Gold, “Glock” and Crypto
In June 2026, officers of the Spanish Civil Guard came to search the house of Anatoliy Shariy and his wife Olha Bondarenko. They took away phones and computers.
In the house they found a “Glock 19” pistol, cryptocurrency worth about €800 000, 20 gold plates worth about €150 000, as well as paintings, watches, jewelry and various luxury items worth about €400 000, as well as a “Porsche Cayenne” car. In total, the court seized property worth €1.35 million. Shariy previously sold one of his largest assets in Spain — a house in the province of Tarragona, which he bought in 2019.
According to La Vanguardia, the house was worth €670 000 at the time and Shariy paid for it immediately. The case files do not reveal when he got rid of the villa, but Spanish investigators believe it was no coincidence. According to them, Shariy knew that he was under investigation, so the sale of the house looks like part of a “decapitalization” (a deliberate withdrawal of assets).
According to the Civil Guard, Shariy spent the money from the sale of the house on gold, jewelry, and luxury items. Investigators are convinced that he did this intentionally (like such property is easy to hide so that it cannot be found and confiscated).
In Spain, Shariy and Bondarenko do not hide that they live lavishly: they publish pics on social networks in expensive clothes, with watches, jewelry, and bags from luxury brands. Anatoliy Shariy and Olha Bondarenko. Bondarenko has a bag similar to the Hermès Birkin (in this size its price starts at €10 000), Olhaʼs blue mesh ballet flats are similar to Alaïa Fishnet (which cost €800), and Shariyʼs turquoise loafers are Loro Piana Summer Walk (for €890).
The case remained secret for almost two years, but it began with a Ukrainian appeal
"It all started with a request for cooperation from the Ukrainian authorities. They used the mechanism of an international court order. I did not have access to the document itself, but it was it that became the basis for the decision to investigate the tax crimes of Shariy and Bondarenko," the author of the “elDiario” investigation Javier Lillo told Babel.
Following the Ukrainian request, the Spanish opened their own criminal proceedings. The investigation is currently being conducted by the Investigative Court No. 5 of the city of El Vendrell in Tarragona, the Tarragona Provincial Prosecutorʼs Office, the Spanish Tax Service and the Civil Guard.
In a report dated June 12, 2025, the Civil Guard informed the court that it had found signs of three possible crimes at once: tax evasion, money laundering and forgery of documents. Later, when Shariy sold the villa, another suspicion was added to them — in concealing property.
According to the investigation, Shariy and Bondarenko have been tax residents of Spain since at least 2016, meaning they had to declare all their income there, regardless of the country in which they received it and where the payer was located.
Tax experts, who worked at the courtʼs request, believe that the couple underpaid almost €151 000 in taxes in 2018, and almost €388 000 in 2022. In Spain, failure to pay more than €120 000 in one tax period is already considered a criminal offense.
Then the investigators took up 2019-2021 and saw a much more complicated picture. Sharia and Bondarenko had accounts in Lithuania and Russia. The names of the banks, account balances, and dates of their opening are not included in the published materials.
The Civil Guard recorded P2P payments they made from Russia and Luxembourg, cryptocurrency assets, and transfers from individuals from Kazakhstan.
Of course, accounts in a Russian bank, cryptocurrency, or transfers from Kazakhstan are not evidence of illegal activity in themselves, but the Spanish investigators were interested in how much money the couple actually received, whether they declared it, and who this money came from.
In a February 2026 report, the Civil Guard tentatively estimated the total amount of possible fines for Shariy and Bondarenko at €10.7 million. Although by then, the Spanish were already interested in more than just whether Shariy had paid his taxes.
The Spanish case against Shariy and Bondarenko is still under investigation. They have the status of suspects, but no formal charges have been brought against them yet. The court is collecting bank and tax documents and is expected to question them. Shariy calls income from videos and donations from viewers the main source of his familyʼs wealth, and Spanish investigators are now tracking where the money actually came from in his accounts in various countries.
How Russian intelligence services appeared in the tax case
Investigators are separately checking the money and transfers that Shariy and Bondarenko received into different accounts, and the case materials indicate that this could be dirty money. The investigation does not rule out that Shariy could have been paid in this way for working for Russian special services against Ukraine.
“The Civil Guard considers a number of financial transactions suspicious in the context of money laundering. They proceed from the fact that Anatoliy Shariy was convicted in Ukraine for acting in favor of Russia, so they assume that these transactions could have been payments from Russian intelligence services. However, he is not charged with any specific such episode. What the investigation currently has is accounts in Russia, donations from Kazakhstan, and cryptocurrency,” explains Lillo.
Back in 2025, the Civil Guard asked the court to send requests for international legal assistance to Lithuania, Poland, Luxembourg, France and Ukraine. Such requests allow a court in one country to obtain banking, tax and procedural documents from another.
The Spanish wanted to establish all the income of Shariy and Bondarenko, trace the movement of money and find out whether other countries were investigating Shariyʼs possible paid work for Russian intelligence.
