Assad uncle used Guernsey adviser to secretly manage vast wealth

Rifaat al-Assad, the ‘Butcher of Hama’, identified as client of consultant who received ban and fine this year

An uncle of the recently ousted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used an adviser in Guernsey to secretly manage his wealth, which included a vast European property empire worth hundreds of millions of euros that prosecutors claim was acquired with funds looted from the wartorn state.

Rifaat al-Assad, known as the “Butcher of Hama” for overseeing the violent suppression of a rebellion in the 1980s, has been accused of war crimes by Swiss prosecutors. In 2020, he was convicted by a French court of embezzling Syrian state funds and pouring the money into luxury properties, with the French state seizing assets worth €90m.

The Witanhurst estate in Highgate, north London – the second largest private residence in the capital after Buckingham Palace. Rifaat sold it for £32m to developers in 2007 after leaving it in disrepair.

A £50m mansion in South Street, Mayfair. Owned through a shell company in the British Virgin Islands, it was frozen by British proceeds of crime prosecutors in 2017.

A seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom estate in Leatherhead, Surrey, with a gym, tennis court and indoor swimming pool. It was sold for £4m in 2016 before prosecutors could impose an asset freeze.

A seven-storey mansion on Avenue Foch, which leads to the Arc de Triomphe in the most expensive arrondissement of Paris. Art and furnishings from the property were auctioned but the property itself remains frozen.

Thirty-two apartments in Paris’s Avenue du Président Kennedy, which runs along the bank of the Seine next to the Eiffel Tower.

La Máquina, a €60m estate occupying almost a third of the entire Marbella resort town of Benahavís. La Máquina’s footprint is so expansive that the Assads were reported to have considered transforming it into an enclave exclusively for wealthy Syrians.

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