A Russian banker spent millions on Atlanta properties, left with little trace
Sergey Khotimskiy’s career in Atlanta real estate began with a steady drumbeat of deals, a few million dollars here and there.
The Russian banker spent nearly $4.7 million in 2015 to become the landlord of a well-known pub in Virginia-Highland, then $4 million to buy a nightclub space in Buckhead.
He spent $2.3 million on a church sanctuary in a converted movie theater on North Highland Avenue, $1.7 million on the home of a health food store in Brookhaven, and $5.6 million on a nondescript Alpharetta shopping center with a Starbucks drive-thru.
All told, over seven years, Khotimskiy and LLCs linked to him poured more than $37 million into metro Atlanta. Several of the investors who sold him commercial property said they never met him.
“It was like a ghost in the night,” said Anton Kotze, who sold him the Brookhaven building. “The money was good and in the account, and the property transferred very quickly.”
Then the banker left Georgia with little trace.
In 2022, weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Khotimskiy finalized an exchange of assets with his ex-wife and in doing so relinquished control and ownership of his remaining real estate holdings in Georgia, according to his ex-wife. He did so shortly after the U.S. government sanctioned his bank, cutting it off from the American financial system.
Less than a month after the transfer was completed, he was sanctioned personally. The federal government froze him out of the U.S. and made it a crime for Americans to do business with him. But because the transactions were completed before sanctions were imposed, Khotimskiy’s transfers were perfectly legal.
Khotimskiy is one of the more than 4,000 people and entities the U.S. has sanctioned since Russia’s invasion, a push to inflict pain on its president, Vladimir Putin, and key players in its government and economy. In a press release announcing Khotimskiy’s sanctions, the U.S. State Department said the government was targeting “elites close to Putin” in an effort to ensure Russia paid “a severe economic and diplomatic price” for attacking Ukraine.
Now, President Donald Trump and 85 senators are threatening to impose even more economic sanctions, hoping the threat of further isolation will push Putin to end the war.
But the story of Khotimskiy’s business dealings in Georgia raises crucial questions about potential gaps in the sanctions system, a joint investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Post and Courier of South Carolina and the independent Russian media outlet iStories has found.
Reporters traced court documents, state corporate filings, county real estate records and regulatory filings across the country to understand Khotimskiy’s involvement in the U.S. And they interviewed local investors and tenants who dealt with him.
The reporters found that to transfer property worth tens of millions of dollars, Khotimskiy did not have to file a single piece of paper at a county courthouse. Instead, he privately signed over control of the holding companies that owned them.
And because Georgia does not collect information on who owns LLCs, the government was none the wiser.
Khotimskiy’s story shows just how little the government knows about who owns what, even on its own soil. And it shows how a basic question like “who’s your neighbor?” can be vexingly difficult to answer, even at a place called Neighbor’s Pub.
‘Burgers and beers’
Neighbor’s was already a fixture on Highland Avenue when Khotimskiy bought its building in 2015, his first known commercial real estate purchase in Atlanta.
The pub’s owner, Doug Landau, had invested in properties himself. And when he met Khotimskiy, he found it easy to talk shop and negotiate lease terms: Khotimskiy spoke excellent English, and he was well-versed in commercial real estate. Khotimskiy, now 47, seemed like just another investor eager to capitalize on the emerging Beltline and the resurgence of Atlanta’s in-town neighborhoods.
“Look, he’s a businessman,” said Landau, who has been involved with Neighbor’s since it opened 40 years ago. “He did the same math everybody else did.”
Khotimskiy studied law in Moscow and pursued a career in film before turning to finance. In the early 2000s, he bought a small-town bank with a group of business partners including his brother, according to financial press accounts and his personal biography. In Khotimskiy’s telling, the bank they named Sovcombank catered to pensioners and eventually grew through acquisitions, according to an interview he gave the trade publication World Finance.
In time, according to the U.S. government, it became Russia’s third-largest privately held bank and the ninth-largest overall.
It did so with help from the Russian government, regulatory disclosures show. It sold shares to the Russian government’s investment arm. It counted government entities and state-owned businesses among its customers. And it won regulators’ blessing to buy competitors.
“You can’t make money without showing allegiance to the government and having (a) close relationship with the government,” said Elina Ribakova, an expert on the Russian economy and fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Khotimskiy did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.
