Industry News
Seven years ago Karl-Erivan Haub, a German-American billionaire, was reported missing after failing to return from a backcountry skiing expedition in the Swiss Alps. The 58-year-old was the owner and CEO of German retail group Tengelmann, which runs supermarkets, discounters, and DIY centers across the globe. He was reportedly in Zermatt to train for the Patrouille des Glaciers ski race, an international long-distance ski event organized by the Swiss army but failed to return to his hotel on April 7, 2018. Haub was born in Tacoma, Washington, where his parents, Erivan and Helga, set up a home during the Cold War period, worried about a potential escalation of a conflict with Russia. To this day, the family owns several properties in the Tacoma area and has a wing at the Tacoma Art Museum.
Initially, it was assumed that the experienced alpinist and skier had fallen in a crevasse, but suspicions quickly arose. Conditions were fine on April 7, so there appeared to be no reason for the highly experienced mountaineer to have gotten lost on the trail he had taken several times before. Haub had set off on his own, which was unusual for someone who was known to be obsessed with safety. His personal trainer had even advised him against setting out on a high alpine route this close to the race and had instead suggested that he should do some tapering in the last week leading into the Patrouille des Glaciers event. Furthermore, Haub had turned off his brand new, nearly fully-charged mobile phone halfway up the mountain (phone data shows that it was at 83% when it was switched off). All actions that were out of character for the very experienced and cautious mountaineer.
Haub was known to be extremely cautious and risk-averse. He was said to instruct his drivers to take a different route to work every day to minimize the risk of abductions and had bulletproof glass installed in his limousines. In addition, he had his bodyguards test the efficacy by shooting at the windows to ensure they were in fact bulletproof. For someone as paranoid as Haub to turn off his mobile phone and set off without taking basic precautions, such as setting out with a beacon or a guide, just seemed odd. In light of these oddities, the internal investigators at Tengelmann concluded with a probability of 90% that Haub had faked a backcountry skiing accident. Furthermore, the investigators at Tengelmann found it odd that the 60 mountain rescuers and five helicopters brimming with high-end technology could not find a single trace despite searching for an entire week and suggested that the Swiss police were covering up a deliberate disappearance.
Furthermore, investigations of Haub’s phone records showed that he had spoken with a Russian woman in St. Petersburg on the night before his disappearance for an hour and a half. The woman, identified as event manager Veronika Ermilova, had also spoken with him four times the day before. After those phone calls with his alleged mistress, Straub instructed the pilot of his private jet to change the destination for his stay in the Alps. Instead of going to Les Deux Alpes, France, as originally planned, he flew to Zermatt, Switzerland. Ermilova denies having received several calls from Haub in the days prior to his disappearance and emphasizes that her relationship with the billionaire was purely of professional nature.
In the meantime, Haub’s brother Christian took over the management of the business while his wife Katrin took over her husband’s controlling stake in the family business. Despite the questions raised by Tengelmann’s internal investigations, Christian went on to request that his brother Karl-Erivan be declared deceased, stating in front of the court in May 2021 that, “I have no reliable indications, let alone evidence that my brother could still be alive.” Haub was declared dead by the Cologne Court on May 14, 2021. This enabled Christian to take over his brother’s shares from his sister-in-law, as she was not allowed to be involved in the family business without her husband according to the private statutes of the Tengelmann group, which dates back its history all the way to 1867 and passes control over the family enterprise to the first-born son.
A German journalist, Liv von Boetticher, working for German TV station RTL, decided to dig deeper into the peculiar story and things became increasingly bizarre. It turns out that just days after Haub’s disappearance, agents from both the CIA as well as Russian FSB traveled to Zermatt and stayed at Haub’s hotel “The Omnia,” to investigate the circumstances of Haub’s disappearance. Liv von Boetticher assumes that Haub, who also holds American citizenship by birth, may have been targeted by the American investigating authorities because of dubious business in Russia and therefore, presumably with Russian help, had staged his death in order to disappear to Moscow.
Von Boetticher obtained several confidential documents from a Tengelmann insider, but it is unclear why Christian Haub’s confidant would share such sensitive information. According to the information supplied to the journalist, the management at Tengelmann was aware that there were serious doubts about the CEO’s alleged death, but why would this insider share this with a journalist? What vested interest would there be for the Tengelmann company to spread doubt about Christian’s statement under oath that he had no indication that his brother was not dead when he clearly did, except to discredit Christian? Von Boetticher handed the documents and photographs in her possession to the Cologne public prosecutor’s office. An investigation against Christian for lying under oath is supposedly now underway after the journalist filed a lawsuit against the billionaire.
Two photographs obtained in Moscow, Russia in February 2021 by Israeli-American company Interfor International on behalf of Tengelmann show a man who looks eerily like Haub. Two biometric reports by specialists which compare the facial features of the person in the photographs with those of Karl-Erivan Haub came to the conclusion that the depicted person was Haub with a certainty of 99% and 85%, respectively. The only person to benefit from discrediting Christian Haub would be Karl-Erivan’s wife Katrin, who would then regain control over her missing husband’s stake “in absentia.” Katrin Haub and her children Erivan and Viktoria received €1.7 billion ($1.8 billion) in exchange for her husband’s shares in the family business, giving Christian Haub 70% of the family business.
The motive for a staged disappearance by Karl-Erivan seems muddled. Some theories point to his affair with Veronika Ermilova, however, a romantic motive seems unlikely. A divorce would have been much easier and not resulted in the loss of his stake in the family business. Other theories allege Russian involvement, with some suggesting that Haub was a Russian spy or was involved in unsavory business activities in Russia. The fact is that Tengelmann under Karl-Erivan Haub expanded heavily into Russia from 2010-2015. During this expansion, Haub allegedly got involved with some unsavory characters, a practice many deemed as necessary to gain a foothold in the newly emerging Russian market. It is possible that the Tengelmann Group got tangled up in money laundering activities in a bid to advance an expansion into the East under Karl-Erivan’s stewardship. The fact is also that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched an investigation into European companies’ activities in Russia, including Tengelmann’s. Another three days later, the U.S. Treasury Department expanded sanctions to include the “Rossiya Network,” the group of banks and oligarchs with whom Haub had done business according to the internal Tengelmann documents.
The explanation of an entanglement with the ”Russian Laundromat”—large-scale money laundering activities in Russia from 2010-2014— is feasible despite sounding like it’s coming from a spy novel. While Occam’s Razor suggests that the simplest solution with the least assumptions is the most likely and plenty of people disappear to be never seen again in high alpine terrain, a lot of the circumstances surrounding Haub’s disappearance—not least of all the timing of his disappearance—are highly suspicious. Another one of the potentially odd circumstances is the claim that the private detectives hired by Tengelmann to investigate on the ground in Russia allegedly and mysteriously both wound up dead shortly after their discoveries.
The story remains intriguing and it will be interesting to see whether the recent publication of the photos from Moscow will lead to a re-evaluation of Haub’s death.
