Industry News
UPDATE — June 3, 2026: The Epstein Files Connection
This article was first published in April 2025. It has been updated following major new developments in December 2025.
Eight years after Karl-Erivan Haub disappeared on the Klein Matterhorn above Zermatt, one of the most baffling missing persons cases in Swiss history has taken a genuinely extraordinary turn — his name has appeared in the Epstein files.
On December 23, 2025, the United States Department of Justice published approximately 300,000 pages of documents from its investigation into the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Buried among them were three pages concerning the Valais cantonal police, the Swiss Federal Police (Fedpol), and the disappearance of Karl-Erivan Haub. The documents were first reported by Swiss outlet Blue News and subsequently covered across German-language media.
The documents reveal a chain of contact that began in June 2020. On June 2, 2020, a man identifying himself as Mark Epstein — Jeffrey Epstein’s brother — called the Valais cantonal police from New York. He followed up the same day with two emails. In those emails, Mark Epstein offered information and made a striking allegation: he suspected that Karl-Erivan Haub had been murdered, and that the circumstances of his disappearance were connected to the death of his brother Jeffrey.
Mark Epstein has long maintained that Jeffrey Epstein did not die by suicide in his jail cell in August 2019, but was killed because he knew too much. According to the documents, he believed the same logic applied to Haub — that the German-American billionaire may have been eliminated because of what he knew.
The Valais cantonal police, acting through Fedpol as intermediary, subsequently contacted U.S. authorities by email on June 15, 2020, to ask whether American agencies had any information linking the death of Jeffrey Epstein to the disappearance of Karl-Erivan Haub. That email — sent from Swiss federal police to the FBI — is what appears in the Epstein files, explaining why a missing Swiss Alps billionaire has surfaced in one of the most scrutinised document releases in recent American legal history.
What the American authorities replied, and whether that reply influenced the Swiss investigation, remains unknown. The Valais cantonal prosecutor’s office confirmed to Swiss media that the case remains open.
The Epstein documents also reportedly contain references to threats against Haub’s brother Christian, though the context of those threats is described as unclear.
The Epstein connection is only the latest development in a case that has accelerated significantly since this article was first published.
In May 2023, German magazine Stern published CCTV footage obtained from a source described as connected to Russia’s FSB intelligence service, purporting to show Karl-Erivan Haub in Moscow in 2021 — three years after his disappearance and two years after a German court had officially declared him dead. Experts cited in the Stern report put the visual similarity at 90%.
By 2024, German broadcaster RTL had gone further. Its reporting identified a Russian woman named Veronika Ermilova as a likely companion of Haub in Moscow, and facial recognition technology applied to more recent images reportedly put the similarity between the man in the footage and the missing billionaire at 99%. RTL alleged that Haub had faked his death in order to begin a new life in Russia with Ermilova, having accumulated years of business dealings with Russian figures including banker Andrey Suzdaltsev, whom he had called in the hours before his disappearance.
The RTL investigation triggered a criminal complaint against Haub’s brother, Christian — the man who took sole control of the Tengelmann Group after Karl-Erivan’s disappearance. The Cologne public prosecutor’s office opened a formal investigation into whether Christian Haub had committed perjury in the 2021 court proceedings by swearing under oath that there was no evidence his brother was alive, when RTL alleged that at least some family members were aware of indications to the contrary.
As of the time of this update, that criminal investigation remains ongoing. Eight years on, the case of Karl-Erivan Haub sits at the intersection of three competing theories, each of which has gained new supporting evidence since his disappearance:
He died in the glacier. The original conclusion of the Swiss search operation — that Haub fell into a crevasse in the glacier terrain above Zermatt and that his body remains entombed in the ice. Glaciers in the region move and calve, and bodies have re-emerged decades after disappearances. His body has not been found.
He faked his death and fled to Russia. The theory supported by the Moscow CCTV footage, the facial recognition analysis, the Russian business connections, the phone calls to Russian contacts made on the morning of his disappearance, and the RTL investigation. This theory implies that at least parts of his family knew and concealed it from the court — which is what the criminal investigation against Christian Haub is exploring.
He was murdered. The theory advanced by Mark Epstein in the documents that now appear in the Epstein files — that Haub knew too much about something, and was silenced. This is the most speculative of the three theories and is not supported by physical evidence, but it is now documented in official police records on two continents.
German investigative journalist Liv von Boetticher, who published a book on the case in 2023, concluded that “much suggests that the former head of the Tengelmann empire had been involved in extremely dubious business dealings in Russia for years and was probably on the radar of the American FBI and CIA as a result.” Whether that radar contact connected to the Epstein network, and whether the man last seen on a ski lift above Zermatt on April 7, 2018 is alive in Moscow or dead in a glacier, remains unanswered.
The Valais investigation is open. The Cologne prosecution is active. The Epstein files are still being processed. And somewhere in the gap between those three unresolved threads, the truth about Karl-Erivan Haub is still waiting to be found.
Original Article from April 2025
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.