Khotimskiy’s personal wealth supported a wide range of pursuits: He could afford investments in Atlanta, an ownership stake in a bank in Florida and an eclectic collection of walking canes, including one he boasted was worth some $15,000.
He and his wife built a three-story home near Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, in a secluded riverfront community called Palmetto Bluff. The house sat in a development that once played host to pop star Justin Bieber’s wedding, and it overlooked the May River, beside a park where big live oaks shaded bocce ball courts and an ice cream shop.
Read more
In a gated sanctuary of sprawling new mansions and marsh views near Hilton Head, South Carolina, prominent Russian banking executives including Sergey Khotimskiy bought homes and lots worth more than $22 million. Then they were sanctioned. To read more, visit postandcourier.com.
And read more about Sergey Khotimskiy at iStories.
And they bought a $1.9 million townhome in The Enclave, a Buckhead development said to be inspired by the Place des Vosges in Paris. The home had antique oak floors, three fireplaces, and five-and-a-half baths. Its 6,150 square feet spanned three stories.
Landau, the bar owner, knew his landlord’s background. And in 2023, it gave him pause when he watched a TV segment about how governments were seizing assets like yachts from Russian elites.
“It made me think, ‘Wait a second. I’m paying rent to a Russian banker,’” Landau said.
That night, Landau said, he pulled up the U.S. Treasury Department’s website and found a list of every person the agency had sanctioned. He searched Khotimskiy’s name, and there it was. The government had targeted him in March 2022, just weeks after Russia went to war with Ukraine.
Landau feared he might have a problem: He was paying some $30,000 a month to an LLC established by Khotimskiy, and with the sanctions in place, it was against the law to do business with him. Plus, Landau said he supported Ukraine and didn’t want to somehow support the Russian war effort.
“When you wake up in the business, you’re thinking (about) serving burgers and beers. You’re not thinking, ‘I’m sending money to Russia,’” Landau said.
Because Georgia businesses don’t have to disclose their owners, Landau had no way to know where his rent money was going.
He called his lawyer, who hired a high-powered firm in Washington to investigate. The ordeal would take a couple of months and roughly $56,000 in legal fees to resolve, he said. No one had told him his business was nearly caught in the crossfire of America’s economic war. No one told him the building had changed hands either.
The building still belonged to 752 North Highland LLC, which had been Khotimskiy’s holding company. But Landau’s lawyers told him he was in the clear: The company had a new owner.
Even then, Landau said, he wasn’t told who his new landlord was. In Georgia, he learned, property owners’ identities can be shrouded in mystery.
Full-court press
At many of the properties, Khotimskiy left only a limited paper trail in the public record. But his investment in a Buckhead nightclub space opened a window into his business dealings, thanks to a long legal fight with a then-fledgling NBA player.
Dennis Schröder arrived in Atlanta as one of the Hawks’ first-round picks in 2013, a speedy 19-year-old from Germany with a wide wingspan. And in 2016, he decided to open a nightclub.
Months earlier, Khotimskiy had set up an LLC and paid $4 million for commercial space in the base of an aging condo building on Peachtree Road. Schröder, who wore jersey number 17, became his tenant.
The DS17 Lounge was not universally beloved. Its loud bass drew noise complaints from residents upstairs. The health department dinged it for having a greasy kitchen with lots of fruit flies.
And less than a year after it opened, Khotimskiy’s lawyers alleged the nightclub stopped paying rent. Even after they reached a settlement and the club shut down, the lawyers alleged Schröder didn’t pay.
After Schröder was traded to the Thunder in 2018, Khotimskiy’s lawyers served papers on him in Oklahoma. Once Schröder was dealt to the Lakers in 2020, Khotimskiy filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles. A process server went to the Lakers’ facility, seeking to garnish Schröder’s paycheck.
Khotimskiy’s collection efforts hit wall after wall. Records obtained from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office show that when the process server reached the Lakers’ lawyer in 2022, he was told Schröder had no pay to garnish in L.A.: He had moved again.
Records show authorities in California sent demand letters to Schröder’s new team, the Boston Celtics. But their efforts were still underway when the U.S. government sanctioned Khotimskiy.
Schröder’s agent, Mark Bartelstein, did not respond to requests for comment about whether the debt was ever paid. The Celtics and the Lakers did not answer questions about how they handled Khotimskiy’s demands.
In court papers filed in California in 2021, Khotimskiy offered a revelation: He had sold his stake in the nightclub space years earlier.
