Police dig into the case of the Australian miner and the Kremlin ‘slush fund’

A little-known Melbourne company bankrolled by high-profile rich listers – and a Kremlin “slush fund” – is at the centre of Australia’s first major criminal investigation into Russian sanctions evasion.

Tigers Realm Coal is registered to an unassuming accountant’s office in Melbourne, but its major operations are in Russia. For more than a decade, the public company has attracted investment from some of Australia’s most prominent philanthropists and mining executives to mine coal in the frozen wilds of Siberia.

But in 2022, when Australia sanctioned Russian coal within days of President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Tigers kept mining – pulling in record hauls to sell onto Asian markets and paying millions of dollars in taxes to the Kremlin, helping fund Russia’s war machine.

Four years on, those operations continue, despite the company announcing in 2024 that it would sell its assets in Russia and wind up after it lost a Federal Court fight to evade the Australian sanctions.

The Australian Federal Police has now confirmed it is investigating Tigers Realm for breaching sanctions, following a referral from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

A spokeswoman told this masthead: “The AFP has an ongoing investigation into this matter. Further comment will be made at an appropriate time.”

This week, Tigers was delisted on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) after failing to lodge its financial accounts for more than a year – something the company claims is a consequence of its “limited communication” with the Russian arm of the business to comply with Australian sanctions.

When this masthead approached the Collingwood accountant’s office listed by Tigers as its local contact, staff there said no one had heard of the company.

The AFP probe is believed to be the first criminal investigation into Russian sanctions evasion in Australia and has been welcomed by anti-corruption researchers who have previously warned the government about Tigers’ business dealings with associates of the Kremlin.

Among Tigers’ biggest shareholders is Russia’s key sovereign wealth fund, set up by Putin, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which had representatives on Tigers’ board until the 2022 invasion. Tigers still spruiks the RDIF on its website despite the fund being sanctioned by Australia and described as Putin’s “known slush fund” by the US and other nations.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong said the Albanese government took sanctions compliance seriously, having beefed up its regime to help starve Russia of revenue streams for its Ukraine war. “We will continue to work across government and with international partners” to monitor for and crack down on sanctions breaches, she said.

Both Transparency International and Russian investigative group Arctida have followed Tigers’ paper trail through a sprawling network of offshore shell companies and high-profile Russians, and warned Australian authorities of “corruption red flags” surrounding the project.

At the same time that Tigers was obtaining mining licences in Siberia, records reveal that a key shareholder of its Russian operations was the father of a then senior Kremlin official at the Russian mining ministry that gave out those licences.

Another wealthy Russian who had worked at Tigers as a “government relations manager” is now a major beneficiary of millions of dollars in private royalties that the company is paying to several shadowy Cyprus companies, on top of the taxes it already pays to the Kremlin.

In annual reports and ASX notices, Tigers has praised many of its Russian executives as “instrumental” in obtaining lucrative mining licences from Moscow.

Transparency International Australia director Clancy Moore said the organisation’s research on Tigers’ finances, provided to the Australian government and this masthead, showed Tigers’ Russian project had been exposed to risks of corruption and conflicts of interest “from day one”. “It’s like a set of Russian babushka dolls,” Moore said.

In 2024, the Federal Court ruled that Tigers’ operations in Russia breached Australian sanctions, ending the company’s near-two-year legal battle to overturn them. Within a week, it announced it was selling to Russian tycoon Mark Buzuk.

Then, as the sale stalled, Tigers said the company had been left largely on ice, with its value plummeting. Shareholders have been unable to withdraw their funds, and today the sale still awaits Putin’s presidential approval.

Yet, at its last AGM in June last year, Tigers told impatient investors that while the board had instructed the Russian side of its operations to stop mining when it voted through the sale, “the management team in Russia were unable to comply with the instruction, as to do so would have exposed them to serious personal risk”. Remuneration had continued to be paid as “business as usual”, the AGM was told.

The company has previously said its Russian arm is required to ringfence all ongoing profits since 2024 in a “locked box” set aside for Tigers’ proposed buyer. But Tigers did not answer questions from this masthead.

Russian media reports Tigers’ operations in the far-east yielded more than 1.5 million tonnes of coal during summer runs last year, down only slightly from the 1.7 million tonnes mined in 2024, according to independent investigators and Russian business newspaper Nedradv.

Mining could resume for the summer of 2026 as well, through the coal port it still owns in the Arctic wilds. But Tigers told the ASX in January that it had no more capital available as the parent company, and this had “limited the Russian operating entities access to required financing to resume”.

Prominent philanthropists such as billionaire Paul Little and medtech founder Dr Bruce Gray are among Tigers’ biggest shareholders, though Little has said that he and his wife, Jane Hansen, have been unable to divest their 5.63 per cent stake since the freeze over the proposed sale in 2024. As investors, they are not involved in managing the company’s operations.

Also among the company’s unusual line-up of shareholders is an investment firm, Baring Vostok, previously caught up in an embezzlement scandal in Russia.

If the sale of Tigers’ Russian operations goes through, delivering capital back to shareholders as planned, Russia’s RDIF fund would be the third-biggest investor receiving a payday.

Tigers has told the market that all return of capital will only be made “in accordance with” sanctions. Given how long the proposed sale has stalled, the firm is now also “looking for other potential options”.

DFAT is monitoring Tigers but did not comment on possible pay-outs to sanctioned entities, while the RDIF rejects its description as a slush fund and claims it complies with the laws of countries where it invests Russian funds.

Arctida director Ilya Shumanov said it now appeared that Tigers had agreed to sell to a tycoon with Kremlin connections to try to ensure an easier exit.

But at last year’s AGM, Tigers indicated it was not going smoothly – railing against what the company called a “completely insidious” sanctions regime created by a hostile Australian government that had left Tigers “unable to defend ourselves from any of the extortionate things that have happened to us since”.

Moore said doing business in Russia came with risks for any company, as the “tentacles” of Putin’s corrupt mafia state reached into every industry, particularly its lucrative fossil fuel sector.