and the General Accountant of Antigua and his port manager.
Entities include West Indies Oil Co. Ltd., an old -headquarters -based oil distribution company, of which the Government is a majority shareholder, and Fancy Bridge Ltd., an investment firm based in Hong Kong that owns shares of the oil company, as well as Petróleos de Venezuela SA, known as PDVSA.
The institutions that lawyers plan to mention must comply with the request for information unless Browne or someone else presents a motion that opposes the citations.
Legal cases related to Alfa Nero are also ongoing in Russia and in the Supreme Court of the Eastern Caribbean.
