Did a viral video show authentic property records proving that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his wife bought an Italian villa from singer Sting for 75 million euros? No, that's not true: A screenshot of what looked like a document allegedly confirming the transaction was forged. When Lead Stories accessed the Italian property records database, authentic documents contained no traces of the purported sale.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, by @aussiecossack on August 6, 2024. It opened:
🥂Meanwhile in other news Zelensky just spent 75 million euros of YOUR taxes on purchasing this luxury wine estate in Italy!
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Aug 6 15:50:37 2024 UTC)
The 'proof'
The video from the post contained at the 0:55 mark what it presented as a screenshot of an officially recorded sales transaction:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Aug 6 21:17:36 2024 UTC)
The voiceover said:
In June 2024, Sting sold Tenuta Il Palacio to a new owner -- San Tomaso SRL, a company registered in Italy.
San Tommaso SRL is a company owned by the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his wife, Olena Zelenska.
However, the real property records in Italy's land registry database, accessed by Lead Stories staff on August 9, 2024, did not contain the purported transaction. As of this writing, the villa in question is still owned by Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, best known by his artistic pseudonym Sting, and his wife, Trudie Styler.
A composite image below also illustrates that what the video on X showed was a low-quality fake (on the left) that misrepresented the property's identifying information and altered the appearance of a standardized official property report (Lead Stories removed unique personal identification numbers from the authentic document):
The original two-page document in Italian can be accessed here.
The land registry database, Agenzia delle Entrate, showed no other properties matching the search criteria.
A search across news websites indexed by Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) produced a single result: An English-language article published by a Ukrainian outlet that described the claim as "Russian propaganda."
Story's origins
The claim fits the pattern of the Kremlin disinformation narrative aimed at portraying Zelenskyy as a corrupt politician spending Western military aid to enrich himself. Lead Stories previously debunked such claims here and here.
The misinformation monitor NewsGuard (archived here) reported that one of the first websites that published the most recent variation of the story about the multimillion-dollar villa in Italy's Tuscany was the website Database Italia, which, NewsGuard has reported, spread QAnon conspiracies in Europe in the past.
The account of @aussiecossack -- also known as Simeon Boikov (archived here), a pro-Putin and anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist wanted by the Australian police on warrants for an assault conviction and a revocation of parole who republished the claim on X -- does not hide its affiliations with Kremlin-linked sources of information. For example, his bio (archived here) says that he "broadcasts" for one of the Russian state-sponsored propaganda outlets, Sputnik News.
Besides @aussiecossack, numerous loyalist or state-sponsored Russian-language media outlets, including the official newspaper of the Russian Federation's government, also shared the claim about the Tuscany villa.
Zelenskyy, a successful comedian and TV producer before entering politics, did have a villa in Italy (archived here) in 2019, but, Forbes reported, appeared to have sold it after that (archived here). His 2023 annual income declaration (archived here), however, still mentioned a company named San Tomaso, according to a copy of the declaration in the private Ukrainian database YouControl.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims related to the Russian-Ukrainian war can be found here.
