Konstantin’s problem was money. Investors all over the world now wanted their coins turned into real money and cashed out. Some could be fobbed off with the usual excuses, but not all. The people who’d put a gun to the back of his head took him to a minivan, broke one of his fingers and told him that, if Ruja had disappeared with their money, “we will come back and kill you.” Going to the police wasn’t an option either—they threatened to “cut a body part out” if he did. A few weeks later, Konstantin found himself in a hotel room in Zurich with members of the Hells Angels gang who’d also invested. This time a gun was put into his mouth. “You have to make sure every promise is fulfilled,” they told him. “The money we’ve invested in [OneCoin] is worth far more than your life.”
Konstantin texted Gary Gilford around this time. “It’s really, really bad over here,” he told him. Things were getting serious.
The issue wasn’t money per se: it was getting hold of it. Ruja knew every loophole, every shady jurisdiction and corporate trick used by the rich and infamous to keep their assets hidden, and it turned out she’d used all of them. Shortly after Ruja’s disappearance, Konstantin found himself looking at one of the most complicated corporate structures ever created. The multi-million pound properties, the €6.9 million yacht, the company shares, the bank accounts—it was all mostly intact. Konstantin just couldn’t get it. Ruja’s assets were all hidden inside a labyrinth of phoney directors, off-shore firms, and strangely named holding companies.
Although she had companies all over the world, where OneCoin was concerned, the most important were based in Dubai. She had a favorite “formation agent” there called “Europe Emirates Group,” run by a man called Adrian Oton. Its offices were in the Jumeirah Lake Towers, an 80-skyscraper mega-construction that circled one of the city’s artificial lakes. Europe Emirates Group specialized in setting up companies for those who wished to operate in the Emirate, where the law states overseas businesses need a local corporate structure. The company signed contracts on Ruja’s behalf and set up several of her companies there, including RISG, OneCoin Limited and Meteora Holdings.
A typical setup went something like this: when Ruja purchased the elegant nineteenth-century townhouse on Sofia’s famous Narodno Sabranie Square in 2015, she registered ownership to a Bulgarian company called One Property. That in turn was owned by her Dubai company RISG Limited. But that was just the half of it. On September 27, 2015, Ruja handed all 1,000 shares in RISG Limited, and the famous townhouse it owned, to Elva Marga Bolivar de Rodriguez and Eduardo Enrique Harris Robinson, two quiet churchgoers from the small town of Tocumen just west of Panama City.1 But before receiving their shares, Eduardo and Elva will have almost certainly signed an undated “blank stock transfer document,” in which they resigned with immediate effect and agreed to return all shares back to Ruja Ignatova.2 Ruja probably held a physical copy of this document in her safe in Sofia. If anything bad happened, her assets would be unconnected to her, safely out of the authorities’ reach. But whenever she wanted to take back control, all Ruja had to do was retrospectively date their resignation letters.
She called these people her “monkeys.” And she used monkeys with RavenR Dubai and RavenR Capital London too. Both were technically owned by two ordinary Cypriots. Thomas Christodoulou was a former cook in his thirties whose previous work experience included being a cook at Cyprus Airways and the manager of a branch of Pizza Hut. Andri Andreou was a woman in her mid-twenties with practically nothing whatsoever to her name.3 (At some point, Gary had realized that Ruja’s name wasn’t on the official company documentation. “Don’t worry,” Ruja had told him. She had explained that there were a few technical issues that needed ironing out because everything had grown so quickly—and it was easier to just keep her name off the paperwork for now.4 Later, Gary would regret accepting that answer. “I wish I’d delved into it more,” he says.)
These corporate games were designed to protect Ruja and confuse outsiders. But the consequence of Ruja’s prolonged and unplanned disappearance—combined with OneCoin’s declining revenue—was that Konstantin was also baffled. He was struggling to access the assets that might have been useful to pay off debtors, keep the company going and avoid getting “a body part cut off.”
What he really needed was a power of attorney—a legal letter signed by Ruja in the presence of a lawyer that could confer him access to her assets. Even that might not be enough, because some countries and banks have very strict rules about their use, but it would certainly be a start. According to the FBI, Konstantin had a power of attorney from his sister signed by her on February 8, 2018. Konstantin would later claim it was a forgery knocked up by Irina Dilkinska. But Gary Gilford recalled Konstantin spending weeks desperately trying to get hold of the power of attorney in early 2018. If it was real, then Konstantin knew exactly where his sister was—and might even have gone to see her too. But where?