Sam Jones in Vienna and Paul Murphy in London
In November 2016 he presented “Project Phoenix” to the German company’s board. Approval was made for $10mn of funding — which was lent via an entity in Singapore, Senjo, and then to the Dubai account of a Swiss lawyer who in turn put the funds into Isle of Man-registered Emerging Africa Energy Limited.
EAEL would invest its $10mn in Lorasco, while LHG would invest $4mn and manage the company. At first EAEL’s ultimate beneficial owner was declared by Lorasco’s LHGappointed management to be the Swiss lawyer. In a 2020 due diligence review, however, Lorasco updated its know-your-customer file to indicate that EAEL was in fact controlled by an offshore trust — the Labels Foundation. The trust’s UBO was named as James Henry O’Sullivan, who at the time was publicly identifiable as a Singapore-based businessman with strong connections to Wirecard. O’Sullivan, a co-conspirator of Marsalek in the Wirecard fraud, was convicted in Singapore this year and will be sentenced in January.
But the true UBO of EAEL was and always had been Marsalek, according to two people who built the structure. A third party declared they were “100 per cent sure” Marsalek was the beneficiary based on what he himself had told them. LHG and Ben Halim have stated that, as with LCC, they had no knowledge of Marsalek’s financial involvement until Bowman informed them of it in 2022. At that point, they said, they had acted swiftly to freeze EAEL’s shares in accordance with the law.
“At no time during the due diligence processes carried out by LHG companies was it discovered or suspected that Marsalek was the UBO of any investing party,” they said. Despite that claim, documents reveal a close financial relationship between Ben Halim and Marsalek at the time. In December 2016 Marsalek underwrote a $4mn bridge financing loan from Ben Halim’s British Virgin Islands-based family investment vehicle to fund EAEL’s acquisition of Lorasco shares, as the promised $10mn in funding from the Swiss lawyer — and ultimately Wirecard — was late to arrive. According to Ben Halim and LHG, Marsalek agreed to incur this $4mn liability as a “favour”. It did not make them think he might also be the owner of EAEL, they said.
The bridge loan guarantee was not Ben Halim’s only direct financial relationship with Marsalek. In 2018 Marsalek invited Ben Halim and other backers of the Libya projects to invest in a new crypto token being launched by messaging platform Telegram, whose founder Pavel Durov had met Marsalek and invited him to participate. A special purpose vehicle was set up for them to pool their money and invest but Credit Suisse, which was organising the sale of the token, blocked the transaction. It turned out the bank was happy to take money from Marsalek, whose role in the biggest corporate fraud in recent European history had yet to be revealed, but was wary of his Libyan friends.
As a workaround, Ben Halim and others decided to let Marsalek invest their money in his name, sidestepping Credit Suisse’s money laundering checks. However, the US Securities and Exchange Commission blocked Telegram’s issuance of the tokens and Marsalek refunded his Libyan associates.
In responses to questions from the FT and Bayerischer Rundfunk, Ben Halim and LHG repeatedly stressed that all relationships with Marsalek had been arranged through Bowman, who they said had concealed the true nature of Marsalek’s involvement and interests in Libya. Bowman acknowledged he had been the main contact between LHG and Marsalek but insisted Ben Halim and others at the company were fully aware of the Austrian’s investments.
“I’ve never had any reason to be disingenuous about Marsalek’s past involvement. He was a fantastic investor and a good friend. What we were doing at the time was completely legitimate and even though it might be obvious in hindsight, we had no idea about his other life . . . To all of us, he was just this hugely talented, very successful European businessman,” Bowman told the FT.
“He was the anchor investor in Lorasco from day one and it was known to all of us internally [at LHG] — and there’s substantial evidence to support that. The business wouldn’t have been created without him. That was really one of the reasons why I parted ways with LHG. They have been trying to bury the truth,” Bowman said.
Other people who were part of the LHG-Marsalek network also dispute the notion that Ben Halim was not enthusiastic about the Austrian’s involvement.
Correspondence reviewed by the FT shows Ben Halim was involved in extensive and frequent discussions about projects involving Marsalek over a period of several years. One topic that often cropped up was Libyan politics. A 2018 photograph obtained by the FT shows Marsalek in Benghazi, taking tea with Ben Halim, Bowman and Wanis Bukhamada, the late head of eastern Libya’s special forces under General Haftar who was widely revered in Libya as the “black panther” for his success in fighting Isis.
People present on the trip even recall Marsalek asking Ben Halim whether he would be interested in running for political office, with a view eventually to becoming prime minister of the country. Ben Halim confirmed details of the meeting but said he dismissed out of hand Marsalek’s suggestion, which led him to believe Marsalek to be a dangerous fantasist. Others dispute that, and say Ben Halim knew about Marsalek’s connections in Russia and engaged with him, albeit irregularly and indirectly, as an interlocutor for Russian interests. While Ben Halim did not wish to enter politics, other discussions took place over other potential candidates who might be sympathetic to LHG and Marsalek’s interests.
When Marsalek fled in 2020, everything changed — not least for him. He faced one particular irony: having salted away millions of dollars behind complex structures and frontmen around the world, he was now, trapped in Russia, vulnerable to losing control of his hidden assets. “Assholes” were trying to “steal” his money, he would write in a December 2020 Telegram message to Orlin Roussev, one of the Bulgarian spies convicted last year in Britain, “because they think I am hiding in a cave in Afghanistan”. While he did not indicate to whom he was referring, his hidden financial interests in Libya were being eroded.
Lorasco in 2020 and 2021 initiated a series of capital raisings that began to vastly dilute Marsalek’s holding in the company. EAEL’s stake dropped from more than two-thirds to just 10 per cent. Matters became even more complicated in 2023 when Bowman started to acquire — via Damviol, a company controlled by his wife — shareholdings that had once belonged to Marsalek, taking part of EuroAtlantic’s stake in LCC and trying to acquire all of EAEL’s stake in Lorasco. Bowman told the FT this was a case of sweeping up assets that were going cheap and would never be reclaimed.
LHG, however, claimed this was suspicious and has refused to acknowledge the transfer of EAEL shares to Damviol. It says it is legally bound to keep the proceeds of a crime frozen. It also says it has questions about Bowman’s motive as Marsalek’s former friend and even the origin of his funds. Bowman told the FT he had not spoken to Marsalek in five years and that the idea he could be so stupid as to act as a front for him, given their known relationship, was ludicrous. Bowman’s dispute with LHG will soon come to a head — in court. Damviol in October filed a civil case in London alleging a conspiracy to defraud it, accusing Ben Halim and LHG of trying to use Bowman’s past relationship with Marsalek as a pretext to freeze the company out of his rightful minority shareholdings.
LHG, which denies the allegations, filed its legal response this week, saying there was no “animus” between Ben Halim and Bowman and stated that LHG blocked the transfer of EAEL-held shares on purely legal and fiduciary grounds.
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