Prosecutors say a Luebeck trading company secretly supplied Russian industry and arms makers, violating EU export bans worth millions euros.
Germany has arrested five people for exporting goods worth at least 30 million euros ($35 million) to Russia, including to more than 20 arms companies, in violation of EU sanctions, prosecutors said Monday.
The suspects allegedly used a company based in the Baltic Sea port city of Luebeck to arrange about 16,000 shipments to Russia in recent years, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.
The investigation, including raids at additional locations, was conducted by customs agents in cooperation with Germany’s foreign intelligence service BND, said the office, based in the western city of Karlsruhe.
The prosecutors said the procurement network “was presumably operated by Russian state agencies” and that the recipients included “at least 24 listed arms companies in Russia”.
Newspaper Bild named the company targeted as Global Trade, and showed masked customs officers searching the premises in an industrial area and carrying away boxes of seized evidence.
Among those arrested was the trading company’s managing director, partially identified as German-Russian dual national Nikita S.
“Since at least the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, he and the other accused used the company on numerous occasions to clandestinely procure goods for Russian industry and export them to Russia,” prosecutors said.
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“To conceal the transactions, the accused used at least one other shell company in Luebeck, sham customers in and outside the European Union, and a Russian company as a recipient, in which Nikita S. also holds a position of responsibility,” they said in a statement.
“The aim of this operation was to circumvent European Union embargo regulations,” prosecutors added, without detailing what goods were allegedly illegally exported.
The other suspects arrested were partially identified, in keeping with German privacy rules, as German-Ukrainian Artem I. and German nationals Boris M. and Eugen R.
Another German-Russian dual national, Daniel A., was also detained in the raids carried out by the Customs Criminal Investigation Office.
‘Heavy price for attack’
The suspects were arrested on charges of belonging to “a criminal organisation engaged in export business in violation of the Foreign Trade and Payments Act”.
They will on Tuesday face an investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice, who will serve the arrest warrants on four of the suspects and decide whether to also remand in custody Daniel A.
Officers also searched sites in the cities of Frankfurt and Nuremberg and two other locations, in an investigation targeting five other suspects who are currently at large, the statement said.
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Since President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU has imposed export restrictions on Russia covering military as well as so-called dual-use goods, including many mechanical, electronic and optical components and software.
Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil said in a statement that Germany is “providing substantial support to Ukraine and will continue to do so.
“At the same time, we are making it clear to Russia: Putin must pay a heavy price for his attack.
“Today’s operation, carried out on behalf of the Federal Prosecutor General, shows that we are consistently enforcing the sanctions we have agreed upon within the EU.”
Bild reported last month that its own investigation had shown another logistics company was also illicitly but routinely transporting goods from Germany via Poland and Belarus to Russia.
The daily said its reporters had sent parcels that were falsely labelled as containing books or clothes but in fact were filled with sanctioned electronic components which had been disabled.
To trace the illicit deliveries, Bild said it had placed GPS tracking devices inside five mail parcels, showing they all arrived safely in Moscow.
