Jul.05, 2010

They are investigating the finances of a charity called Southern Union that was set up to enable Zimbabwean expats to send money home at affordable exchange rates.

While with the company, Miss Chapman, 28, moved millions of pounds between the UK and Zimbabwe, raising questions over whether the cash may have been laundered for the purposes of espionage.

According to ex-husband Alex, 30, she worked alongside a multi- millionaire called Ken Sharpe for three years at the British-registered company based in the north London flat the couple shared.

Mr Chapman said that money was deposited in an HSBC account in London then distributed through a maze of international bank accounts and front companies, to avoid scrutiny by Zimbabwe’s authorities, before being distributed by Mr Sharpe.

Mr Chapman – who divorced Ms Chapman in 2005 – said he was interviewed by a female MI5 agent last week who wanted to know his wife’s business relationship with Mr Sharpe, a fluent Russian speaker who lives in Zimbabwe with his Russian wife.

“She wanted to know the workings of Southern Union and all about Ken Sharpe,” said Mr Chapman.

“She asked if there were any strangely large amounts of money going through the company.”

MI5 is trying to unravel a suspected network of 20 “illegal” Russian agents in Britain, all involved in “deep cover” operations similar to those uncovered by their counterparts in the US.

FBI agents arrested Ms Chapman when they learned she’d had a coded message to flee the country by her father who realised her cover had been blown. The man, Vasily Kushchenko, 52, was dubbed a “low level” embassy employee by Chapman’s US lawyer Robert Baum, which contradicts other compelling evidence that he is a senior officer in the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence.

Mr Baum’s statements, intended to assist his client, will be taken by some as evidence Kushchenko was controlling his own daughter, and might even be the brains behind her operation.

The lawyer said Chapman called her father after an FBI agent, posing as a Russian consulate employee, asked her to deliver a fraudulent passport to another woman working as a spy.

“The father said ‘You’ve got this passport. It’s forged. Go turn it in to the police.’” The FBI may not have known the bugged call was to her father but took it to mean he was urging her to flee, evidently realising she had been compromised.

This was said to be a decisive factor in her arrest last week. She is in custody with nine spy suspects. The wife of one was granted bail last week.

The alleged paymaster of the Russian spy ring, Christopher Metsos, is thought to have fled Cyprus after the authorities there granted him bail after a court hearing last week.