The case, brought by Arkady Gaydamak against Lev Leviev (Levaev) in London in 2012, over disputed unpaid commissions and dividends from diamonds business in Angola. Involves testimony on the roles of the US-Russian rabbi Berl Lazar and an Angolan general. Gaydamak lost the suite.
Gaydamak is convicted in the so called French “Angolagate affair” of arms sales and money laundering between France and Angola during the civil war in Angola (1975-2002). The amount of these sales is estimated at some $ 790 million.
The first instance sentence for the “Angolagate affair” was handed down on October 27, 2009 in Paris. Gaydamak, alias Bar Lev ARYE (his Israeli ID) and Falcone were found guilty of illegal arms deals, tax fraud, money laundering, embezzlement and others, sentenced to six years in prison and fines. Gaydamak was sentenced in absentia.
The Paris Court of Appeal’s decision was given on April 29, 2011. Gaydamak’s sentence was reduced to three years of prison and €375,000 fine for tax evasion and laundering of money of “serious criminal origin” (p.73 of the document). The appeal decision confirmed the international arrest warrant for Gaydamak (ibid). The appeal court cleared the majority of defendants, including Gaydamak, for proper arms trafficking, accepting their claims that they acted on behalf of Angola’s government.
In 2013 a group of Angolan citizens submitted a complaint to Swiss prosecutors against Gaydamak, his partner Russian senator Vitaly Malkin and others, pretending they helped to embezzle Angolan State debt to Russia to Swiss accounts.
In 2018 brother and son of Leviev were reportedly arrested in Israel in the case of diamonds smuggling. (See also mentions of Levaev in a Gennady Petrov’s conversation from Tambovskaya gang case and an Austrian Prosecution’s document on Leviev’s link to Mikhail Chernoy from Izmaylovskaya gang).
Taiwanchik (Alimzhan Toktakhunov) claimed in an interview that Gaydamak was his friend. Gaydamak resides in Moscow.
In 1972, Gaydamak emigrated to Israel and than to France from USSR on the so-called Jewish exit visa. See more on this type of emigration and suspicion of cooperation with KGB of the new immigrants also involved in organized crime, raised by Swiss Intelligence (2007) and an FBI report (90ths).
Support TBCA if you think this document is useful : [give_form id="2685"]Support TBCA if you think this document is useful. Donations are processed by the publisher DRJI: [give_form id="3338"]