Yaroslavna Lasytsa,39, the wife of a British shipping entrepreneur is facing criminal charges after being exposed in court as a confidence trickster, using the couple’s business in a multi-million-dollar series of commodity shipment scams.
Operating from the couple’s office at a golf club in Wimbledon, south London, Yaroslavna Lasytsya, 39, forged bank paperwork and construed a web of lies to hoodwink suppliers thousands of miles away in the Ukraine.
Firms duped by Lasytsya have together lost millions of dollars. Relying on fraudulent documents, they allowed close to 3,000 tonnes of crude sunflower oil to be released onto ships departing the Ukraine, mistakenly believing the cargo had been paid for.
In truth, however, copies of supposed bank payment records — known as SWIFT documents — provided by Nemetona Trading Limited (NTL), a company owned by Lasytsya and Jonathan Townley, had been forged.
Defrauded oil exporters have sent a detailed dossier of evidence to Investigators. Those behind the scam could now face investigation for theft, money laundering and tax evasion.
Criminal investigation
Criminal investigation comes after one supplier firm, Inter Export won a civil claim at the high court in London.
In evidence, Inter Export executives explained how, in 2012, they had accepted as genuine a series of bogus SWIFT documents sent by NTL. The documents purported to show payments from NTL’s bank account at Nordea Bank in London.
Inter Export allowed 1,028 tonnes of sunflower oil to be loaded onto a tanker ship, the Vindemia, satisfied the funds would appear in its bank account within a few days.
At the same time, NTL also secretly arranged — without Inter Export’s knowledge or permission — for the oil to clear customs and depart the port.
The freight handling firm and customs agent that helped rush through customs clearance were two companies owned by Lasytsya’s parents. Meanwhile, Lasytsya was also an employee of the freight forwarding company.
Even after the Vindemia had set sail, NTL continued to send Inter Export lies and bogus bank paperwork. On one occasion, this included the false paperwork with the forged signature of a senior banker at Banque Cramer in Switzerland.
Before NTL could be challenged in the courts, Lasytsya had arranged for the oil to be sold on to global commodities group Glencore. Proceeds from the sale have yet to be traced but do not appear to have gone to NTL, which was declared insolvent in 2015.
Documents recovered from NTL’s bank show that, although Townley was not an NTL director at the time, he was closely involved in the company’s financial affairs, including authorising loans to the company and acting as NTL’s bank account signatory.
Unpaid Assistant
Another of his companies acted as NTL company secretary, and shortly before Inter Export was defrauded, a loan from NTL was used to buy Townley a Ferrari.
Townley has denied knowledge of NTL’s disputed transactions or forged paperwork, insisting the company was effectively run by his wife. He has described his role as “sterling account bookkeeper” and as an “unpaid assistant”.
The high life: Townley was “unpaid assistant” for business he says was run by his wife
At the time, Townley’s main business centred around his directorship of Arkley UK Ltd, the London-based arm of a Russian steel pipe producer.
As well as its main role shipping and selling ChelPipe products, Arkley developed extremely close business ties to NTL. Under Townley’s direction company channelled millions of dollars in loans, to NTL, financing its trading activities.
Arkley’s published accounts suggest Townley made a considerable fortune .
Between 2003 and 2012 — a period when Arkley made only modest pretax profits — audited accounts show the company paid more than £18m to consultancy, ship brokering and trading companies managed and co-owned by Townley. The payments were for unspecified services on “normal commercial terms”.
During that time, one of Townley’s tangled group of inter-connected businesses was a firm called Aurelius Ltd. Having started life as a ship broking firm, this company went bust in 2009 in bizarre and controversial circumstances.
Liquidators called in to wind the business up quickly raised concerns about what they described as “potential wrongful trading”, later proposing “potential malfeasance action against directors [Townley and Lasytsya] for £100,000approx.”
Even now, eight years after Aurelius collapsed, the liquidation drags on. The threat of a malfeasance action was eventually lifted after directors produced a quantity of “jewellery and beads”. These assets have yet to be sold, according to the latest liquidators’ report.
Despite leaving behind controversial business failures, variously embroiled fraud and malfeasance allegations, Townley’s fortunes have flourished elsewhere.
Silverburn Shipping, an Isle of Man-registered company founded by Townley and again run from the Wimbledon offices that once served NTL and Aurelius, has thrived in the Caspian Sea, catering to the likes of BP, Chevron and others active in the local oil industry.
In early 2013, just as Lasytsya’s lies at NTL deceived two of Ukraine’s leading sunflower oil traders, Townley was able to add new tankers — the Silver Kenna and Silver Freys — to the Silverburn fleet.
