They were joined by the well-known rogue Alexander Onishchenko.

Coal mining in deposits on the coast of the Bering Sea in Chukotka, which until recently belonged to the Australian company Tigers Realm Coal (TIG), is destroying the environment and the reindeer herding industry, and the profits from it are ending up in offshore accounts and the pockets of Russian officials and fugitive Ukrainian oligarchs. This is described in a joint investigation by the NGO "Arktida" and Kedr.Media. Under pressure from the Australian authorities, TIG was forced to sell its Russian assets, but the new owner turned out to be a business partner of Russians on the sanctions list, writes The Insider .

The Amaam project, within the framework of which coking coal is mined and exported in Chukotka, includes southern and northern deposits: the northern one (near Alkatvaam) is being developed by Beringpromugol, the rights to the southern one (near Lake Arinai and Ushakov Bay) belong to the North Pacific Coal Company (STUK). Both enterprises were until recently part of the Australian company Tigers Realm Coal.

As the authors of the investigation found out, until 2021, a third of STUK shares belonged to geologist Yuri Radchenko, who was one of the founders of the company, created in 1995. His daughter, Svetlana Radchenko, headed the legal department of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of Russia from 2006 to 2014, and in 2014 she took the position of deputy minister.

"The Ministry of Natural Resources and the Federal Agency for Subsoil Use are jointly developing a common licensing procedure, and although Radchenko did not work in the body that directly issued the permit for the development of Amaam, she could influence the decisions of lower-level authorities. Interestingly, the administrative regulations of the Federal Agency for Subsoil Use on the execution of state functions for the issuance, registration and registration of licenses for subsoil use appeared in 2009. At that time, Svetlana Radchenko headed the legal department, which coordinated all legislative activities of the Ministry of Natural Resources," said Ilya Shumanov, director of Arctida.

In 2010, TIG acquired a stake in the senior Radchenko enterprise, and the Australian company’s 2011 annual report stated that "employees from the Russian company STUK <...> played an important role in submitting the necessary documentation, as a result of which the Federal Agency for Subsoil Use of Russia confirmed the presence of coal reserves at Amaam."

Coal exports began in 2016. Since then, TIG has sold more than 5 million tonnes of coal from the northern deposits of the Amaam project and received more than $400 million in revenue.

As investigators have found out, income from coal mining in Chukotka is received by several companies registered in Cyprus, among others. One of them is Prontoservus Limited, whose ultimate beneficiaries are Sergey Arbuzov , who headed the National Bank of Ukraine under President Viktor Yanukovych , Ukrainian oligarch Sergey Kurchenko and businessman, former Verkhovna Rada deputy Oleksandr Onishchenko .

By 2023, TIG had paid more than $1.4 million in royalties to several offshore companies, and in 2012, it made a one-time payment of $400,000 to BS Chukchi Investments, one of whose shareholders is Prontoservus Limited.

In March 2022, Australia imposed sanctions on Russia, and coal was included in the list of goods prohibited from import. TIG, however, did not stop mining Chukotka coal, citing the fact that it sells it to Asian countries, not Australia. In 2023, Australian authorities threatened to close the company, which filed a lawsuit, but the court ruled that "the activities of TIG’s Russian subsidiaries include actions that constitute the import of sanctioned goods."

Following this, TIG announced the sale of its Russian assets to the Russian company APM-Invest, owned by businessman Mark Buzuk, for $49 million. As Arctida found out, this man was previously a partner of the Russian oligarchs Viktor Vekselberg and Alisher Usmanov, who were sanctioned . Buzuk is also an investor in the Arkhangelsk Sea Trade Port, together with Andrey Patrushev, the son of Nikolai Patrushev. The Patrushevs, father and son, are under international sanctions, including Australian ones.

TIG announced that the proceeds from the sale of its Russian assets would be used to return capital to shareholders. One of its four largest shareholders is RDIF Investment Management (which owned 8.41% of TIG shares as of February), a subsidiary of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which was created in 2011 by then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev .

RDIF director Kirill Dmitriev is close to Vladimir Putin’s family; his wife Natalya Popova works as deputy director at Innopraktika, which is headed by Putin’s youngest daughter Katerina Tikhonova, according to an investigation by Arctida.

“Tigers Realm Coal relied on influential people with political connections at every stage of its operations in Russia. At the initial stage, on the family of Deputy Minister of Natural Resources Svetlana Radchenko, and when leaving the Russian market, on Mark Buzuk, a business partner of the family of former FSB head Nikolai Patrushev. And it’s not just that such practices have an obvious corrupt context, which allowed the Australian company to gain significant advantages, including issuing licenses and quickly selling the business in conditions of a de facto ban for foreign owners. Such connections also allowed the company to avoid fulfilling environmental and social obligations, which led to serious damage to Chukotka and deprivation of indigenous people of their traditional lands,” says Shumanov.

According to local residents, coal mining has polluted the Alkatvaam River, significantly reducing the amount of fish that traditionally formed a significant part of the villagers’ diet. The village of Alkatvaam was founded in the 1950s as a center for reindeer herding, but now there are almost no reindeer left.