Khotimskiy disclosed that he had sold the building’s holding company to another Sovcombank executive, Dmitry Gusev. In court, Khotimskiy said Gusev had given him the rights to collect against Schröder.
Back in Georgia, there was no indication that Gusev had bought the property. Gusev’s name didn’t appear in Georgia’s property and corporate records for years — not until after he sold the building in 2020 and filed paperwork with the state to close the LLC.
The undisclosed sale is striking because Gusev was also targeted by U.S. sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine. Gusev did not respond to requests for comment.
Had he not decided to sell, there would have been no record connecting a sanctioned Russian banker to a property worth millions.
‘The guys you read about’
Anti-corruption experts say the U.S. is an appealing destination for wealthy Russians and international investors to park their money.
It has robust property rights, insulating them from potential instability and uncertainty in their home countries. Laws in most states allow for secrecy. And the U.S. economy is massive, so even big investments can often avoid attention.
Khotimskiy’s investments in Atlanta serve as an example.
In Virginia-Highland, pastor Scott Armstrong at City Church-Eastside didn’t even know Khotimskiy’s name, just that the church’s landlord was from Russia.
“We just jokingly referred to him as the oligarch,” Armstrong said.
Jeffrey Stein sold Khotimskiy’s LLCs two properties for more than $15 million without ever meeting him, Stein said.
Penn Hodge, who sold Khotimskiy an Alpharetta shopping center that housed a Mattress Firm and a Starbucks, said he didn’t interact with the banker either. Khotimskiy submitted a bid with the highest offer, Hodge said, and that was that.
When he was selling his Brookhaven building to Khotimskiy, Anton Kotze was told the buyer was abroad. The Russian banker didn’t visit the property before spending $1.7 million to buy it in 2016.
Kotze said he remarked at the time that the experience reminded him of news stories he’d seen about foreign investors parking their money in the U.S.
“I was like, ‘Man, these are the guys you read about,’ you know?” Kotze said, adding: “‘This is exactly it.’”
A few years after he entered the Atlanta market, changes in Khotimskiy’s personal life prompted changes to his real estate portfolio.
He and Elena Baskina, his wife at the time, divorced in 2018. In a statement in response to reporters’ questions, Baskina said she stayed in the U.S. as a permanent resident while Khotimskiy remarried in Russia.
Baskina said she became sole owner of some of the real estate LLCs and co-owner of others, while her ex-husband retained sole ownership of some. Her statement didn’t offer specifics about who owned what, and the public record offers few clues about the transfers.
During the summer of 2021, when Khotimskiy was visiting the U.S., Baskina asked to renegotiate their separation agreement, she said in her statement. She said the COVID pandemic made her realize that it was safer to rely on real estate she owned in her adopted home rather than another person.
They agreed she would receive his assets in the U.S., while he would take control of her assets in Russia, she said. She would also give up child support payments.
“I wanted all my assets and sources of income to be based in the U.S. and under my control,” Baskina said.
The exchange was “negotiated to be equivalent,” she said. “I was not ‘given’ anything in this settlement update.”
The process took several months, she said.
In the meantime, the prospect of a Russian invasion of Ukraine began to grow. Decisions in Moscow would soon put Khotimskiy on a collision course with the U.S. government.
Targeted
Alarm bells about Russia’s plans in Ukraine began ringing as the fall of 2021 gave way to 2022.
More than 100,000 troops were stationed along the border, and Ukraine’s allies began marshaling support. In Washington, Congress threatened economic retaliation. Anticipating an invasion, lawmakers proposed cutting Russia’s most important banks out of the financial system.
In January 2022, they named Sovcombank as a target. Sovcombank responded quickly, hiring lobbyists to distance the bank from Putin’s regime.
They argued Sovcombank didn’t cater to oligarchs, disclosures show. They said it served Russians with modest incomes, mostly in remote towns and villages. They said it had adopted business practices from the West, even prioritizing diversity and inclusion and financing green projects.
The Moscow Times interviewed Khotimskiy in 2022 for an article about Russian businesses’ race to prepare for sanctions. He railed against the proposals, telling the outlet it was “illogical and unfair” for the U.S. to target his bank. It was “like working with a gun to your head,” he said.
Records show Khotimskiy continued to ply his interests in the U.S. In January, his name was listed on an application for a work visa filed by the holding company that owns Neighbor’s building. And in his dispute with Schröder, a process server delivered papers seeking to freeze the NBA veteran’s bank accounts.
