FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
BERLIN – The morning of 7 April 2018 Karl-Erivan Haub left the hotel in Zermatt to go skiing on the Matterhorn. AND one of the richest men in Germany, general manager of the Tengelmann family group which operates in large-scale retail trade. The cameras film him at the top of the Klein Matterhorn cable car. The cell phone – it turns out later – is turned off.
From that solitary excursion Haub will never return, nor will his body ever be found.
Three years later, he was officially declared dead.
Many details of that morning don’t seem to add up. Haub, 58 years old and with a personal wealth of 5.2 billion euros, was preparing for the Swiss Army long-distance race, the Patrouille des Glaciers, in which he had participated several times. On the other hand, he was a marathon runner, very meticulous in his preparation: because he went out aloneand did not inform his coach Julia Emmler, violating the basic rules of ski mountaineering, he who was so scrupulous? For six days they looked for him everywhere, with mountain rescue, teams lowered into the cliffs and five helicopters. In vain.
Haub «is in Russia with his lover. And his family knew.”
Almost a year ago, a German journalistic investigation by the RTL group and Stern reached a sensational conclusion: the billionaire would not only be alive, but would be living in Russia with his mistress. And family, or rather brothers — who inherited his shares upon his official death — they would know about it.
Obviously, in this story of snow, disappearances and billions, they couldn’t be missing either the secret services and private investigators (the best in the thriller market: Russian and Israeli). However, it also proves that the journalistic reconstruction was not far-fetched the Cologne prosecutor’s office which reopened the case in recent days: and he wants to hear his brother Christian Haub for possible perjury, because he declared that he had had no news of his brother for 3 years, starting the complex machine of inheritance and succession.
«Obviously there is no truth in these accusations – his lawyer Mark Binz told Zeit – And until a few months ago the prosecutor also saw it that way, and didn’t think he should proceed». However, the prosecutor’s office says, there is no valid reason to cancel the death certificate.
The reconstruction is mainly thanks to an investigative journalist from RTL, Liv with Boetticher, who gave an interview to Capital in recent days. “After three years of work, the clues we have collected lead towards the conclusion that Haub created his own disappearance.”
The double life, and the lover Veronika Ermilova
Some details. First of all, the “late” Karl-Erivan Haub most likely had a double life, and a Russian lover, Veronika Ermilova. She was an event planner, and even coordinated a birthday party for the billionaire’s mother, in full view and presence of the family.
In the three days before the disappearance, Karl-Erivan and Veronika had texted or called each other 13 times. Not only that – from what several German media have written -, Ermilova also appears to have contacts with the Russian secret service FSB.
The tracks leading to Moscow
And then there they are the tracks that lead to Moscow. «I myself – says Liv von Boetticher – saw it a photo in 2022 showing Haub in Moscow in February 2021». This is the context: that image was obtained by a private Israeli-American agency that researched the biometric facial recognition system in Moscow. And the bombshell revelation: «As far as I know, that photo was also known to Christian Haub when he gave sworn testimony that he had “no reliable evidence” that his brother was alive to the judge of Cologna in May 2021″. The final brushstroke: it would have been the Haub family who hired the private investigators, and it would be the agency that had ensured in writing that it could provide a photo of the missing person for a fee of “100 thousand euros”.
The dynasty behind the Tengelmann Group
The rest are stories of a dynasty. Christian Haub is now the main shareholder of Tengelmann group, with its 75 thousand employees: he controls two thirds of it, after having bought out his widow’s shares for a billion. The last third is in the hands of his younger brother Georg.
As for the billionaire who appeared, RTL points the finger at “heavy ties” with not exactly reliable Russian subjects, to the point of hypothesizing his involvement in a notorious money laundering scandal.
He would therefore have disappeared, because he was entangled in an overly complex affair, fearing trouble in the West. None of this – however – is known to the German investigators.
What happened that morning of April 7, 2018? A meticulously organized disappearance, like that of Federico Caffè, only in times when video cameras record everything and erasing one’s fingerprints is almost impossible? A mountain accident, as it officially is? Certainly the Alps never returned that body.
Tags: Died Russia lover Putin spy
