BERLIN
\nGermany has arrested five people for exporting goods worth at least 30 million euros ($35 million) to Russia, including to over 20 arms companies, in violation of EU sanctions, prosecutors said Monday. The suspects allegedly used a company based in the Baltic Sea port city of Luebeck to arrange about 16,000 shipments to Russia in recent years, the Federal Prosecutor\u2019s Office said in a statement.
\nThe investigation, including raids at additional locations, was conducted by customs agents in cooperation with Germany\u2019s foreign intelligence service BND.The prosecutors said the procurement network \u201cwas presumably operated by Russian state agencies\u201d and that the recipients included \u201cat least 24 listed arms companies in Russia\u201d. Among those arrested was the trading company\u2019s managing director, partially identified as German-Russian dual national Nikita S.
\n\u201cSince at least the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, he and the other accused used the company on numerous occasions to clandestinely procure goods for Russian industry and export them to Russia,\u201d prosecutors said.\u201dTo conceal the transactions, the accused used at least one other shell company in Luebeck, sham customers in and outside the European Union, and a Russian company as a recipient, in which Nikita S. also holds a position of responsibility,\u201d they said in a statement.
\n\u201cThe aim of this operation was to circumvent European Union embargo regulations,\u201d prosecutors added, without detailing what goods were allegedly illegally exported. The other suspects arrested were partially identified, in keeping with German privacy rules, as German-Ukrainian Artem I. and German nationals Boris M. and Eugen R. A German-Russian dual national, Daniel A., was also detained in the raids carried out by the Customs Criminal Investigation Office.
\nThe suspects were arrested on charges of belonging to \u201ca criminal organisation engaged in export business in violation of the Foreign Trade and Payments Act\u201d. They will on Tuesday face an investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice who will serve the arrest warrants on four of the suspects and decide whether to also remand in custody Daniel A.
\nOfficers also searched sites in the cities of Frankfurt and Nuremberg and two other locations, in an investigation targeting five other suspects who were currently at large, the statement said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BERLIN Germany has arrested five people for exporting goods worth at least 30 million euros ($35 million) to Russia, including to over 20 arms companies, in violation of EU sanctions, prosecutors said Monday. The suspects allegedly used a company based in the Baltic Sea port city of Luebeck to arrange about 16,000 shipments to Russia …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":93130,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93139,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93121\/revisions\/93139"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}