The name of Paolo Urfer attracted the attention of Polish journalists after the Lechia Gdansk football club was bought by the Dubai investment fund Mada Global last year.
On the Lechia club website Paolo Urfer is listed as president. At the same time, Wikipedia and other sources confirm that the owner of Lechia is Mada Global. Journalists from the publication Wirtualna Polska 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 were behind them.
Paolo Urfrer and Yuri Ivanyushchenko
Whether the fugitive Ukrainian oligarch Yuriy Ivanyushchenko, also known under the criminal pseudonym “Yura Enakievsky”, is behind the purchase of Lechia Gdansk is not known for certain. But it is known that Paolo Urfer represented and represents his interests in Ukraine, and these interests are not limited to football.
As is known, 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 belonging to the fugitives remained in Ukraine. Among these 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.
Be that as it may, during the reign of the Donetsk clan, Yuri Ivanyushchenko became a very rich man, taking over significant state assets. After the 2014 revolution, Ivanyushchenko disappeared along with Yanukovych, and Ukrainian law enforcement officers put him on the wanted list, seizing the identified assets.
Among the latter was the estate of Yuri Ivanyushchenko 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 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 that Paolo Urfer transferred the purchased property to his company Orbita Holdings SA. Although Sergey Ivanovich Ivkov is formally listed as the founder, he is a clear figurehead who was picked up by Ivanyushchenko’s people somewhere in Lugansk. In 2023, the company changed its owner – it became a Cyprus offshore company. But Paolo Urfer is still listed as the beneficiary.
Apparently, Ukrainian law enforcement officers will no longer be able to recapture the sold asset of Yuri Ivanyushchenko: even if a Swiss citizen managed to buy the seized property, now, after transferring it into other hands, the Ukrainian authorities have even less chance.
Paolo Urfer and Russian mafia defender Ralph Isenegger
Another representative of organized crime also emerges in connection with the name of Paolo Urfrer. This time we are talking about a representative of the Solntsevskaya organized crime group (Russia) Sergei Mikhailov, nicknamed “Mikhas”.
True, “Mikhas” no longer appears here directly, like “Yura Enakievsky,” but through Paolo Urfer’s friend and partner, Ralph Oswald Isenegger. He, like Paolo Urfer, is a Swiss citizen. If Urfer is a former football player who retrained after finishing his career as a football functionary, then Isenegger is a lawyer involved in the same sports field.
Apparently, both met in Russia, where Paolo Urfer represented the interests of the Chechen businessman Bulat Chagaev, who bought the Swiss football club Neuchâtel Xamax. This was in 2011, but Urfer soon fell out with Chagaev and in subsequent years collaborated as an adviser, in particular, with the Russian clubs Zenit (St. Petersburg) and Rubin (Kazan).
Isenegger began his legal career in Switzerland, and his knowledge of Russian helped him gain clientele from the former Soviet Union. These were mainly representatives of the mafia and authorities, actively hiding their capital in Switzerland. Here Isenegger helped them a lot. Somewhere along the way, he crossed paths with Sergei Mikhailov, who had just been arrested in Switzerland on charges of participating in an organized criminal group. A year later, the key witness who was supposed to accuse Mikhailov was shot dead in the Netherlands before testifying. In 1998, two years after his arrest, “Mikhas” was released and the charges against him were dropped.
Ralph Isenegger took an active part in this process, who was even arrested for three months for taking instructions from the Mikhas cell for his entourage on how to ruin the case. However, Isenegger escaped with a slight fright - only three months in prison.
But he acquired clients at the very top of Russian crime and government, which are difficult to distinguish from each other. Among these was the former head of President Yeltsin's Administration, Pavel Borodin. He was arrested in 2001 in the United States and handed over to the Swiss, who accused him, among other things, of accepting a $30 million bribe 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, in which Urfer became involved as a director. Izenegger also quarreled with Chagaev, but he met Urfer, with whom he still collaborates.
Ralph Isenegger, Donald Trump and Ukrainian oligarchs
Isenegger’s name also surfaced in the scandal over a bribe to Donald Trump in 2019. According to the US prosecutor's office, we are talking about a million dollars from the 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 the Trump election campaign. For what merits Firtash transferred a million dollars to Trump is unknown, but the United States has been unsuccessfully seeking for several years the extradition of the oligarch, who fled Ukraine and is holed up in Austria.
Among Izenegger’s clients there is also Yuri Ivanyushchenko, already known to us. Some time ago, Izenegger even boasted on his company’s website that he managed to remove Ivanyushchenko’s name from the EU sanctions list. Today, the site displays a “404 error” instead of this message.
Whether Yuri Ivanyushchenko and Paolo Urfer were brought together by Ralph Isenneger or whether they met in another way is unknown. 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 Dynamo club (Kyiv). In January 2023, he even acted as an intermediary in the sale of football player Ilya Zabarny to English Bournemouth.
Izenegger also collaborated with Dynamo (Kyiv). He represented his interests in proceedings before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne. The club's owners, Grigory 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 football crime stories, the Surkises hid from taxes by transferring money for player transfers through offshore companies. We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Whether Isenegger participated in this is also unknown, but the fact that he appeared in the Surkis orbit is an unambiguous fact.
Urfer, Isenegger and the purchase of European football clubs
The purchase of Lechia Gdańsk is not the first football deal between Urfer and his colleague 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 a beneficiary of the company in which the club is registered, but 95 percent of the shares are owned by 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.
Urfer tried to buy Krakow's Wisla and Wroclaw's Slask. The deals fell through, but during these attempts, Urfer's connections with Isenegger and Russian-Ukrainian dirty capital surfaced. Urfer refused to answer questions about connections with Russia and the origin of funds. But he said that his investors do not represent Russian capital.
The origin of the money is still in doubt
As a result, Urfer bought Lechia Gdansk, but the origin of the money with which this purchase was made is still very doubtful. Trying to hide behind a Dubai investment fund is very clumsy.
The Gdansk club was officially bought by Football Culture Polska, a company registered in Warsaw and owned by the Mada Global Fund for Income Opportunities from Dubai. Investor representatives claim that the fund is associated with Mada Capital and Mada Financial Services, which form the Mada Group capital group.
The problem is that there is no mention of Mada Global Fund on the group's website. Moreover, representatives of the group did not answer whether they have connections with this foundation and whether they know Paolo Urfer and Ralph Isenegger.
The name Mada Global, which appeared in Urfer's conversations with clubs, can be found on a list of local funds registered with the United Arab Emirates Securities and Exchange Authority. But there is no more information. The Mada Global website only appeared in June 2023 and does not contain the names of people associated with the fund or the address of the fund.
Conclusion – is the Russian mafia investing in European football?
The conclusion that follows is that, apparently, the Russian and Ukrainian mafia are investing money stolen in their countries into European football. However, we are more likely talking about Russian crime - after all, Yuriy Ivanyushchenko and other persons with Ukrainian citizenship and mentioned in the material belong to pro-Russian forces that closely cooperate with the Russians. And, in fact, they are an offshoot of Russian crime, and not independent forces.
But no matter who owns the money with which Paolo Urfer and Ralph Isenegger acquired the Polish and Latvian football clubs, their origin raises at least questions. Especially in the context of connections between the new club owners and very odious personalities from Russia and Ukraine.
