“Flee, fight or not move”: most of the Russian billionaires known to be close to Vladimir Putin have relied since the beginning of the war in Ukraine on the famous maxim of defense against Western sanctions.
Affected, these “oligarchs” have seen their accounts frozen, their yachts and homes seized, but they are circumventing or fighting the sanctions, and waiting for better days.
Some initially tried to use their fame to soften the Western authorities, like Petr Aven, who made his fortune in post-Soviet oil in particular, assuring in the FT that he had been targeted by sanctions for having “taken Putin on the phone” or not knowing “how to survive” with their frozen accounts.
Roman Abramovich, the most famous of the “oligarchs”, plays matchmaker between Moscow and the West but still had to sell the English football club Chelsea, one of the jewels of his empire.
He has since been seen several times in Russia, Israel – of which he is also a citizen – as well as in Dubai or Turkey, countries that have not taken action against wealthy Russians.
Dubai, in particular, is opening its arms to them to the point where a district has been renamed “Little Moscow”.
Petr Aven, ex-co-owner of the conglomerate Letter One with Mikhail Fridman and German Khan, has taken up residence in Latvia, of which he is a national, while Oleg Deripaska would have opted for Moscow. By learning at his expense the price of one word too many.
According to the press, one of the aluminum magnate’s hotels was seized by the Russian courts shortly after he called the invasion of Ukraine a “war”, a term banned by the Kremlin which does not speaks only of “special operation”.
Mikhail Fridman, meanwhile, has chosen to stay in London, his lawyer confirmed to AFP.
If they are discreet, the oligarchs have launched their legal counter-offensive, a sign that they still have the means to afford the services of expensive lawyers.
Petr Aven notably asked the British justice to be able to draw 60,000 pounds (67,000 euros) per month from his frozen accounts for the “essential needs” of his family. The case is ongoing.
Like his ex-partners Mikhail Fridman and German Khan, or like Alicher Ousmanov and Roman Abramovich, he has taken legal action against the sanctions imposed by the EU or the United Kingdom, Oleg Deripaska attacking Washington.
According to Forbes, his fortune has halved over the past year, to $1.7 billion.
And according to the financial press, that of Abramovich, the largest shareholder of the steelmaker Evraz, is also halved, to some 7 billion, which remains substantial.
In total, the assets frozen by the United Kingdom amount to 18.4 billion pounds (20.7 billion euros) as part of the British sanctions against Moscow, for some 17 billion euros in the Union European.
“It’s hard to know if (the oligarchs) are suffering, because we don’t know how much they have,” said Jodi Vittori, a professor at Georgetown University, interviewed by AFP.
For her, if we freeze their private mansion in London, that does not mean that they do not have others in some tax haven, in the name of relatives, front companies or anonymous trusts.
Transparency International, in a recent report, notes that nearly 52,000 properties are still held anonymously in the UK, some by “kleptocrats and oligarchs”, despite the entry into force of compulsory registers last year.
Others try to go through their family, or through intermediaries. According to documents seen by The Guardian newspaper, Abramovich altered offshore trusts three weeks before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to transfer billions of dollars in assets to his children.
A Briton was also arrested on suspicion of having helped Oleg Deripaska to illegally buy real estate in the United States.
“There still seem to be too many ways to avoid sanctions,” says Duncan Hames of Transparency International UK.
The sanctions measures themselves remain incomplete: personalities targeted in Europe are thus not targeted in the United States.
For Tyler Kustra, professor at Harvard and the University of Nottingham, the effectiveness of sanctions targeting the oligarchs to hinder the war launched by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine remains to be proven.
But for Jodi Vittori, these businessmen remain key pawns in the Kremlin machine: “They may not have direct influence on Putin, but they bring things to the regime: mercenaries” like the boss of the Wagner group, Evguéni Prigojine, “key minerals, money laundering… Taking sanctions against them remains important”.
02/22/2023 10:46:02 – London (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
