Billionaire Faked Own Death To Join Russian Lover in Moscow: Reports

A German billionaire who was officially declared dead in 2021, three years after vanishing in the Swiss Alps, may have faked his own death to live with his alleged mistress in Moscow.

Karl-Erivan Haub, a German-U.S. dual citizen, was 58 at the time of his disappearance, and was former managing director German retail giant Tengelmann Group. He was last seen on the morning April 7, 2018, heading up a mountain lift, and was reported missing the following morning after he didn’t return to his hotel in the Swiss resort of Zermatt.

A search for the businessman was officially called off in October 2018. Three years later, in May 2021, Karl-Erivan Haub was formally declared dead by the district court in Cologne, where he lived. Evidence to have him officially declared dead was submitted by his wife, brothers, and company.

His younger brother, Christian Haub, was named the sole CEO of Tengelmann after he vanished. In May 2021, he swore in an affidavit that he possessed no information that his missing sibling could still be alive.

Now, Christian Haub is being investigated by the state prosecutor’s office in Cologne over allegations that he could have given false statements, local news outlet Zeit Online reported on April 11. The publication said that contrary to the statements he provided, is accused of having had reliable evidence that his brother could still be alive.

The state prosecutor’s office has emphasized that there is still insufficient evidence that Karl-Erivan Haub is alive, and that there is at present no reason to request an annulment of his death certificate.

Christian Haub has denied giving false statements. Newsweek has contacted Tengelmann for comment by email.

The latest probe comes after a team of journalists with the broadcaster RTL, who had been investigating Karl-Erivan Haub’s disappearance, filed a criminal complaint in May 2023, saying that the billionaire could have faked his own death.

The team said that these events could be connected to a younger Russian woman with links to Russian intelligence—allegedly Veronika Ermilova—who worked for an event management agency, and with whom Karl-Erivan Haub had allegedly been leading a secret double life.

“There are strong indications that he could have caused his disappearance intentionally” and “at least parts of his family were aware of it and, against their better judgment, kept this secret from the Cologne District Court and the public,” investigative journalist Liv von Boetticher, who was part of the RTL team, told German magazine Capital in an interview published on April 15.

Boetticher said she and her team had “journalistically processed our research results over a period of three years” and hoped that the public prosecutor would initiate an official investigation “based on what we considered to be overwhelming evidence.”

“We had also informed the Cologne District Court in 2021 of our strong doubts about Mr. Haub’s death. The step of filing a criminal complaint against Christian Haub in May 2023 is certainly unusual, but we saw it as the last resort to officially initiate an investigation and clarify the background to the mysterious disappearance of Karl-Erivan Haub,” she said.

Boetticher said she had obtained photos in the fall of 2022 that appeared to show Haub in Moscow in February 2021.

“To my knowledge, these photos were available to Christian Haub at the time when he gave a sworn statement to the Cologne district court in May 2021 that he had ‘no reliable evidence’ that his brother was still alive,” she said.

Boetticher said that there was “an alleged lover of Karl-Erivan Haub with whom he had intense telephone contact before his disappearance and who has connections with the Russian domestic intelligence service the FSB.”

“On this basis there were investigations by the internal investigators and specially commissioned agencies in Russia,” she said. “There is a record that shows the investigators assumed Haub was in Russia and also said they could get a photo of him for €100,000 (about $100,000).”

Boetticher said she believes the businessman’s motivation for leaving for Russia “lies in his business connections” to the country.

“Our suspicion is that dealings with Russia or with Russian business partners could have got Karl-Erivan in trouble in the West,” she said.