An uncle of the recently ousted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used an adviser in Guernsey to secretly manage his wealth, which included a vast European property empire worth hundreds of millions of euros that prosecutors claim was acquired with funds looted from the wartorn state.
Rifaat al-Assad, known as the “Butcher of Hama” for overseeing the violent suppression of a rebellion in the 1980s, has been accused of war crimes by Swiss prosecutors. In 2020, he was convicted by a French court of embezzling Syrian state funds and pouring the money into luxury properties, with the French state seizing assets worth €90m.
In a joint investigation, the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism have now identified him as a client of a Guernsey consultant who was fined by regulators earlier this year. Ginette Louise Blondel, 40, was banned from working as a director for nine years and fined £210,000 by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission in March.
Originally employed as a personal assistant for the son of her client, then as a consultant, Blondel went on to manage a complex trust structure on the family’s behalf, according to a notice published by the regulator. In one instance, her personal bank account was used to distribute €1m to third parties on her client’s behalf.
The notice does not name Blondel’s employer, simply referring to them as “Client 1”. However, details of the case, and evidence gathered by international prosecutors, indicate that Client 1 was Rifaat al-Assad.
A brother of Hafiz al-Assad, who seized power in Syria in a 1971 coup, Rifaat was the head of the Defence Brigades. His elite forces allegedly oversaw the massacre of an estimated 20,000 people in the town of Hama in 1982.
The Assad regime collapsed this month as rebel groups rose up and seized control of the capital, Damascus, after more than a decade of civil war. Assad family members have been granted asylum in Moscow. It is unclear whether Rifaat, now 86, is among them. His European wealth remains in limbo, with freezing orders imposed in the UK, Spain and France, meaning properties cannot be sold without permission from the authorities.
The regulator’s case against Blondel is a window into the role played by tax havens such as Guernsey in enabling ultra-wealthy individuals – even those suspected of the most serious atrocities – to shelter and grow their wealth in Europe.
“Rifaat al-Assad’s crimes, particularly the 1982 Hama massacre, are among the gravest atrocities of our time,” said Philip Grant, the executive director of Trial International, which filed the criminal complaint against him in Switzerland.
Chanez Mensous, a lawyer at the NGO Sherpa, which initiated the French criminal complaint against Rifaat, called on European governments to repatriate money raised from asset seizures to vulnerable Syrians. “Restitution is essential,” she said.
London, Paris and Marbella
In 2013, two years into the Syrian civil war, Swiss prosecutors began investigating Rifaat’s alleged role in the Hama case. He was uniquely vulnerable to prosecution, having been expelled from Syria in 1984 after staging a failed coup against his brother.
In exile he set up home in France while developing an €800m real estate portfolio with offices, villas, mansions and apartments in London, Paris and Marbella. A 2019 judgment from one of the cases against him disclosed that more than 500 properties belonging to Rifaat were under asset freezes.
According to Spanish prosecutors, the properties were owned by companies whose directors included Rifaat’s frontpeople or numerous family members – he was reported to have had four wives and 16 children – but rarely by the man himself.
His property empire has included:
The Witanhurst estate in Highgate, north London – the second largest private residence in the capital after Buckingham Palace. Rifaat sold it for £32m to developers in 2007 after leaving it in disrepair.
A £50m mansion in South Street, Mayfair. Owned through a shell company in the British Virgin Islands, it was frozen by British proceeds of crime prosecutors in 2017.
A seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom estate in Leatherhead, Surrey, with a gym, tennis court and indoor swimming pool. It was sold for £4m in 2016 before prosecutors could impose an asset freeze.
A seven-storey mansion on Avenue Foch, which leads to the Arc de Triomphe in the most expensive arrondissement of Paris. Art and furnishings from the property were auctioned but the property itself remains frozen.
Thirty-two apartments in Paris’s Avenue du Président Kennedy, which runs along the bank of the Seine next to the Eiffel Tower.
La Máquina, a €60m estate occupying almost a third of the entire Marbella resort town of Benahavís. La Máquina’s footprint is so expansive that the Assads were reported to have considered transforming it into an enclave exclusively for wealthy Syrians.
