The U.S. Justice Department is trying to seize a mansion in Beverly Hills that was allegedly purchased with dark money generated from a multimillion-dollar fuel fraud scheme, officials announced this week. 

According to an April 22 news release from the Justice Department, the European-style mansion in the iconic 90210 ZIP code was purchased with approximately $30 million in funds generated from a fuel delivery scheme “to defraud the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), pay bribes to an official of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and violate U.S. money laundering laws.” 

The property at the center of the legal wrangling is identified as “Foothill Manor,” according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which obtained a copy of the complaint. According to Zillow, the property sold in 2018 for $20 million. The property is described on a real estate agent’s website as an 11,838-square-foot French villa that looks as though it were “plucked from a fairytale.” Lined with tiered gardens and featuring a European-style pool and fountain, the six-bedroom estate is just minutes from Rodeo Drive and about 2.5 miles from the famed stretch of Sunset Boulevard. 

The property was allegedly purchased with a relatively small portion of the $700 million allegedly swindled from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency between 2016 and 2020 in a scheme orchestrated by an unnamed defense contractor based in Virginia.

The complaint alleges that the Virginia defense contractor’s personnel bribed Kurdish military general Mansour Barzani 25 cents per liter for exclusive fuel delivery access while blocking competitors. As a result, the Defense Logistics Agency awarded the company contracts at greatly inflated prices, the Justice Department release says. 

In 2018, $30 million of the funds was then allegedly transferred from Barzani’s trust to purchase the Southern California mansion, leading to a series of renovations and improvements at the estate from 2019 to 2022.   

Justice Department media representatives did not respond to SFGATE’s request for more information about the estate by the time of publication.