A holding company in Copenhagen’s Nordhavn district works with the Russian state, but appears to have no activity in Denmark.
The company is called Inter Energia and owns one third of a sanctioned company in Latvia, Itera Latvija, together with Russia’s state-owned oil company Rosneft. The Latvian firm has more than 300 million kroner, nine cars and a yacht in frozen assets.
Danwatch has previously revealed Inter Energia’s links to Russia’s state-owned oil company through a network of companies in Cyprus and Luxembourg, but can now unveil entirely new details about the owner behind the firm.
For more than twenty years, the Danish holding company was owned by Latvian businessman Juris Savickis, a former top spy in the Soviet Union’s feared intelligence service, the KGB.
This is shown by documents from the KGB archives in Latvia’s National Archives, which Danwatch has reviewed. Juris Savickis’s role and core expertise in the KGB was to infiltrate Western Europe. Savickis stepped down from Inter Energia in August this year.
The revelation makes former chief analyst at the Danish Defence Intelligence Service, and now independent security analyst, Jacob Kaarsbo take notice.
“It is madness that this can happen. These are exactly the kinds of companies the Russians can use to hire people to carry out sabotage and all sorts of other things for them,” he says.
The KGB archives show that Juris Savickis held a senior role in the KGB in Latvia.
According to the papers, he was head of “Section 1 of Department 1” and was responsible for producing documents for KGB agents who were to be sent to the West under false identities.
Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Mette Skak, has for years researched Russia’s intelligence services and its foreign and security policy.
Like Jacob Kaarsbo, she believes the Copenhagen company could potentially be used to recruit “one-off agents among ordinary people”, she explains.
“Some end up inadvertently helping the Russian intelligence services with drastic and risky operations,” says Mette Skak.
Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, which is known for sabotage and attempted assassinations, is one of the active groups currently infiltrating several European countries.
“We know the GRU are quite willing to take risks, and that they are intensifying their activities in Europe. They spend a lot of time being active in the field themselves and, generally speaking, they do not hold back from anything at all.”
Danwatch has no documentation that the company has recruited agents from the office in Nordhavn. Nor has it been possible to contact the company or Juris Savickis himself, as the company’s website has been deleted and all contact information is invalid, and the company’s director stepped down without responding to Danwatch’s enquiries.
It is, moreover, common for foreign companies to establish holding companies in Denmark for tax reasons.
Hired former intelligence colleagues
Although the Soviet Union no longer exists, many of the most powerful people both in the Kremlin and in Russia’s business sector are former KGB officers. This includes, among others, President Vladimir Putin.
That is why one should pay attention when a former top spy suddenly owns a company in Denmark, says Jacob Kaarsbo.
“The thing about former KGB people is that even if they no longer work for the intelligence service, they still often receive orders directly from the Kremlin, the FSB and the SVR,” he says, referring to Russia’s newer intelligence and security services.
Couldn’t Inter Energia be an entirely legitimate business?
“We usually say that coincidences require a lot of planning. When you have the cast of characters and all the connections behind it—a former senior KGB figure and Rosneft with everything that entails—then there is a high likelihood they are engaged in subversive activity. We have seen this pattern before.”
According to the documents, Juris Savickis was part of the Soviet intelligence service from 1971 right up until the collapse of the union.
Afterwards, he teamed up with a colleague from the KGB and began a very successful career as a businessman in gas and energy trading between the Baltics and Russia.
He regularly travelled to Russia, among other things to meet with the executives of the state gas company Gazprom and Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank.
In 2002, Vladimir Putin personally considered appointing Savickis as director of Gazprom.
In a 2001 interview, Savickis himself says that his companies’ “security service actually consists of former KGB officers—professionals in their field”.
The former spy’s activities in Copenhagen make Mette Skak wonder.
“It is quite remarkable. He may have managed to fly under the radar, although it is possible that the Danish intelligence services are aware of him,” she says.
The Russian intelligence services behave very aggressively in the West, and therefore a company like this could well be part of their hybrid operations, the associate professor assesses.
“Russia is quite active with various forms of hybrid warfare, also through strange corporate structures, so I would probably place this case in the context of the broader conflict against the West,” she says.
While Latvia has tried to crack down hard on the company Itera Latvija, of which Inter Energia owns one third together with Rosneft, the Danish authorities will not comment on the case. Not even after Danwatch has described the relationship with Rosneft.
That prompts Jacob Kaarsbo to level sharp criticism at the authorities.
“I cannot say anything other than that it is madness. The authorities need to take a tougher line, as in Latvia. I would strongly warn against allowing this sort of thing to go on,” he says.
For him, the case in Nordhavn is a crystal-clear example of “how naive we are in the West”.
“Putin’s trademark is using private operators to do subversive work for Russia. He has used both the mafia and oligarchs with huge success, and we have been far too naive about it,” he says.
The Danish Business Authority tells Danwatch that it cannot comment on the specific case, but that, as a rule, it investigates cases where there is suspicion of sanctions violations. If the suspicion is strong enough, the cases are handed over to the police.
Sold the company to a business partner
Juris Savickis was owner of Inter Energia right up until 12 August 2026, when he suddenly stepped down.
The holding company has now been sold to one of Savickis’s business partners, Latvia’s former prime minister Aigars Kalvitis.
Savickis and Kalvitis have, among other things, helped run Latvia’s largest energy company, Latvijas Gaze, which Inter Energia co-owns via Itera Latvija together with Rosneft.
The company in Nordhavn is thus still run by people with ties to the Russian oil company.
Rosneft is known for using complicated corporate structures, as in this case, to conceal its ownership and evade sanctions, Mette Skak says. A good example is Rosneft’s Indian refinery Nayara Energy, which made it possible to sell fuel to Europe despite the sanctions, as Danwatch has previously described.
“We have seen similar cases with this kind of company, like Nayara Energy, but it is very surprising that this is happening in Copenhagen,” she says.
Across Europe, Russia’s intelligence services are engaged in shady activities, and it can therefore be difficult to see through what they are doing.
But one of their methods for placing spies in the West has been to use their diplomatic connections, Mette Skak explains.
“We saw, in connection with the revelation that the Russians were behind the drone attack at an airport in Leipzig, that the Germans shut down Russia’s diplomatic offices and the Russian House. That is, in reality, something that directly hits the Russian spy network,” she says.
During his time in the KGB, Juris Savickis’s role was precisely to infiltrate the West through various institutions, like those Mette Skak mentions.
Inter Energia’s annual reports show that there is virtually no activity in the company. By contrast, it has 116 million kroner in assets—one third of which are frozen in Latvia—and smaller sums continue to be withdrawn from the company to an unknown recipient.
According to Jacob Kaarsbo, it should not be possible at all for a former top spy to run a business in Denmark in cooperation with Rosneft. He calls it “wild that it is not harder” for the company to be able to continue operating in Nordhavn.
“I would hope that if you can unravel it through open sources, then people have been aware of it,” he says.
Danwatch has tried to contact Inter Energia’s director in Denmark, Anders Anton Maier. He stepped down shortly after the first enquiry and still has not responded.
Inter Energia had a c/o address at the large IT company CSC, which is located in Nordhavn. Anders Anton Maier also works for CSC. CSC has not responded to Danwatch’s enquiries either.