Spanish prosecutors alleged that the source of the funds used to buy those properties was a combination of $200m stolen from the Syrian state and disguised as expenses, and a $100m loan from Libya. Rifaat and his associates were accused of profiting from “huge illicit resources from multiple criminal activities: extortion, threats, smuggling, plundering of archaeological wealth, usurpation of real estate, [and] drug trafficking”.
Rifaat left France for Syria in 2021, shortly before the French court of appeal upheld his June 2020 conviction for money laundering and aggravated tax fraud, for which he was sentenced to four years in prison. In March this year, Swiss prosecutors charged him with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Rifaat’s present whereabouts are unknown. Attempts to reach him for comment via the Syrian embassy in London were unsuccessful. He has denied the French and Spanish money laundering charges, claiming most of his fortune was given to him by the Saudi royal family.
Details in the notice of sanctions against Blondel, the Guernsey adviser, indicate Rifaat was her client. He is described as being “an alleged war criminal and kleptocrat” who in June 2020 was “convicted of money laundering and aggravated tax fraud in a European court and sentenced to four years in prison”.
Blondel was named, alongside other advisers and multiple banks, in a Spanish indictment paper against Rifaat. She was described as a representative for one of his family’s corporate vehicles. The present status of the Spanish case is not clear and prosecutors did not respond to inquiries.
With a master’s in corporate governance and membership of the Chartered Governance Institute, the industry body for company secretaries, Blondel was an established figure in Guernsey’s offshore finance industry. The island in the Channel draws in private wealth from around the world, managing companies and trusts holding assets worth an estimated £300bn.
In January 2013, Blondel left her job at a trust management firm, where Client 1’s business had dominated 99% of her time, and branched out on her own, according to the regulator. The client’s son employed her as a personal assistant. A year later, in March 2014, she signed up as a consultant to advise on business and administration, helping manage Client 1’s financial activities. She worked for them for seven years until 2020.
According to the Guernsey regulator, the client – Rifaat – was first investigated for money laundering in 2012, and Blondel knew this when she started working for him.
The regulator found she breached local laws by managing trusts, when only regulated companies can carry out such work. She held 11 simultaneous directorships, in breach of a maximum cap of eight, and failed to conduct formal money laundering risk assessments.
In 2015, €1m of funds were transferred into her personal bank account, after an attempt to set up a corporate structure fell through. Blondel then used the funds to make more than 150 payments to third parties on her client’s behalf. “The commission considers these payments led to a very real risk that Ms Blondel may have been used to launder the proceeds of crime, a risk which Ms Blondel has consistently failed to recognise,” the regulator said.
Blondel did not respond to an invitation to comment.
No further sanctions
Susan Hawley, the executive director of Spotlight on Corruption, said prosecutions against advisers were essential to serve as a deterrent.
“If countries like the UK and its crown dependencies … are only prepared to use regulatory measures such as fines and disqualification, they cannot hope to fully deter dirty money washing through their financial systems,” she said.
However, the Guernsey regulator does not bring criminal charges, and Blondel appears to be facing no further sanctions.
Next year, Guernsey’s ability and willingness to combat money laundering will be the subject of an assessment by Moneyval, an arm of the Council of Europe. A previous report in 2015 found the island’s number of prosecutions and convictions to be “disproportionately low” considering the size of its financial services sector.
A spokesperson for the states of Guernsey insisted the jurisdiction treated money laundering offences extremely seriously.
“In this specific case, the Guernsey Financial Services Commission – the local regulator – took serious action against this individual, handing down a very large fine and a ban from working in the industry,” the spokesperson said. “However, as people working in the law enforcement sector are well aware, the evidential threshold for a criminal prosecution and the threshold for a regulator to take action are very different.”
They continued: “As in all criminal matters, for any successful prosecution an alleged offence must be proven to the high criminal standard. Where, following a full investigation, there is insufficient evidence to proceed, a case will be closed.”
A spokesperson for the Guernsey Financial Services Commission said: “The Guernsey Financial Services Commission takes tackling financial crime seriously.”
