S urrounded by intense scents of pine, thyme and the sea, Gianluca and I carefully wend our way down a narrow forest path that leads to Cala Morisca, a small idyllic cove on the coast in the municipality of Lloret de Mar, northeastern Spain.
We are in the final days of summer, Halfway down, we encounter a gate. Red and white security tape dangles across the path, encouraging us not to cross. We do. A further thousand feet down, a closed fence finally blocks our path. Behind it: a compound of posh residential buildings surrounded by a sprawling, well-manicured lawn that stretches to the edge of a cliff, and, beyond that, the Mediterranean Sea.
The tape, cameras and warning signs notwithstanding, public access to the path is permitted under a July court ruling, the result of years of litigation between the owners and the Lloret de Mar town council.
The town won. The estate is about acres β about 80 American football fields β and consists of a wooded area and residential areas of , square feet built up. With the Mediterranean at our feet, the beauty of the place is overwhelming. I can vouch for that. No wonder Can Juncadella is a favored summer holiday destination for the Kulibayev family. Two years of work for the Caspian Cabals investigation , led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with more than 20 media partners, showed how Kulibayev had ready access to the levers of power through his father-in-law Nursultan Nazarbayev, who ruled petroleum-rich Kazakhstan for nearly three decades.
Kulibayev managed to acquire stakes in lucrative private companies that were once state-owned and that allowed his private business empire to grow and make him a billionaire. He obtained major interests in Kazakh energy, real estate, commodities, banking and construction, held in a sophisticated web of bank accounts, properties and assets, a tangled network of companies and trusts registered in more than 20 countries, from the United Kingdom to Germany, Luxembourg, Singapore and the Cayman Islands.
