The biggest collection of at-risk A-listed buildings in Scotland is secretly owned by a senior executive at a sanctioned Russian bank, The Herald can reveal.

Aberdeen’s sprawling and Broadford Works - a textile mill first opened during the Napoleonic Wars - has been effectively abandoned - blighted by fires and vandalism - since it closed in 2004.

Property developers have talked of turning the entire historic complex in to housing - but the most recent plans - worth £120m - to create 900 homes and student flats have been dropped. 

Officially the works are owned by a firm headquartered on the Channel Island of Guernsey called Ferness Investments Holdings Limited.

However, new corporate filings reveal that the beneficial owner of this offshore company is a man named Andrey Kosolapov, a very senior figure at the Moscow financial services and banking giant Absolut.

(Image: Alamy Phptos)

US authorities officially sanctioned Absolut Bank late last year as part of sweeping restrictions on Russia’s financial services sector. 

The UK has not acted on the institution and Kosolapov is not subject to personal sanctions.

The 51-year-old, originally from Orsk on the Ural river but now based in Limassol, Cyprus, and described as a Cypriot citizen in UK corporate filings, has spent most of his career at the Absolute Group, including its bank. 

Mr Kosolapov is a close associate and business partner of Aleksandr Svetakov, the sanctioned billionaire founder of Absolute Group and number 87 of the US Treasury Department ’s 2018 list of Russian oligarchs.

There is no suggestion that Mr Kosolapov has personally engaged in any wrong-doing. His name was revealed under new rules introduced by the British Government after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

Since August 0f 2022 foreign or offshore companies with property in the UK have had to declare their beneficiaries on a register of foreign entities.  The rule was designed to prevent owners using opaque trusts and shell firms to hide their identity.

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Ferness Investments Holdings registered as a foreign entity in February 2023, naming a Spanish woman called Carmen Gonzalez and an opaque Cypriot trust as beneficiaries.

It registered Mr Kosolapov as its sole beneficiary a year later. That filing was made public in April.

It was researchers at Transparency International, the anti-corruption campaign, who noticed the declaration. 

They have been keeping an eye on the offshore ownership of British property, not least vulnerable parts of the country’s built heritage.

Juliet Swann, Transparency International UK’s Nations and Regions Programme Manager, said: “This revelation shows the value of transparency provided by the Register of Overseas Entities (ROE). 

“Guernsey company Ferness Investment Holdings bought Broadford Works in 2017 but only now can we see Ferness' ultimate owner and make the link between them and a Russian investment bank sanctioned in the United States.

(Image: Alamy)

“While recent property transparency reforms are showing their worth, loopholes remain. It is still possible to list a trust as the ultimate owner of property, obscuring those who control or benefit from the land from public view.

“Together, Westminster and Holyrood could close these gaps. Failure to do so risks displacing secrecy from offshore companies into trust structures, leaving us in the dark about who owns important parts of Scotland.”

The Press and Journal newspaper late last year revealed that the latest planning application for the Broadford Works had lapsed. 

It cited a representative of Ferness Investment Holdings saying: “The current consent for the site is unfortunately not deliverable in its current form.

“We are though fully committed to the site.

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“We are working with our project team to help shape and inform future proposals which we hope to discuss with the council and the local community in due course.”

There is considerable concern in Aberdeen that some of the structures at the site will have to be demolished. This is likely to be expensive.

There is particular fear for the future of a steel-framed mill building at the site, believed to one of the oldest surviving strictures of its kind in the world.

Broadford Works was once the biggest employer in Aberdeen and traded, as Richards, right in to the 21st century. 

Ferness Investment Holdings bought the entire complex for £14m in 2017 - after planning consent for flats and student accommodation was granted.

Absolut Bank last year brushed off the US sanctions. “We believe that these events will have no effect whatsoever on our work,” the institution told state news agency TASS. “We changed our business models some time ago in the light of external economic conditions.” The bank added that US sanctions were now routine and affected some 40 Russian financial institutions.