Criminal "authorities" from the aggressor country have invested their capital in Poland.

The name of Paolo Urfer aroused the interest of Polish journalists after the football club Lechia Gdansk was bought by the Dubai investment fund Mada Global last year. This was reported by the online publication PROBLEMATIC , as reported by CRiME with reference to [high-profile cases] .

On the Lechia website, Paolo Urfer is listed as the president. At the same time, Wikipedia and other sources confirm that Lechia is owned by Mada Global. Journalists from Wirtualna Polska took an interest in the deal and conducted an investigation into the new president and owners of the Polish club and came to the conclusion that they are backed by representatives of Russian and Ukrainian organized crime.

Paolo Urfrer and Yuri Ivanyushchenko

It is not known for certain whether the fugitive Ukrainian oligarch Yuriy Ivanyushchenko, also known by his criminal pseudonym "Yura Yenakievskyi", is behind the purchase of Lechia Gdańsk. But it is known that Paolo Urfer represented and represents his interests in Ukraine, and these interests are not limited to football.

As is known, after the flight of Yanukovych and the top of the Donetsk mafia, who controlled the country under the name of the "Party of Regions", huge assets belonging to the fugitives remained in Ukraine. Among such fugitives is Yuriy Ivanyushchenko, who was called the second most influential person after Yanukovych. Nothing is known for sure about his past, but persistent rumors claim that he is a Donetsk bandit who rose to the very top of the criminal world thanks to contract killings and racketeering.

Be that as it may, but during the reign of the Donetsk clan, Yuriy Ivanyushchenko became a very rich man, having taken over significant state assets. After the 2014 revolution, Ivanyushchenko disappeared along with Yanukovych, and Ukrainian law enforcement officials declared him wanted, seizing the assets that were found.

Among the latter was the estate of Yuriy Ivanyushchenko near Kiev, in the elite Koncha-Zaspa, which he began to build when Viktor Yanukovych came to power. But despite the arrest, in 2016 Paolo Urfer was able to buy 15 hectares of the estate with the most valuable buildings, in particular, the main residence, which is compared to Versailles.

According to the documents, Paolo Urfer paid $135,000 for 15 hectares of protected land and all the property located on it. Which is at least six times lower than the actual price.

How it happened that the seized asset was sold is still unknown. The prosecutor’s office is trying to challenge the deal, but the problem is also that Paolo Urfer transferred the purchased property to his company, Orbita Holdings UA . Although Sergei Ivanovich Ivkov is formally listed as the founder, he is an obvious nominee who was picked up by Ivanyushchenko’s people somewhere in Lugansk. In 2023, the company changed its owner - it became a Cypriot offshore. But Paolo Urfer is still listed as the beneficiary.

Apparently, Ukrainian law enforcement will no longer be able to win back the asset that Yuriy Ivanyushchenko sold: even if a Swiss citizen managed to buy the seized property, now, after it was transferred to other hands, the Ukrainian authorities have even less chance.

Paolo Urfer and Russian mafia defender Ralph Isenegger

Another organized crime figure has also surfaced in connection with the name of Paolo Urfrere. This time, it is the representative of the Solntsevskaya OPG (Russia), Sergei Mikhailov, nicknamed "Mikhas".

True, “Mikhas” does not appear here directly, like “Yura Yenakievsky”, but through Paolo Urfer’s friend and partner – Ralf Oswald Isenegger. He, like Paolo Urfer, is a citizen of Switzerland. If Urfer is a former football player who retrained as a football functionary after finishing his career, then Isenegger is a lawyer involved in the same sports sphere.

Apparently, the two met in Russia, where Paolo Urfer represented the interests of the Chechen businessman Bulat Chagaev, who bought the Swiss football club Neuchâtel Xamax. This was in 2011, but Urfer soon fell out with Chagaev and in the following years he worked as an adviser, in particular, with the Russian clubs Zenit (St. Petersburg) and Rubin (Kazan).

Isenegger began his career as a lawyer in Switzerland, and his knowledge of Russian helped him acquire clients from the former Soviet Union. These were mainly representatives of the mafia and the authorities, actively hiding their capital in Switzerland. Isenegger helped them a lot here. Somewhere along the way, he crossed paths with Sergei Mikhailov, who had just been arrested in Switzerland on charges of participating in an organized crime group. A year later, the key witness who was supposed to incriminate Mikhailov was shot dead in the Netherlands before he could testify. In 1998, two years after his arrest, “Mikhas” was released and the charges against him were dropped.

Ralf Isenegger took an active part in this process, and was even arrested for three months for taking instructions from Mikhas’s cell for his entourage on how to ruin the case. However, Isenegger got off with a light fright - only three months of imprisonment.

