Marbella, Money & Moscow: what El Español just revealed and what we found when they knocked on our door

El Español exposes Halit Sahitaj’s Marbella network: transnational extortion, luxury assets, ties to Russian intelligence, and a campaign aimed at undermining Kosovo’s war-crimes tribunal now.

LONDON — On 4 September 2025 El Español published¹ what can fairly be called one of the most damning, granular investigations yet into Halit Sahitaj, the Marbella-based fixer who, according to Spanish prosecutors and that paper’s reporting, ran a transnational extortion and money-laundering operation with luxury cars, high-value goods and apparent links into elements of Russian state security. El Español’s account maps a life of ostentation without declared income, a network of intermediaries, and a criminal architecture that investigators say reached into Moscow. That reporting now public and corroborated, in part, by leaked files and our own months-long probe rewrites how we should see recent attempts to manipulate Kosovo’s war-crimes process².

What El Español reported?

In short: the Spanish piece portrays Sahitaj not as a lone conman but as the node of a hybrid criminal-intelligence structure.

• A multi-jurisdictional lifestyle of Bentleys, Lamborghinis and high-end watches at a Marbella property searched by UDYCO in December 2020, assets vastly disproportionate to any declared income.

• A criminal network that specialised in extortion of wealthy targets, using forged or quasi-official paperwork and the threat of extradition or legal trouble in Russia to extract payments. The chain of intermediaries included Baltic/Estonian operatives and men who acted as on-the-ground enforcers.

• Connections, documented in police files and surveillance logs, between Sahitaj and Russians described as operatives or intermediaries with ties to the GRU/FSB, including meetings in Switzerland shortly before Sahitaj’s December 2020 arrest. El Español frames those links as part of a broader pattern of Russian influence and state-backed criminal protection.

• A Málaga court process (oral evidence concluded and a sentence drafted at the time of reporting) in which most defendants admitted membership of a criminal organisation; the paperwork and witness testimony compiled in Spain portray the enterprise as transnational and sophisticated.

Put bluntly by El Español: Sahitaj lived like an oligarch on the Costa del Sol with no legitimate declared income and investigators describe a structure that blended mafia techniques with corrupt access to judicial apparatuses in Russia to terrorise victims into paying.

Why this matters for Kosovo (and The Hague)

El Español’s Marbella dossier is not an isolated “mafia” tale. When read alongside our own investigations, the picture that emerges is a hybrid operation that can be used as a tool of political warfare: buy or coerce testimony, plant fabricated intelligence, generate kompromat, and disseminate it via media proxies to delegitimise judicial actors. That’s precisely the pattern we began to detect when a mysterious Facebook account »“Laky Laky”« tried to hand us an apparently forged dossier and even offered money to publish it³.

When lies become weapons: disinformation, extortion, and the silencing of justice. — The GPC Editorial Cartoon.

How Gunpowder Chronicles was targeted (what we experienced)?