Artyom Ouss, son of the governor of the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk Alexandre Ouss, is wanted by Washington for a case of illegal sale of American technologies to arms companies in Russia.
He was arrested in October at Milan’s Malpensa airport. Pending a court decision on his extradition to the United States, he was under house arrest, with an electronic bracelet.
On Tuesday, Italian justice gave the green light to his extradition and the next day Artiom Ouss disappeared.
According to the daily La Repubblica, at the end of Wednesday morning, the carabinieri checked Mr. Ouss who was still at his home in the vicinity of Milan, but around lunchtime the alarm of the electronic bracelet rang and the man has since been found.
The newspaper evokes the possibility that he is already abroad, a theory also supported by the daily Corriere della Sera.
“At present, an involvement of the Moscow secret services in aiding this escape is not excluded”adds this newspaper.
Artiom Ouss is suspected, along with four other Russians and two Venezuelan oil brokers, of having bought electronic components from the United States intended to equip planes, radars or missiles, and of having resold them to arms companies. Russians by circumventing the sanctions in force.
This network is suspected of having used the same front company to transfer hundreds of millions of barrels of Venezuelan oil to Russia and China.
“As a father, I am very worried about my son. I don’t know where he is and I don’t know what happened in detail. All I can say is that d “After Artyom, the apartment where he lived was well guarded by the carabinieri. They even came to see him several times a night. So I really can’t understand how he could have disappeared”reacted Friday in Russia in front of the press his father Alexandre Ouss.
Commenting on the charges against his son, Mr. Ouss felt that “it’s roughly made up from scratch” and that Artiom had found himself in the heart of a “geopolitical game”.
