Wrapped in white sheets on pink granite, set underground like an old-time bunker, hidden from the satellite reliefs by an eternally irrigated lawn without droppers, positioned right above the roofs of the "ghost" villa. The hermitage is a secret as few, stretching out towards the bay of Capo Capaccia, in the turquoise waters of the paradise of the Costa Smeralda. The cameras that surround it follow the faces from a distance, free access to those cliffs sculpted by the wind and the sea is forbidden even to the most rebellious rams at the forbidden gates. The entrance is dead-end. A roundabout makes you understand in no uncertain terms that you cannot go further, you have to turn. A block of olive wood, massive as a bison, runs on a steel track, between two stone pillars. The number is 26 of the Russian street in the hermitage of Romazzino, Porto Cervo. It is useless to look for the name on the doorbell, at most you can come across yet another severe eye set between small buttons and access codes that obviously nobody knows. Cars do not arrive here, no one dares to cross that winding path from the dead end. The extreme gamble was to place two silent bows in the secondary gate of this enclave, one white and green, like the flag of the violated land, and one white and red, of the invading nation. For the rest silence, absolute and impregnable.

Rocky Ram, the ram

That that tongue of pink rock is forbidden and inviolable can be understood from the name of the "dacha" in Sardinia, Rocky Ram, literally "rocky ram". Stubborn and lonely, aggressive and haughty. When a sort of dated Simca, a greenish quattroruote of other times, appears on the roundabout, the question arises spontaneously, addressed to the lady on her honeymoon backwards, who evokes the glories of the past with her better half. Wary, despite retirement, she replies with pride: I worked for many years here with the Engineer, I lived there as if it were my home. But then the Russians arrived, and we went back to the village.

The Engineer

It is useless to ask who the Engineer is, he will never tell. For discretion and eternal confidentiality. Here, however, for everyone, the Engineer is much more than a name and a surname. As for the Advocate or the Knight. It is the dawn of ten years ago when Carlo de Benedetti, almost an Italian oligarch, powerful and influential as few in the economic, political and editorial life of the Bel Paese, goes to the notary Carlo Munafò in Saronno together with Mrs. Margherita Crosetti, his first wife. To be sold there is a modest cheap company, with an allotment to make even the most chauvinist of Islamic faiths shudder, 90 euros owned by the Engineer and ten euros by his wife. It is a pity that the anonymous “Romazzino simple society”, born on 16 May 1995 and registered office in via Valeggio in Turin, is anything but an empty box. In the real estate “belly” of that modest team of such a consort there is the number one, the most exclusive, the unattainable villa of Capo Capaccia, Rocky Ram. It is March 26, 2012 when the spouses put their signature on that piece of paper with which they sell that strip of Sardinia to an unknown gentleman legal representative of a registered company a thousand miles away from the rocky ram. From the emerald paradise to the fiscal paradise of Cyprus, the step is short, secret, hidden and armored in the vaults of the third Mediterranean island, after Sicily and Sardinia. The sales contract is top secret. It is useless to dig into the Conservatories. Carlo de Benedetti, far-sighted and prescient, on April 3 two years ago dissolved the family company without liquidation. In the chamber registers, the "Romazzino" is a "canceled" company. Official sales documents are inaccessible on the Italian front. All that remains is to rely on the merchants of golden castles who are not lacking here, in the emerald genius of the Aga Khan Karim.

113 million villa

The brokers of the operation tell of a breathtaking final figure of 113 million euros, even if the engineer would have wanted a few more. In this land devoted to exasperated wealth, that figure had not gone unnoticed, so much so that even today many, including insiders, wonder who could have dared so much, going well beyond nine figures, to buy that secret "dacha" and “ghost” in the Romazzino peninsula, an exclusive strip of Porto Cervo. There is everything in that price, a stratospheric villa, initially with 19 rooms, then becoming 25 with the house floor, the proscenium, the isolation, the privacy, an entire peninsula, surrounded on three sides by brushstrokes of blue and turquoise to be the envy of the most refined colors in the history of art. Of course, there is apparently no alternative way out and entry to that gate on the roundabout, an essential element to escape from paparazzi and thieves. Here, however, in this land of magnates, princes and oligarchs they are used to competing hand in hand with the scripts of James Bond and his companions. And it is no coincidence that probing the sea in front of the circumnavigation of the peninsula, strewn with white sheets, one sees the direct passage from the brilliant waters to the underground floors of the villa.