Months after the fraud scandal blew up around NTL, ownership of Silverburn was transferred to a Cayman Islands Trust.
The Silver Kenna: a $14 tanker joins Townley’s Silverburn fleet in 2013
Townley has told the high court that Lasytsya and he were separated in 2014, and remain in divorce proceedings. However, records show the couple continue to live together at a house owned by Townley in Surrey.
Lasytsya also draws a salary from Silverburn, and the couple have been regular fixtures at a string of luxury sporting events and charity galas.
Elsewhere, Lasytsya has reinvented herself as a jewellery designer, again operating from the Wimbledon office. She has written several articles about jewellery for New Style, a Russian-language luxury magazine published in London.
Image from Lasytsya’s jewellery website: “Sirin is about being unique, spirited and empowered”
Glimpses into the social life enjoyed by Townley and Lasytsya suggest the 39-year-old remains held in high affection by her husband — despite the couple’s separation and the mounting fraud allegations against her.
Ruling on the claim brought by Inter Export, Ms Justice Proudman found that Lasytsya had been the author of fake SWIFT documents relied upon by the sunflower oil supplier.
The judge also said Lasytsya was behind the forged signature purporting to be that of the Swiss banker — an opinion shared even by the handwriting expert called by Lasytsya’s lawyers in her defence. Banque Cramer, meanwhile, have separately referred this matter to the Swiss Public Prosecutor.
In her judgment, Proudman ruled that Lasytsya be held liable for $1.2m in missing payments owed to Inter Export. However, she said lawyers for the Ukrainian supplier had failed to prove that Townley should also be liable based on evidence available at that time.
From the witness box
From the witness box, Lasytsya had earlier told the court a string of improbable lies, including an allegation that forged SWIFT documents had been sent from her email by hackers working for Inter Export.
In her judgment, Proudman concluded: “I have no doubt that her story does not hang together”.
In passing, the judge also noted that weeks before deceiving the Inter Export, NTL had sent fake SWIFT documents to yet another sunflower oil supplier, a Swiss firm Lauffer. “It is striking,” she said, “that similar forgeries were perpetrated on Lauffer.”
Proudman is not the only legal figure to have examined Lasytsya’s business dealings and to have raised serious questions about her conduct.
Liquidators to Global Pipe Supplies Limited (GPSL), another failed business once owned by Lasytsya and run from the couple’s Wimbledon office, have also come to doubt her honesty.
Liquidators were appointed at GPSL after another Ukrainian sunflower oil supplier — a subsidiary of the group called Pology — realised it too had been deceived.
Pology told liquidators how, in 2013, it had transferred 2,000 tonnes of crude sunflower oil onto a tanker at the same Ukrainian port as Inter Export. It believed payment would arrive shortly afterwards, in this instance from GPSL. It too had extensive dealings with Lasytsya.
Ukraine is one of the world’s leading exporters of sunflower oil
Eventually, payment for only 1,000 tonnes of oil — made from NTL — was forthcoming. In addition, Pology received a forged bank documents purporting to demonstrate that the remaining balance had been paid. It was another lie.
In December last year, GPSL liquidators issued a creditors’ report explaining they had identified claims to be brought against Lasytsya and the company’s sole director Ruth Paioes, possibly for as much as $1.9m in missing funds.
Liquidators have been unable to reach Paioes, who had worked as an assistant at Lasytsya and Townley’s Wimbledon office. Lasytsya has since admitted she acted as GPSL’s “de facto director”.
Lasytsya (left) with friends at Royal Ascot 2016
Administrators report that Lasytsya has been in touch several times since a meeting in May last year. However, she is said to have provided “no adequate response” either to requests for documents or for explanations of suspect transactions identified from GPSL’s bank statements.
Meanwhile, administrators to NTL have also received incomplete information from Lasytsya. In April last year — eight months after the company was declared insolvent — they had still failed to obtain from her a full set of books and records of the company.
Lasytsya continues to claim the bust company has assets — notably 1,000 tonnes of sunflower oil which she says is stored in a war-torn region of Ukraine.
But several creditors businesses, including Inter Export and Pology, fear this is just another of Lasytsya’s confidence tricks. Certainly, the missing cargo has yet to be discovered by liquidators, despite its supposed location being a long distance from conflict areas in Ukraine.
Ruling on the lawsuit brought by Inter Export, Ms Justice Proudman said she too did not believe stories about missing oil. She found the administration of NTL had been “obtained under false pretences that there was no quantity of oil in the Ukraine for its administrators to sell”.