Then, in February 2022, on the same day Russian missiles began falling on Ukraine, President Joe Biden’s administration dropped a hammer on Sovcombank, imposing sanctions to lock it out of the U.S.
It was with this backdrop that Baskina and Khotimskiy finished their asset swap. Property records show Baskina took ownership of the $5.9 million house near Hilton Head on March 13, 2022. In response to reporters’ questions, Baskina said her ex-husband also transferred his last ownership interests in the Georgia LLCs in the first week of March 2022. She said she did not try to hide the transactions.
The move made her the sole owner of the properties around Atlanta, she said.
“Neither my ex-husband, or any other person, has a current or future right to ownership or control of any LLCs or properties owned by me,” Baskina said.
Baskina said she had not expected Khotimskiy to be sanctioned because the U.S. had not traditionally targeted bank officials like him. But on March 24, 2022, Khotimskiy was hit with individual sanctions. Under Biden’s executive order, he was banned from traveling to the U.S., and it became illegal for Americans to do business with him.
Had Khotimskiy still owned the properties when the sanctions were imposed, they would have been frozen.
Asset transfers
When the government rolled out Russian sanctions in 2022, Kimberly Donovan ran the intelligence division at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, an arm of the Treasury Department tasked with detecting suspicious activity in the financial system.
Investigators there traced how oligarchs and other Russians moved their assets in advance of war, she said. And they raised alarms to banks to be on the lookout.
“Anywhere from two weeks to a month or so ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they all transferred their assets, especially those overseas, into the names of their family and close associates,” Donovan said.
In an alert to banks, FinCEN warned that the commercial real estate sector was vulnerable to Russian sanctions evasion. And the agency said it’s a red flag for Russian elites to transfer assets around the time they’re sanctioned.
Tracing those transfers can be especially challenging in the U.S. because states require such little disclosure from LLCs, experts say.
Only New York has passed a law requiring corporations to disclose their ownership. Gary Kalman, the executive director of the anti-corruption group Transparency International U.S., said the only reason states like Delaware and South Dakota are known for secrecy is that they advertise it.
In Georgia, for instance, the Secretary of State’s Office does not collect information on ownership, spokesman Robert Sinners said. LLCs have to file annual reports, but their owners can have someone like a lawyer fill them out, leaving the actual owners’ names out of it.
“It’s incredibly difficult, it’s incredibly frustrating and it’s incredibly depressing” that the U.S. doesn’t have clear rules requiring disclosure, said John E. Smith, the former director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which imposes and enforces sanctions.
Smith added: “There’s no doubt that it weakens, in many respects, our abilities on the national security and foreign policy fronts.”
Concerns like Smith’s have been simmering for years, and in 2021, the U.S. took steps to address them.
That year, Congress enacted a law called the Corporate Transparency Act by overriding Trump’s veto of a catch-all defense spending bill. The law promised to crack down on money laundering and terrorism financing by requiring companies to tell the federal government who actually controlled them.
But as the first reports were coming due earlier this year, the Trump administration announced it would not enforce key provisions of the law, saying it was “reining in burdensome regulations.” It said LLCs established in the U.S. would not have to comply. In a statement, a Treasury Department spokesman said it was focusing on overseas companies, “rather than imposing unnecessary reporting requirements on nearly 33 million U.S. small businesses.”
If they happened to submit reports, officials said, they would delete them.
As a result, experts say, the government will stay in the dark about who owns what.
Tony Bartelme of The Post and Courier and Irina Dolinina of iStories contributed to this report.
About this story
This story is based on reporting by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Post and Courier of South Carolina, the independent Russian news outlet iStories and freelance journalist John Dell’Osso.
Journalists looked across the country to locate public records and piece together the story of Sergey Khotimskiy’s business dealings in the U.S. These ranged from property records in South Carolina to LLC registrations in Georgia to court records in California. The team also reviewed visa applications, bank regulatory filings, foreign agent disclosures, code enforcement records, health inspections, congressional legislation, Russian press articles, judgment levies and several lawsuits. In Georgia, a reporter also interviewed some of the people who sold real estate to Khotimskiy’s LLCs and some of their tenants.
To give context to their findings, reporters also interviewed experts on corporate transparency and the Russian economy and former government officials whose work included enforcing economic sanctions. They also reviewed alerts and reports published by sanctions authorities in the U.S. and abroad.
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