EXCLUSIVE: Brad Pitt has demanded to know who he is in business with after half of his hip wine brand Chateau Miraval, sold by his former partner Angelina Jolie to exiled Russian billionaire Yuri Shefler, ended up in a secretive Jersey trust.
Sources close to Pitt told City A.M. the actor is taking a “big interest” in an international report into Jersey’s secretive shelters for the super rich, released last week.
The actors are involved in a bitter legal battle over the wine estate, with Pitt claiming Jolie broke a mutual agreement when she sold her half to Shefler for $67m in 2021. Jolie says she offered to sell to Pitt but was unwilling to sign a non-disclosure agreement demanded by his team.
The opaque nature of the trust structures raise a lot of questions. It’s impossible for Brad to know who the beneficial owner is. Brad hopes the courts will ultimately find in his favour and unwind the sale.
A source close to Pitt told City A.M.: “Brad is taking a close interest in developments in Jersey and would welcome greater transparency in relation to the corporate structures that control the stake sold by Angelina.
“The opaque nature of the trust structures used by Shefler raise a lot of questions, and it’s impossible to know for sure who the beneficial owner is. Brad is determined to get full disclosure.
The pair had “an agreement in place not to sell their share of the wine business to a third party without consent”, the source claimed, adding that Jolie “broke that agreement” and “introduced various smokescreens” into the resulting litigation to try and “rationalise her decision making”.
“Brad hopes the courts will ultimately find in his favour and unwind the sale,” the person said.
The Russia billionaire and the Jersey trust
Swiss-based vodka magnate Shefler’s Miraval stake is held in a Jersey trust controlled by a Jersey-based Private Trust Company (PTC), with the ultimate beneficiaries not in the public domain.
Pitt and Jolie jointly bought Chateau Miraval for $28.4m in 2008, building the estate into a rosé behemoth generating more than €15m a year in profits in 2022.
A source close to Jolie told City A.M.: “Brad and Angelina never had any agreement regarding how one would sell their shares of Miraval.”
Shefler is best known for his spirits empire Stoli Group and it was the wine arm of this company, Tenute de Mondo, that purchased Jolie’s stake in Miraval. It initially acquired the full 50 per cent but a Luxembourg court placed 10 per cent of that into an escrow account earlier this year, giving Pitt an effective majority share of the business.
No stranger to conflict, Shefler has been involved in a decades-long battle with the Kremlin over trademark rights to Stolichnaya vodka. He left Russia in 2002 and has not returned.
Brangelina’s bitter feud
Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt in 2016 after the couple got into a physical altercation on a plane and has made further allegations of violence.
She disputes the timeline offered by Pitt. A source close to Jolie told City A.M.: “Brad and Angelina never had any agreement regarding how one would sell their shares of Miraval. In fact, Brad even told his business manager when the couple purchased the property in 2008 that he did not want any agreement because ‘it wasn’t necessary for two reasonable people to have such an agreement.’
“In the ensuing 13 years, he never claimed they had such an agreement, not to Angelina, not to her attorneys, and not to the court in the divorce case. Even now, Brad agrees that there is no written contract and he also concedes he doesn’t even have an oral contract with Angelina. It was only after Jolie sold that he manufactured his claim, which to be clear is for an unspoken ‘implied contract.’
“The documents and timeline confirm without dispute that Angelina was willing to sell her interest to Brad, but Brad panicked because of an under-seal filing in the custody case discussing his physical and emotional abuse of the family. Brad then demanded as a new condition of sale that Angie sign an expanded NDA to now include his personal conduct. When Angie refused, Brad then backed out of their deal so she sold elsewhere.”
Jersey has a reputation for attracting Russian oligarchs, with Roman Abramovic seeing $7 billion in assets frozen there in 2022.
The report into Jersey by the Council of Europe’s MoneyVal committee – which has been described as the FBI of tax shelters – examined the anti-money laundering and financing of terrorism measures in the UK Crown Dependency.
While broadly positive about the steps Jersey has taken to safeguard against financial crime, MoneyVal concluded it “needs to improve” in some areas.
There are no suggestions Shefler has engaged in any illegality but the report raises questions about the future use of trust structures that do not identify the ultimate beneficiaries.
Alex Cobham of the Tax Justice Network said: “There is no public register of the beneficial owners of Jersey trusts. I don’t think there’s really a case for [this type of structure] other than opacity. If there is an argument for creating the complexity, creating the regulatory liabilities and creating the management costs that isn’t about opacity then I’m not aware of it.”
Shefler did not respond to requests for comment.