A German billionaire, Karl-Erivan Haub, disappeared in the Swiss Alps in 2018 and was officially declared dead in 2021. There are suspicions that he may have faked his own death to live with his alleged side chick in Moscow.
Haub, a German-U.S. dual citizen and former managing director of Tengelmann Group, was last seen heading up a mountain lift in April 2018. His disappearance led to a search that was called off in October 2018. Three years later, in May 2021, he was declared dead by the district court in Cologne.
His younger brother, Christian Haub, was named the CEO of Tengelmann after his disappearance. Christian Haub is now being investigated for potentially providing false statements regarding his brother’s disappearance.
Despite these allegations, there is still insufficient evidence to suggest that Karl-Erivan Haub is alive. Christian Haub has denied giving false statements, and Tengelmann has been contacted for comment. The investigation was prompted by a criminal complaint filed by journalists in May 2023, suggesting that Haub may have faked his death to be with a younger Russian woman connected to Russian intelligence.
“There are strong indications that he could have caused his disappearance intentionally” and “at least parts of his family were aware of it and, against their better judgment, kept this secret from the Cologne District Court and the public,” investigative journalist Liv von Boetticher, who was part of the RTL team, told German magazine Capital in an interview published on April 15.
Boetticher said she and her team had “journalistically processed our research results over a period of three years” and hoped that the public prosecutor would initiate an official investigation “based on what we considered to be overwhelming evidence.”
“We had also informed the Cologne District Court in 2021 of our strong doubts about Mr. Haub’s death. The step of filing a criminal complaint against Christian Haub in May 2023 is certainly unusual, but we saw it as the last resort to officially initiate an investigation and clarify the background to the mysterious disappearance of Karl-Erivan Haub,” she said.
Boetticher said she had obtained photos in the fall of 2022 that appeared to show Haub in Moscow in February 2021.
“To my knowledge, these photos were available to Christian Haub at the time when he gave a sworn statement to the Cologne district court in May 2021 that he had ‘no reliable evidence’ that his brother was still alive,” she said.
Boetticher said that there was “an alleged lover of Karl-Erivan Haub with whom he had intense telephone contact before his disappearance and who has connections with the Russian domestic intelligence service the FSB.”
“On this basis there were investigations by the internal investigators and specially commissioned agencies in Russia,” she said. “There is a record that shows the investigators assumed Haub was in Russia and also said they could get a photo of him for €100,000 (about $100,000).”
