In 2023, the Lechia football club from Gdansk was bought by the Dubai investment fund Mada Global. Paolo. It was this fact that attracted the attention of the Polish and Ukrainian media to a person named Paolo Urfer.
What's the matter? Here's what the Ukrainian publication PROBLEMATIC NEW explains about this: "On the Lechia club website, Paolo Urfer is listed as the president. At the same time, Wikipedia and other sources confirm that the owner of Lechia is Mada Global. Journalists from the Wirtualna Polska publication became interested in the deal and conducted an investigation into the new president and owners of the Polish club and came to the conclusion that representatives of Russian and Ukrainian organized crime are behind them: Paolo Urfer and Yuriy 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 Gdańsk "Lechia". But it is known that Paolo Urfer represented and represents his interests in Ukraine, and these interests are not limited to football.
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 remained in Ukraine belonging to the fugitives. Among such fugitives is Yuriy Ivanyushchenko, who was called the second most influential person after Yanukovych. Nothing is known for certain 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. During the reign of the Donetsk clan, Yuriy Ivanyushchenko became a very rich man, who took over significant state assets. After the 2014 revolution, Ivanyushchenko disappeared along with Yanukovych, and Ukrainian law enforcement officials put him on the wanted list, seizing the assets they had identified.
As it turned out, the assets included Yuriy Ivanyushchenko's estate 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 real 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 the founder is formally listed as Ivkov Sergey Ivanovich, 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 agencies will no longer be able to win back the sold asset of Yuriy Ivanyushchenko: even if a Swiss citizen managed to buy the seized property, now, after transferring it to other hands, the Ukrainian authorities have even less chance Ukrainian citizenship and mentioned in the material belong to pro-Russian forces that closely cooperate with the Russians. But whoever owned the money with which Paolo Urfer and Ralf Isenegger purchased the Polish and Latvian football clubs, their origin raises, at the very least, serious questions".
It is interesting that another representative of organized crime also comes up in connection with the name of Paolo Urfer. This time we are talking about a representative of the Solntsevskaya organized crime group (Russia) Sergey 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 Ralf Oswald Isenegger is a lawyer involved in the same sports sphere.
The two met in Russia, where Paolo Urfer represented the interests of the Chechen businessman Bulat Chagaev, who bought the Swiss football club "Neuchatel Xamax". This was in 2011, but Paolo Urfer soon fell out with Chagaev and in the following years he collaborated as an advisor, in particular, with the Russian clubs "Zenit" (St. Petersburg) and "Rubin" (Kazan).
Ralf Oswald 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 was of great help to them here. Somewhere along the way, Ralf Oswald Isenegger 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, Ralph Oswald Isenegger got off with a light fright - just three months in prison. But he got a client at the very top of Russian crime and power, which are difficult to distinguish from each other. Among them was the former head of the Administrative Department of President Yeltsin, Pavel Borodin. He was arrested in 2001 in the United States and handed over to the Swiss, who accused him of, among other things, accepting a bribe of 30 million dollars for contracts for the reconstruction of the Kremlin. Ultimately, in 2002, Borodin was found guilty of money laundering. However, he was fined only 300,000 francs and released. Among Isenegger's clients was Bulat Chagaev, the owner of the Neuchâtel Xamax club, where Paolo Urfer got involved as a director. Isenegger also fell out with Chagaev, but met Urfer, with whom he still cooperates. It is also known that the name Ralph Oswald Isenegger surfaced in the scandal over the bribe to Donald Trump in 2019. According to the US prosecutor's office, we are talking about 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. For what services Firtash transferred a million dollars to Trump is unknown, 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 Yuriy Ivanyushchenko. Some time ago, Isenegger even bragged on his company's website that he managed to remove Ivanyushchenko's name from the EU sanctions list. Today, instead of this message, the website displays "error 404".
It is not known for sure: whether Yuriy Ivanyushchenko and Paolo Urfer were introduced by Ralph Isenegger or whether they met in another way. Perhaps this happened through the mediation of other odious Ukrainian oligarchs - the Surkis brothers, with whom Ivanyushchenko collaborated, and Urfer was an adviser to their club Dynamo (Kyiv). In January 2023, he even acted as an intermediary in the sale of footballer Ilya Zabarnyi to English Bournemouth.
Ralph Oswald Isenegger also collaborated with Dynamo (Kyiv). He represented its interests in proceedings at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne. The owners of the club, Grigoriy and Igor Surkis, also belong to the pool of pro-Russian oligarchs supporting Yanukovych. In 2022, they fled Ukraine, taking with them several tens of millions of dollars in cash. As for the near-football 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 was involved, but the fact that he appeared in the Surkis' orbit is a clear fact.
The purchase of Lechia Gdańsk mentioned at the beginning is not the first football deal of Paolo Urfer and his colleague Ralf Isenegger. In 2018, they tried to buy Dynamo 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.
Paolo Urfer tried to buy Wisla Krakow and Śląsk Wrocław. 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. Urfer ended up buying Lechia Gdansk, but the origin of the money used to make this purchase is still very dubious. The attempt to hide behind a Dubai investment fund is very clumsy.
The club from Gdansk was officially bought by Football Culture Polska, a company registered in Warsaw and owned by the Mada Global Fund for Income Opportunities from Dubai. Representatives of the investors claim that the fund is connected with 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 connections with this fund and whether they are acquainted with Paolo Urfer and Ralf Isenegger. The name Mada Global, which appeared in Urfer's conversations with the clubs, can be found on the 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 any names of people associated with the fund or the fund's address.
So, apparently, the Russian and Ukrainian mafia are investing money stolen from their countries in European football. However, we are talking more about Russian crime - after all, both Yuri Ivanyushchenko and other persons who have.