The published investigation materials do not say whether the court sent all these requests, what responses it received and why Poland and France were included in the list.
"The case remained classified for about 2 years, so it is difficult to accurately restore the moment when the investigation reached this level. But the Civil Guard report for June and July 2025 already mentioned the need to check whether Shariy could be working for Russian intelligence services," says Javier Lillo.
According to him, there is another unusual detail. The case is being handled by the “Grupo de Información Guardia Civil” in Tarragona (a unit that works — among other things — with intelligence information and issues related to national security).
“The involvement of the intelligence unit’s information service in a criminal case is highly unusual. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when they decided to get involved. But police sources say that such units typically take on persons like Shariy, when the international and political context needs to be taken into account,” says Lillo.
Shariy and Bondarenko were also being monitored, but it is not yet known when the surveillance began and how long it lasted. There are photographs taken by law enforcement officers in the case.
During the surveillance, investigators noticed that Shariy and Bondarenko were taking measures that law enforcement officers identified as counter-surveillance — they were constantly looking around, checking who was nearby and what was happening around. Spanish criminal lawyers, with whom Javier Lillo spoke, say that surveillance is also atypical for a regular tax case.
However, tax officials can resort to such measures to establish tax residency and prove how many days a person spent in Spain.
Anatoliy Shariy and Olha Bondarenko in a pic that investigators took during surveillance.
elDiario.es
In Ukraine, Shariy already has a sentence of 15 years for high treason
Shariy left Ukraine in 2012, when two criminal cases were being investigated against him — about a shooting in a Kyiv restaurant and about an alleged staged attempt on his life. He called it political persecution, and then Lithuania granted him asylum.
Later, the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office of Lithuania began its own investigation into Shariyʼs property and finances. He was deprived of asylum, because the Lithuanian authorities concluded that Shariyʼs stay in the country posed a threat to national security.
In 2016, Shariy moved to Spain. In the 2019 parliamentary elections, he ran for the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on the list of the “Shariyʼs Party” (which received 2.23% of the vote and failed). In September 2022, the Supreme Court finally banned the party.
In February 2021, SBU declared Shariy the suspicion of treason and incitement of national, racial or religious hatred. In connection with these proceedings, he was detained in Spain in early May 2022. The court left Shariy at large, but seized his passport, banned him from leaving the country, and ordered him to appear in court twice a month.
On September 26, 2022, the extradition proceedings were closed.
On June 3, 2025, the Vinnytsia City Court sentenced Shariy in absentia to 15 years in prison for high treason.
According to SBU, after the full-scale invasion, he was involved in Russian information operations and worked with videos of interrogations of Ukrainian prisoners of war. The investigation claimed that Shariy received these recordings from the former head of the Vinnytsia Regional Police Anton Shevtsov (who was associated with Russian special services), gave recommendations on recording interrogations, and edited the videos and deleted footage that could show signs of torture of Ukrainians.
The court found Shariy and Shevtsov guilty of high treason committed by a group of people under martial law. On October 9, 2025, the Vinnytsia Court of Appeals upheld the verdict.
A fragment of a conversation between Anatoliy Shariy and the former head of the Vinnytsia Regional Police Anton Shevtsov, shown by SBU. According to the investigation, through Shevtsov, Shariy received recordings of interrogations of Ukrainian prisoners, edited them, and passed them on to an FSB representative for approval.
What will happen next with the Shariy-Bondarenko case in Spain?
“Neither Shariy nor Bondarenko have yet testified before the Spanish court. A date has yet to be set. The first hearing was canceled due to technical problems, as the interrogation was supposed to take place via video link. As for the precautionary measures, not all the details are being disclosed, but it is clear that their accounts have been frozen, and all the valuables found during the search have been seized,” says Lillo.
In a conversation with Javier Lillo, Shariy and Bondarenko claimed that their income is legal, like they earn on “YouTube”, receive donations from their audience, and consider the case politically motivated.
Separately, Bondarenko stated that the tax case is only about a "discrepancy in calculations" and confirmed that they are ready to fully pay the official debt that Spain will demand in order to close the proceedings.
If the suspicions are confirmed, a tax crime in Spain is punishable by one to five years in prison and a fine of up to six times the amount of unpaid tax. Money laundering is punishable by 6 months to 6 years in prison and a fine of up to three times the value of the laundered property. Hiding assets to avoid paying a tax debt or levying a fine is punishable by one to six years in prison. The penalty for forging documents depends on the specific documents involved.
To seek Shariy’s extradition after his in absentia conviction, Ukraine would have to file a new request and the Spanish National Court would have to consider it in separate proceedings. Since Shariy was convicted in his absence, Spanish law allows extradition only if Ukraine guarantees him a new trial in his presence and defense.
If extradition is granted, it could be postponed until the Spanish trial is over or, if a sentence is imposed, until Shariy has served his sentence in Spain.
A cover of Anatoliy Shariyʼs video "Spain Began Persecuting Shariy. Part 1,", in which he mocks the case against him.