BY EMILY MIBACH
Daily Post Staff Writer
The son of Russia’s former Energy Minister under President Vladimir Putin controls the LLC that owns the former Sunset Magazine property in Menlo Park where massive towers have been proposed.
Willow Project LLC is controlled by Vitaly Yusufov, the son of Igor Yusufov, a prominent Russian politician with close ties to Putin and worth about $1.1 billion, according to Forbes. Attempts to reach the younger Yusufov yesterday were unsuccessful.
Yusufov’s Willow Project LLC bought the 80 Willow Road property in May 2018 from Embarcadero Capital Partners and the asset-management arm of Deutsche Bank, which co-owned the property, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times in 2019. The bank was bought into the property on behalf of clients in 2016, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yusufov’s LLC bought the property for $72 million, but not before a kerfuffle occurred over the purchase at Deutsche Bank, the Times and Journal reported.
Representatives for neither Embarcadero nor Deutsche Bank responded to the Post’s inquiries about the sale yesterday.
Some bank officials were worried about the appearance of doing business with Yusufov and his ties to Putin.
A New York-based Deutsche Bank executive committee tried to halt the transaction, citing the potential reputational damage it could do the bank, according to the New York Times. The decision was overruled by a committee in Europe. After the decision on the sale was overruled, an employee of the bank filed a suspicious activity report to the U.S. Treasury, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Sebastian Kraemer-Bach, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank, told the New York Times that the bank did due diligence on the sale and didn’t find evidence that it would violate money-laundering laws or sanctions.
An online database of sanctions imposed by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control does not list any sanctions against Yusufov or his father.
Yusufov’s purchase of the former Sunset building, which was mislabeled in some Russian media as a “sprawling $72-million mansion in California,” is hardly his first time being mentioned in the media.
In 2009, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel brokered a deal with then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for the then-29-year-old Yusufov to purchase the Wadan Yards shipbuilding company, which provided 2,700 jobs. Before becoming the owner of Wadan Yards, Yusufov had worked as the head of the Moscow branch of the Russian pipeline company Nord Stream AG.
Wadan Yards was renamed to Nordic Yards and then sold in 2016.
Yusufov, along with his father and other family members were included in the leaked Pandora Papers in 2021, which exposed that Yusufov is the beneficiary of multiple British Virgin Islands offshore companies.
In April 2011, Yusufov bought an approximately 20% stake in the Bank of Moscow, Reuters reported at the time. He sold the stake later that year.
Returning to the subject of the Sunset building, Yusufov’s LLC is proposing to build between 800 to 1,150 apartments, 150 hotel rooms, between 50,000 and 240,000 square feet of office space and 8,400 square feet of retail space. The project would be spread across four buildings, one of which would be up to 348 feet tall.
Sunset left its Menlo Park campus in 2015 for new headquarters in Oakland’s Jack London Square.
The Sunset campus includes the headquarters for the investment company Robinhood at 85 Willow Road, though that’s not included in the towers proposal. Time Inc. sold the Sunset campus to Embarcadero Capital Partners, a real estate investment firm in Belmont, for $78 million in 2014. Embarcadero sold the property to Willow Project LLC in 2018 for $72 million.
How can this be happening? So we’re a little late with the Housing Element. This is our punishment? The penalty needs to be proportional to the error. This is way out of line.
This isn’t a punishment. This is what we did to ourselves. This developer is smart for using our city’s incompetence to develop some abandoned land.
Thanks for digging this out. I’m wondering where he got the money from? This is really suspicious.
Our city council, instead of taking a vacation, could have worked on getting this Housing Element done so this sort of thing wouldn’t happen. They need to be recalled. They aren’t going to be able to stop this, they’re incredibly incompetent.
It’s not the council – i would put the blame on the City Manager and staff.
The buck stops with the elected officials, Jovita. As you know. Re-seating a council that did not monitor its staff to comply on time rewards incompetent oversight.
Jen Wolosin is also a cheerleader for a huge office project at nearby SRI which will worsen the housing deficit so much, that under Menlo Park’s counting rules, the Willow LLC project will NOT build enough units to offset the increased deficit created by the proposed SRI project. The damage is being done with or without this project.
Where is Jen Wolosin? Where is Marc Berman? Where is Josh Berman? It would be great if one of these people, who were elected to represent us, actually got involved in this.
The Builders Remedy is a law passed by the legislature but was never passed by the people. It wouldn’t have passed because in an election it would have been exposed as a tool to make developers rich, giving them the right to build in places they would have been kept out of. The only solution I see at this point is to recall Josh Becker and Mark Berman from office and replace them with more neighborhood-friendly representatives.
OurNeighborhoodVoices.com
Join us in passing a constitutional amendment that takes the land use/zoning control from Sacramento and back to the people.
We need to raise MONEY to get it on the ballot.
If this goes through, it will be an eyesore for decades to come. It will turn our quiet little neighborhood into Manhattan. We need to figure out how to stop this. First off, I’d like to know this guy’s source of funds? Is this laundered money? Money Putin stole? Next, I’d like to see this project subjected to a rigorous environmental impact report that looks at everything — traffic, pollution, flooding, school crowding, pedestrian safety, soil stability and noise, just to name a few things. And our council, if truly unable to stop this project, sues and keeps on suing to stop this from happening.
Analogies to Manhattan are quite inappropriate. Have you been to Manhattan? This is one building. CA has dropped the ball on building affordable housing for decades. Where are service workers, Teachers, supposed to live? This particular site may not be the answer. I support building affordable housing, either ADUs, or high density.
People are looking only at the size of the building, it seems. How about the purpose of the building? Will it be equipped to spy on all of us? In past years, oceans were monitored, for spying purposes. Now it looks like the Chinese Communist Party and Russians are buying land in the US. This is better than a balloon. Even if 1% of this building is used for spying, it’s not good. What does Anna Eshoo say?
[Editor’s note: The following comment is false. Yusufov is under sanctions by the Ukrainian government, not the United States. So Yusufov, a Russian, cannot build this building in Ukraine, but he’s free to do so in the United States. The Post checked with the U.S. Treasury Department to determine if Yusufov is under U.S. sanctions. He is not. The link offered by the commenter went to a site listing those under sanctions by the Ukraine. Please don’t post false information.]
He is under sanctions. I think Menlo Park staff and city council need to do their homework: (link)