/ 17 min read

The Swiss Attorney and the Sotheby’s CEO: The Elite Fixers for a $1.5 Billion Fugitive

The Swiss Attorney and the Sotheby’s CEO: The Elite Fixers for a $1.5 Billion Fugitive
George Azar, CEO of Sotheby's Realty in the UK and Dubai
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A tip led us to a mysterious Dubai fund. What we found was a network connecting a money launderer, an insolvent UK company, a £100,000 political donation, the Dubai ruling family, and the UAE Finance Minister.

Welcome to Whale Hunting, where we follow the money behind some of the world's most brazen financial crimes and expose the networks of people who enable them.

Over the past year, Whale Hunting has been tracking the network behind Benjamin Mauerberger, the South African fugitive at the center of a $1.5 billion money laundering operation. This is wealth built on the back of industrial-scale "pig butchering" compounds in Cambodia, where trafficked laborers are forced to defraud thousands of Americans of their life savings.

Our reporting helped expose how this money infiltrated the highest levels of power, leading to the resignation of a Thai deputy finance minister after we revealed his wife received $2.9 million in Tether from the network. In December 2025, following our investigation, Thai authorities moved to seize over $300 million in assets — including luxury yachts, supercars, and millions in stocks —linked directly to Mauerberger’s operations. U.S. Homeland Security launched a manhunt. But Mauerberger himself vanished.

Now a fugitive, he has resurfaced in Dubai, where the network is attempting its most sophisticated maneuver yet: a full-scale professionalization. A tip from a source in the Dubai financial sector pointed us toward a new vehicle registered in the DIFC in early 2025. This source claimed the firm was founded by a high-profile luxury real estate CEO with deep ties to Mauerberger and a curious £100,000 political donation in the UK.

We started pulling threads. The trail unraveled a story far bigger than a single scam. It led from the public filings of a bankrupt London company to the inner circle of Dubai’s ruling family and the office of the UAE’s sitting finance minister.

This is the story of the global enablers: powerful business people, political figures, and offshore specialists who operate in the blur between high finance and big-money politics. It reveals how a company drowning in debt can funnel six figures into a British political party, and how a money launderer and a luxury real-estate CEO can be separated by just one degree.

This is the Mauerberger network in Dubai. And this is how we mapped it.


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