Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to worldwide condemnation and a cascade of momentous actions: the seizure of oligarchs’ yachts, the freezing of bank accounts, a flood of Ukrainian expatriates returning to their homeland to fight and a precipitous plunge in the ruble.
Now, it has unraveled Russia’s efforts to extradite an American citizen held in Germany. The South Florida man is headed home.
An abrupt shift in Germany’s relationship with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine was an unexpected boon for Mark Allayev, 32, who lives in the Miami-area city of Sunny Isles Beach but had been in German custody for eight months at Russia’s request.
Allayev, born in Soviet-era Tajikistan, arrived at New York’s JFK International Airport on Friday morning in a stopover on his way home to Florida, ending months of fear that he would be imminently extradited to Moscow from Frankfurt over an eight-year-old fraud case.
“This came as a complete shock,” Allayev told McClatchy and the Miami Herald in an interview before his flight. “I am happy, relieved and anxious to set foot on U.S. soil and hug my family again.”
German authorities consistently supported Allayev’s extradition to Russia. To the astonishment of Allayev’s attorneys, the main German prosecutor handling the case argued that Russia would not treat him any differently due to his U.S. citizenship and said that Moscow’s foreign policy “cannot be used to construe Russian unreliability in the entirely different area of extradition law.”
But on Thursday, the German prosecutor cited “political reasons” when reversing course and lifting the warrant against Allayev, using his discretion under German law, Allayev’s legal team told McClatchy.
”The chief public prosecutor... quashed the Russian Federation’s request for Mark’s extradition and ordered his immediate release,” said Ely Goldin, an attorney for Allayev. “We are thrilled that Mark is finally free and will soon be reunited with his family.”
The case shows that Germany’s sharp policy turn on Russia in recent days — suddenly canceling a multi-billion dollar gas pipeline, arming Ukrainian troops with lethal weapons and seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs — has expanded to the legal realm.
Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Allayev’s attorneys argued that his status as an American citizen would make him a political pawn for Russia in its conflict with the United States.
But after the invasion, even if Germany had wanted to go ahead with his extradition, all flights between Germany and Russia were halted.
“The release of the defendant was ordered because an extradition to the Russian Federation in this particular case seemed no longer possible,” said Nils Lund, a press secretary at the German district court.
Allayev’s release stunned his parents, who hours before were huddling with their attorneys to explore whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might alter Mark’s fortunes.
In an interview the day before Mark’s release, his father, Roman, expressed fear his son could be held for a decade or more in a Russian prison.
It was Roman’s Moscow-based business that laid at the center of a years-long legal battle — and ultimately caught his son up in an international extradition fight.
“Everything I had built, everything I had worked for — the foundation of which I had hung the hopes and dreams and economic prosperity of my family — I was forced to make a split-second decision to grab my American passport and get the hell out of there,” Roman said, describing the family’s ordeal. “They took my dream, and all of the effort I had put in, and turned it into a nightmare.”
Russian charges
The Allayevs first arrived in the United States as Jewish refugees granted political asylum in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union. That status led the family to eventually acquire American citizenship. But in the late 1990s, Roman, struggling to learn English, decided to return to Moscow to try his hand at business there.
Roman became active in Moscow’s Jewish community, joining Marina Roscha synagogue, whose rabbi, Berel Lazar, is also chief rabbi of Russia and a close contact of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He made a comfortable living on two tracks, through real estate investments and the launch of a beauty salon he described as “a stone’s throw away from the Kremlin.”
Mark began working at Academy of Beauty on Brodnikov Lane in downtown Moscow when he was just 19, and took on “greater and greater responsibilities,” Roman said.
But two years after the opening of the salon, Allayev was accused by Russian authorities of “drugging” women with phenobarbital, a barbiturate used to treat or prevent seizures, to trick them into buying their products from Mon Platin, an Israeli skin and beauty care line.
In a Moscow court document reviewed by McClatchy, Russian prosecutors accused the Allayevs of swindling customers out of one million rubles — in 2014 terms, the equivalent of roughly $26,500.
In response, prosecutors directed the seizure of roughly $5 million in family assets, including the business, its inventory, equipment and bank accounts, as well as two pieces of real estate and three cars, according to the family’s attorney.
A Moscow court later acknowledged in a case against another employee of the salon that Russian prosecutors lacked evidence to prove the Allayevs had been drugging women.
Roman accuses Russian authorities of orchestrating a shakedown after discovering his family’s substantial assets.
“When I came back to Russia, I heard this term, ‘vertical authority,’ and I didn’t know what that meant … I understand it now as a vertical structure of corruption from the top down,” Roman said. “The case was fabricated, and it gave an opportunity for the investigators to look at me, size me up, see that I had assets, and create an opportunity to grab those assets to feed this vertical chain of economic corruption.”
They fled back to the United States in 2014, and ultimately settled in Miami, where they live to this day. In 2016, Mark started a financial services company, according to his LinkedIn account.
Roman said that he was able to wrench much of the money back after three years of legal wrangling. But he believes that fight cost him.
“I didn’t realize then what I was doing was setting up a much steeper bounty on my kid’s life and freedom,” he said. “I feel responsible, because the motivation for all this was to seize the assets that I owned — the father. It’s my economic success that became the target of these people, and now my son is paying the price.”
Returning home from a personal trip to Kiev last June, Mark was detained on a layover at Frankfurt’s airport by German authorities. Two armed guards were waiting at the gate and asked to see a Russian passport as he deplaned. He was using his U.S. passport at the time, and over the course of his custody in Germany would renounce his Russian citizenship.
“I was sure that this misunderstanding would all be cleared up shortly,” he said in a written interview on Wednesday, before learning of his release. “They would realize that yes, I was born in the former Soviet Union, and yes, I worked in Russia with my father for a while. But that I was an American. That I was from Miami.”
He was informed shortly thereafter that he was going to prison.
When Mark was detained, his family contacted Robert Wexler, a former congressman from Florida now with Ballard Partners, a top lobbying firm with connections across the U.S. government. Wexler stressed the poor optics of Germany sending an observant Jew to a Russian prison.
Democratic Reps. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz of Florida and Greg Meeks of New York helped raise attention to his case, Wexler said.
“We’ve essentially undergone an eight-month campaign to explain to the German government, the Bundestag, the German Embassy and the State Department that the allegations against Mark were the result of a baseless, corrupt Russian practice of raiding,” Wexler said.
Surprise release
Allayev’s release marks another breakneck turnaround for Berlin following other significant geopolitical shifts, from the suspension of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to the announcement that Germany will provide anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine.
Just two weeks ago, as Russian forces were amassing on Ukraine’s borders, the German prosecutor’s office wrote in a document to a local court that Moscow’s assurances of fair treatment for Allayev were trustworthy. “The assessment of the Federal Foreign Office that Russian assurances are reliable is not objectionable, irrespective of general political developments,” the prosecutor wrote.
Wexler said the State Department was “helpful” in securing Mark’s release.
When Mark was freed, Roman was able to organize a video call on Whatsapp with his immediate family, where everyone laughed and cried in shock.
“The feeling that I had when I received the call from German counsel, telling me that Mark has been released, is exact the same sense of happiness and joy that I had when he was born. It was the same emotion, the same joy,” Roman said.
While awaiting a flight home Thursday night, Mark told McClatchy that he planned to hug his family, sleep in a real bed, catch a Heat game, eat something “other than canned tuna” and try to rebuild his life when he returns.
“To know that this is all over,” he said, “just happiness and relief.”
