- Yevgeny Prigozhin got past UK money laundering laws using a bill in his 81-year-old mom's name.
- The Wagner Group boss passed the checks that allowed him to sue a UK journalist, the FT reported.
The head of the Wagner mercenary group, implicated in war crimes in Ukraine, was able to pass UK money laundering laws by using a gas bill in his 81-year-old mother's name, according to the Financial Times.
Yevgeny Prigozhin presented the document in response to a 2021 request by a London law firm for his identity documents, before accepting him as a client, the FT reported, citing leaked emails.
The request was made before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But at the time Prigozhin was under UK, EU and US sanctions for funding mercenaries connected to human rights abuses elsewhere in the world, as well as attempts to interfere with the 2018 US elections.
Prigozhin's Russian lawyers sent Discreet Law a copy of his passport and a gas bill in his mother's name, which had an address in the Russian city of St Petersburg, the FT reported.
His lawyers wrote that "the bill is issued in the name of the claimant's mother (Violetta Prigozhina) who actually lives at the client's residential address and pays the bills."
A lawyer at Discreet Law replied by saying: "We are satisfied with the [anti-money laundering] documents," according to the FT. The firm was given permission to represent him in 2021 by the UK Treasury, the FT reported.
Prigozhin had hired the firm to sue Eliot Higgins, founder of investigative news outlet Bellingcat, for libel after Bellingcat reported on the group's activities and Prigozhin's connections to the Kremlin.
The case was later struck out, and Discreet Law applied to stop representing Prigozhin in March 2022.
Prigozhin's mother is also under sanctions as of last year, including by the UK for benefiting from her son's activities. She is now 83.
Despite being under Western sanctions for years, Prigozhin has been able to make millions through commodities companies he controls around the world, the FT reported earlier this week.
The companies, dealing in oil, gas, diamond and gold extraction in Africa and the Middle East, generated $250 million in revenue in the four years before Russia invaded Ukraine, the report said.
Discreet Law founder Roger Gherson told the FT that Discreet Law "cannot comment on confidential communications with their former clients."
The Wagner Group has taken a leading role in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with the US government accusing it of "atrocities and human rights abuses."
It has around 10,000 mercenaries and 40,000 former prisoners deployed in the conflict, Insider's Stephanie Stacey reported last month.