Janna Bullock, the New York developer who made her career flipping houses mostly in the Upper East Side, has been found guilty by a Moscow court of embezzling almost $200 million from Russian government coffers, according to the New York Post. She’s been sentenced in absentia to 11 years in prison.
The case began in 2012 — after Bullock and Alexey Kuznetsov, her then-husband former finance minister of the Moscow region, fled Russia — when state-owned bank, Gazprombank, filed a lawsuit against Bullock in Cyprus, which eventually made its way into U.S. courts after she refused to cooperate. In the U.S., agents from Brown Harris Stevens were subpoenaed for information on Bullock and the mansions she was selling at the time in the Hamptons.
Bullock has denied wrongdoing claiming in a 2014 document obtained by The Real Deal that she is a “target of wrongful Russian corporate raiding.” To date, American authorities have rejected Russia’s request to extradite Bullock.
In 2012, Bullock, who had been a developer in Russia, told The New York Times her real estate fortune was worth $2 billion, however subsequent reports of foreclosures on her properties and a lawsuit leveled against her by a Palm Beach socialite Gina DiSabatino over missing art threw her career into question; however the Post reports she recently sold her Southampton estate (which The Real Deal reported was on the market in 2014) for nearly $30 million — double its 2005 price.
Bullock’s ex-husband was extradited to Russia last year from France. [NYP] — Erin Hudson