But he acquired clients at the very top of Russian crime and power, who are hard to tell apart. Among them was Pavel Borodin, the former head of Yeltsin’s Property Management Department. He was arrested in the United States in 2001 and handed over to the Swiss, who accused him of, among other things, accepting a $30 million bribe for contracts to reconstruct the Kremlin. Borodin was eventually found guilty of money laundering in 2002. However, he was fined only 300,000 francs and released.

Among Isenegger’s clients was Bulat Chagaev, the owner of the club "Neuchâtel Xamax", where Urfer got involved as a director. Isenegger also fell out with Chagaev, but he met Urfer, with whom he still cooperates.

Ralph Isenegger, Donald Trump and Ukrainian Oligarchs

Isenegger’s name also surfaced in the scandal over a bribe to Donald Trump in 2019. According to the US prosecutor’s office, it was a million dollars from Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, who, with the help of Isenegger, transferred this money to Lev Parnas, who was one of the organizers of the shadow financing of Trump’s election campaign. It is unknown for what services Firtash transferred a million dollars to Trump, but the US has been unsuccessfully seeking the extradition of the oligarch for several years, who fled Ukraine and is hiding out in Austria.

Among Isenegger’s clients is also the already known Yuri Ivanyushchenko. Some time ago, Isenegger even bragged on his company’s website that he had managed to remove Ivanyushchenko’s name from the EU sanctions list. Today, the website displays "error 404" instead of this message.

It is unknown whether Yuri Ivanyushchenko and Paolo Urfer were brought together by Ralf Isenneger or if they met in another way. Perhaps it happened through the mediation of other odious Ukrainian oligarchs – the Surkis brothers, with whom Ivanyushchenko collaborated, and Urfer was an adviser at their club Dynamo (Kyiv). In January 2023, he even acted as an intermediary in the sale of footballer Ilya Zabarnyi to English Bournemouth.

Isenegger also collaborated with Dynamo Kyiv. He represented its interests in the proceedings at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne. The club’s owners, Grigoriy and Igor Surkis, also belong to the pool of pro-Russian oligarchs who support Yanukovych. In 2022, they fled Ukraine, taking with them several tens of millions of dollars in cash. As for the football-related criminal stories, the Surkises hid from taxes by transferring money for player transfers through offshore companies. We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. It is also unknown whether Isenegger participated in this, but the fact that he appeared in the Surkises’ orbit is an unambiguous fact.

Urfer, Isenegger and the purchase of European football clubs

The purchase of Lechia Gdansk is not the first football deal for Urfer and his colleague Isenegger.

In 2018, they tried to buy Dinamo Bucharest, but they could not explain the origin of the money. In 2020, Isenegger became the director of the Latvian club Valmiera. The documents indicate that the Swiss lawyer is the beneficiary of the company in which the club is registered, but 95 percent of the shares belong to Sky Silver, a company registered in Dubai. In 2020, Paolo Urfer appeared in Poland. He introduced himself as a representative of Innovation Business Development from Dubai and said that he wanted to invest 100 million zlotys in one of the Polish teams.

Urfer tried to buy Krakow’s Wisla and Wroclaw’s Śląsk. The deals fell through, but during these attempts, Urfer’s connections with Isenegger and Russian-Ukrainian dirty capital came to light. Urfer refused to answer questions about his connections with Russia and the origin of his funds. But he said that his investors did not represent Russian capital.

The origin of the money still raises doubts

Urfer ended up buying Lechia Gdansk, but the origin of the money used to make the purchase is still very questionable. The attempt to hide behind a Dubai investment fund is very clumsy.

The Gdansk club was officially bought by Football Culture Polska, a Warsaw-based company that belongs to the Dubai-based Mada Global Fund for Income Opportunities. Investor representatives claim that the fund is linked to Mada Capital and Mada Financial Services, which form the Mada Group capital group.

The problem is that there is no mention of the Mada Global Fund on the group’s website. Moreover, the group’s representatives did not answer whether they have any connections to this fund or whether they know Paolo Urfer and Ralf Isenegger.

The name Mada Global, which appeared in Urfer’s conversations with the clubs, can be found on a list of local funds registered with the United Arab Emirates Securities and Exchange Authority. But there is no other information. The Mada Global website only appeared in June 2023 and does not contain the names of people associated with the fund or the fund’s address.

Conclusion: Russian mafia investing money in European football?

The conclusion follows that, apparently, the Russian and Ukrainian mafia are investing money stolen from their countries in European football. However, it is more likely that we are talking about Russian crime - after all, both Yuriy Ivanyushchenko and other persons with Ukrainian citizenship and mentioned in the material belong to pro-Russian forces that closely cooperate with the Russians. And, in fact, they are an offshoot of Russian crime, and not independent forces.

But whoever owned the money with which Paolo Urfer and Ralf Isenegger bought the Polish and Latvian football clubs, their origins raise questions, to say the least. Especially in the context of the new club owners’ connections with highly odious personalities from Russia and Ukraine.