Igor Olenicoff

Igor Olenicoff (born 1942) is an American billionaire and real estate developer. In 2007, he was convicted of tax evasion stemming from his use of off-shore companies and Swiss banks to hide his financial assets.

Olenicoff was born in Moscow in 1942. After the war, his family, being tsarists, fled the Soviet Union for Iran, where he was educated by missionaries. In 1957, his family emigrated to the United States. In the U.S., his father Michael, an engineer, worked as a janitor, and his mother, Zina, worked as a housekeeper. He graduated from the University of Southern California with an undergraduate degree in corporate finance and mathematics, as well as an M.B.A.

After school, he worked as a consultant and corporate executive. In 1973, he purchased a 16 unit duplex with his newly founded company Olen Properties. Since then, he has grown the firm and now owns more than 6.4 million square feet of office space and nearly 12,000 residential units in Las Vegas, Arizona, California, and Florida.

In 2006, Forbes Magazine estimated his fortune at $1.6 billion, based upon his sole ownership of Olen Properties. However, Olenicoff told the magazine that he did not own the company, claiming that it was owned by an offshore company–incorporated company since 1980. Olen's offshore corporate parent was first headquartered in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and Denmark.

According to Forbes, the IRS was investigating Olenicoff for tax evasion. The IRS contended that Olenicoff was the sole owner of Olen and used Bahamas-domiciled Sovereign Bancorp Ltd. as an offshore vehicle to hide assets from the IRS and his creditors in order to evade taxes. Olenicoff denied he owned Sovereign, claiming that it was a Russian parastatal investment vehicle established by Boris Yeltsin, and that it had merely lent money to Olen. The IRS hit Olenicoff with a $77 million for back taxes and penalties for the years 1996 and 1997 and was investigating him and Sovereign for the 2002 and 2003 tax years.

It was later revealed that Olenicoff was listed on signature cards held by Barclays Bank (Bahamas) as chairman of Sovereign Bancorp and as the president of the National Depository Corporation, Ltd. In 2007, the IRS reported that he also maintained accounts for these two entities at Solomon Smith Barney's British operations, as well as controlled accounts for other offshore companies in Canada and Liechtenstein in which monies from Olen Properties were shifted abroad to avoid taxes.

In 2022, Olenicoff sued Newport Beach to block a competing real estate developer from building an apartment complex near John Wayne Airport. Olenicoff used California Environmental Quality Act to argue that the environmental impact of the development had not been assessed. Housing advocates characterized the Olenicoff lawsuit as "CEQA abuse" and a pretext to block competing housing.

Olenicoff was ensnared in the UBS scandal, in which the Swiss private bank was revealed to have helped American citizens evade billions of dollars in taxes owed to the U.S. government. Olenicoff was recruited to UBS from Barclays Bank by Brad Birkenfeld, who subsequently blew the whistle on UBS's abetting of tax evasion by wealthy Americans. Olenicoff became a client of UBS in 2001, and transferred $200 million to the bank using credit cards supplied by Birkenfeld.