SHOCKWAVES rippled through Marbella on Thursday after a prominent estate agent was arrested as part of a €200 million mafia investigation.
Italian-born Luca Tamburello, 42, is alleged to have managed wealth linked to notorious Sicilian mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, who died in prison in 2023 after spending more than three decades as one of Italy’s most wanted fugitives.
He now faces claims that he inherited part of Denaro’s hidden fortune through his mother, Maria Bruno, and father, Giacomo Tamburello, both of whom were also arrested in Thursday’s raids.
His arrest came as police seized 22 properties around southern Spain during dawn raids on Thursday, as well as several current accounts in Gibraltar, Italy, Andorra, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Lebanon and Monaco.
The haul amounted to a staggering €200 million, with Italian officials describing the operation as ‘extremely complex.’
Vito Di Giorgio, Palermo’s deputy prosecutor, said: “The people behind these investments showed considerable financial sophistication, routing money through accounts belonging to companies in tax havens and moving it around constantly and at high speed to hide their activities, while also diversifying their investments.”
Originally from Mazara del Vallo in Sicily, Tamburello was described by Marbella residents as a ‘soft-spoken, well-mannered young man’, making news of his arrest all the more startling for those who knew him.
“He was always friendly and great to work with,” one expat estate agent told the Olive Press. “If you wanted anyone arrested for this, it wasn’t him.”
Yet, viewed in hindsight, much of his life appears to have led to this moment – from his education at one of Marbella’s most prestigious schools to a promising career in international finance and, ultimately, the luxury property market.
According to Olive Press sources, Tamburello attended Marbella’s renowned Aloha College, a private British international school popular with expat families.
“He certainly came over as a really privileged rich kid and the education definitely made a difference,” explained another former employee of his.
He later earned a degree in Banking and International Finance from London’s prestigious Cass Business School, according to his LinkedIn profile, before completing a master’s degree in European Business at ESCP, the world’s oldest business school.
His early career began with internships at two banks, including one in Gibraltar, before a four-month stint as an analyst at respected Bloomberg in London.
Tamburello subsequently held analyst roles at several major multinational firms, including Citigroup in London, an investment banking company in New York, and the Morgan Stanley London branch, where he worked between 2007 and 2009.
In 2009, he returned to Marbella and co-founded the real estate agency Value Added Property (VA) alongside German-born Jonas Kruminkl, a fellow alumnus of Aloha College.
The business steadily established itself in Marbella’s luxury property sector and, in 2020, hit the global big time when it entered into a partnership with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Spain (BHSS) – a franchisee of Warren Buffett’s global real estate network.
Part of an ambitious push into the Costa del Sol’s high-end housing market, the world’s then fourth-richest person ‘might have done some better due diligence,’ a real estate expert told The Olive Press.
Following the agreement, VA Property rebranded as BHHS Marbella and BHHS Malaga.
With the association threatening to drag Buffett’s name into the scandal, BHSS told the Olive Press on Friday that it had ‘terminated the rights of the owners of the Malaga and Marbella offices to use the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices name’.
A company spokesperson added that Tamburello ‘no longer had any affiliation’ with the Spanish franchise and stressed that ‘Mr Buffett had no direct involvement with the franchise network’.
By mid afternoon yesterday, they had erased all connections to the Malaga and Marbella branches of BHSS from social media, and taken down Tamburello’s profile from the BHHS Marbella website.
Taken together, Tamburello’s background paints the picture of a man perfectly at home in the worlds of finance, property and high-net-worth clients.
From elite international schools and top business degrees to jobs at some of the world’s biggest financial firms, his career appears tailor-made for handling substantial wealth.
That profile is likely to be of particular interest to investigators, who allege Tamburello found himself at the centre of a network linked to hidden mafia assets – claims he has yet to answer in court.
His story is also inseparable from the family he came from.
Italian authorities have long linked his father, Giacomo Tamburello, to organised crime circles in western Sicily.
According to Italian media reports and court records, he was convicted of drug trafficking offences and had not filed a tax return since 1985 – details investigators say point to a life lived largely outside the legitimate economy.
Against that backdrop, Luca Tamburello’s journey from a Sicilian family under the gaze of anti-mafia investigators to the boardrooms of London and the luxury villas of Marbella is attracting intense scrutiny.
There is no suggestion that his education or early professional career were themselves improper.
But prosecutors are expected to argue that his background gave him a rare ability to move between two very different worlds: the international finance and property sectors, and a family allegedly linked to organised crime.
As investigators at Spain’s national police – alongside Interpol and Italy’s Guardia di Finanza – pore through the hundreds of documents and emails seized, the case is likely to unravel more.
So far, as The Olive Press reported yesterday, 22 houses have been frozen around Spain while six companies were also under the microscope.
A further two in Gibraltar were being probed, and police sources suggested there would be quite a few more coming under investigation in the coming weeks.
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