Nicos Anastasiades, the President of Cyprus since 2013, has been linked to the Magnitsky scandal, the largest tax fraud in Russian history, in yet another round of disclosures from Global Witness, the Investigative Reporting Project Italy and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. The president denies any involvement.

Serge Magnitsky was a Russian tax accountant on a mission to uncover corruption in his home country. The Russian authorities arrested him in 2008, held him in solitary confinement and, it is widely believed, caused his death 11 months later. Magnitsky claimed that he had uncovered a fraud against state coffers on the part of high-ranking Russian officials that led to a loss of about US$230 million. Financial activist Bill Browder, his former boss who has vowed to avenge his death, believes the crimes that Magnitsky was investigating to be linked to accounts at Danske Bank's Estonian branch. The US passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012, which stopped all Russian officials thought to be involved in Magnitsky’s death from visiting the country or using its banking system. There is, similarly, a "Magnitsky clause" in the UK's recently-passed Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 which allows HM Government to impose financial sanctions on people it suspects of flouting human rights.

The three non-governmental organisations link Nicos Anastasiades (Greek: Νiκος Αναστασιαδης, born 27 September 1946) to the scandal through a Limassol law firm that he set up in 1972 called Nicos Chr Anastasiades and Partners LLC and which he left only in 2013. Both his daughters are still partners and he still has an office at the same address. The boutique law firm provides legal, tax and corporate services to international clients, corporate entities, financial institutions and HNW individuals. The president vehemently denies any link.

The allegations come from documents that the NGOs say that they have obtained from the now-defunct Lithuanian Ukio Bankas. These, they say, reveal no overt wrongdoing but indicate that the law firm handled lucrative deals for two Russian shell companies probably owned by a billionaire called Alexander Abramov. One of these, Batherm Ventures Ltd of the British Virgin Islands, reportedly moved US$96 million in eight instalments to another BVI shell company, Delco Networks. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Delco helped to move several million dollars of government money that officials had stolen. It is well known that the people who arrested Magnitsky just days after he approached the courts to press charges were among the very officials whom he was accusing.

Also embroiled in the story is Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and Putin’s best friend who, by some strange alchemy, became fabulously wealthy after Putin’s rise to power. Roldugin introduced Putin to his first wife and is the godfather of Putin’s daughter. The Panama Papers presented Roldugin, rightly or wrongly, as a proxy holder of Putin’s hidden wealth. The Zeitung says that, according to the Panama Papers, “the International Media Overseas, one of the many shell companies of Roldugin’s network, finalised a contract with the shell company Delco Networks” in 2008 around the time of the Magnitsky scandal.

The presidential law firm is also thought to be linked to the so-called Troika Laundromat, named after a Russian bank called Troika Dialog, which Sberbank bought in 2011. Rogue staff at the bank reportedly organised a money-washing exercise that shifted US$4.6 billion in private wealth, mainly through the aforementioned Ukio Bankas, using 70 offshore shell companies. The agencies maintain that Batherm and Matias (the other Abramov shell company) agreed between them to buy Energostroyinvest-Holding for US$220 million, which they paid to Gotland Industrial, one of the three central companies of the Troika Laundromat.