In the Bavarian resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the most expensive villa in Germany is for sale. As DW journalists found out, its owner is a Ukrainian who is hiding from defrauded creditors and law enforcement agencies, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
To say that Villa Glory is a luxurious mansion is an understatement. Glory translated from English means “glory” and “greatness”. Photographs of the interior of the estate indicate the ambitions that its owner had. “Like a luxury yacht, only the finest materials of the highest quality have been used,” say advertisements on German luxury real estate portals.
The price of the estate is almost 13 million euros. Rococo chandeliers crown the light-filled halls, and the marble floor exudes the atmosphere of a palace of the Italian nobility. One of Munich's most famous designers worked on the interior, according to the sale announcement. Although the palace, in addition to the underground garage, has only two floors, the owner spared no expense on a spacious elevator decorated with elite types of wood.
The pretentiousness of the Ukrainian owner of this villa has clearly surpassed even the richest of his neighbors in Garmisch-Partenkirchen - Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who owns the historic Villa Leitenschlössl.
At the same time, the owner of Villa Glory prefers to remain in the shadows. His name is not even listed in the property rights register. There are reasons for this.
However, the publication found out that we are talking about the 28-year-old son of the Galician agricultural baron Nikolai Guta, the head of the Mriya agricultural holding, created by his father Ivan. Buying a plot of land in the picturesque Alpine town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen with an area of 2010 thousand square meters in June 3,7, he paid 3,3 million euros for the land alone and left his name on the land purchase agreement.
After the company defaulted, it was left with a debt of $1,3 billion. However, there is nothing special to collect from Mriya for debts. Land is only for rent. Even tractors and combines disappeared along with the former management in an unknown direction even before the new managers of the holding began to work. Nikolai Guta and his family, as journalists found out, soon after the default was declared, went to Switzerland, where they live in the canton of Obwalden. In Ukraine, a criminal case has been opened against him on suspicion of fraud on an especially large scale, and he faces a long prison sentence.
According to creditors, he illegally withdrew more than $200 million from the holding, in particular, probably part of the money raised on the Frankfurt stock exchange. The scheme is simple: a company in the British Virgin Islands receives investors' money and uses part of the funds to buy dozens of offshore companies in Cyprus. Tens of millions are spent on this, although the companies do not own, relatively speaking, anything other than a table and two chairs.