Usmanov, the neighbor

The wharf here in the forbidden residence, unlike the neighbor, the powerful Alisher Usmanov, is there but cannot be seen. The steel pylons are set and hidden in the seabed, the secret walkway will appear, without attracting attention, only when it is really needed to access or leave the “ghost” dacha of Punta Capaccia from the sea. The question rings in the hemisphere like the Sunday bells in the Stella Maris Church, on the slopes of Porto Cervo. A villa as exclusive as it is secret, camouflaged like few others, however, does not have a real name and surname. For everyone it is the ex of Carlo De Benedetti. For the rest, nobody knows anything. It is not known who enters and who exits, and who knows is careful not to reveal it.

Code of silence

The code of silence flies grazing like silence. This Russian Fort Knox in a land of junipers and myrtle, strawberry trees and seagulls is shrouded in total mystery. The well-informed, those who give in under torture only for the slightest clue, tell of a powerful man, very powerful, filthy rich, close, very close to the Tsar of Russia. No names, though. Perhaps, however, not even they really know who dared to buy a bigger, more exclusive, more private house in Porto Cervo than those of Usmanov, of the billionaire Gennady Timchenko, of Vladimir Lisin or Petr Olegovich Aven. The secrets are all enclosed in a fund to which we went back by crossing databases and international papers, cadastral maps and financial trusts scattered all over the world. The current owner, the buyer of the Engineer's villa, is “Ferimod Investments Limited”. A secret fund, registered in Egypt street, at number 12, of the capital of Cyprus, landed in the Russian-Cypriot corporate world on September 14, 2009. The code number of the secret team is "HE248333". The current state of the organization is active. On the reserved register there are only two names, the first is written in Cyrillic, which translated should refer to the enterprising Eleni Kinani, a very close relative of a very powerful Cypriot minister directly connected to one of the most powerful oligarch families in Russia. Together with Miss Kinani, who is the fund manager, another codified person appears as secretary, “Zoulian Consultants Limited”.

The brothers of Judo

This is yet another confirmation of the documentary intersections that we have reconstructed: Ferimod Investments Limited, owner of the "ghost" dacha, is one of the custodian companies of the financial and economic system of Boris and Arkady Romanovic Rotenberg, the two playmates and Judo brothers of the Tsar of Russia, none other than Vladimir Putin. The difference between the two is, however, substantial, one, Arkady, is an all-round oligarch, with a Russian passport and assets subject to sanctions, the other, Boris, on the other hand, is as oligarch as his brother, but has a Finnish passport. The latter element that has for now protected him from the freezing of assets.

Black Sea & Porto Cervo

The history of this Russian enclave in the land of Sardinia, however, is a bottomless pit of secrets and mysteries, including Vladimir Putin's lust for those castles built directly on tongues of land and rock lying and isolated in the open sea. once in the Black Sea, another in the paradise of Porto Cervo. Certainly he, the Tsar of Russia, when he officially landed in Sardinia for the first time in 2003, saw that turquoise sea with a certain envy. Now his sports and gaming companions, through the tax havens of Cyprus, have planted the flag of the Russian Federation on Punta Capaccia, in the land of Sardinia. The documents in our possession, however, tell much more about that landing in Sardinia of the Rotenberg brothers, billionaires by the grace of Putin. The conquest of this strip of Sardinian paradise passes through divorces, post-marriage clashes and infinite fortunes that re-emerge right in the secret villas of Porto Cervo. Russian history in Sardinia is only just beginning.

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