Chelsea Vatnik - Roman Abramovich
The orphan who conned $Billions from the russian state assets, under the indicted war criminal - Vladimir Putin’s protection.
#Oligarch - Roman Abramovich’s claim to fame is arguably rising to become #Chelsea Football club’s billionaire owner. His rise was was forged in the chaotic transformation of Russia itself, in the years after the iron curtain fell.
Born in 1966, #Abramovich lost both his parents by the time he was three, and he was brought up by relatives in the Komi republic, in Russia’s freezing north. After a brief period in the army, he studied as an engineer, and worked first as a mechanic. In #Russia’s perestroika period, when economic liberalisation allowed for small businesses.
Abramovich ran a children’s toy manufacturer, famously selling plastic ducks from his Moscow apartment. After communism fell, he worked his way up in trading and transportation of oil and other industrial products.
A morally #corrupt high-profile Russian billionaires because of the success of football club Chelsea FC, Roman Abramovich was sanctioned later than some others, because he is less obviously influential than other #Putin allies.
A morally #corrupt high-profile Russian billionaires because of the success of football club Chelsea FC, Roman Abramovich was sanctioned later than some others, because he is less obviously influential than other #Putin allies.
#Abramovich denies having close ties to Mr Putin or the Kremlin, but the UK portion of his estimated $12.4bn fortune is now frozen. At the start of the war he was forced to put Chelsea up for sale for £3bn. and his £150m house in London's Kensington Palace Gardens in London.
Let’s delve into his history:
#Sibneft - the russian oil company saga:
The creation of the vast state oil concern Sibneft, whose formation and sale to Abramovich made his fortune, was an idea he conceived. He had a pocket full of cash from his dealings in the automotive sector, and politically connected. He joined up with a man called #Berezovsky in a business partnership, who obsessed about opposing any prospect of Russia returning to communism.
It was Berezovsky who proposed Abramovich’s idea to the then president, Boris Yeltsin: merging a crude oil producer with a refinery, and handing control of the enlarged business to Abramovich and Berezovsky. In exchange, Berezovsky would use revenues from the new oil company to fund a TV station, #ORT, to broadcast pro-Yeltsin propaganda.
Yeltsin created Sibneft by decree in August 1995, when Abramovich was still only 29. Then, the judgment records, the new huge oil concern was sold to Abramovich in a series of auctions whose price in some cases is stated to have been rigged, with other bidders discouraged by various means.
Abramovich bought 90% of Sibneft for approximately $240m, using only $18.8m of his own capital. Abramovich subsequently claimed he had a deal to pay Berezovsky for political influence, that this deal was “corrupt”, and that Berezovsky’s political lobbying activities were “inherently corrupt”.
Abramovich later admitted in court that he paid billions of dollars of bribes to government officials and gangsters to acquire and protect his assets. As of 2000, Sibneft annually produced US$3 billion worth of oil. The Times claimed that he was assisted by Badri Patarkatsishvili in the acquisition of Sibneft.
Abramovich paid around $250m (£190m) for Sibneft, before selling it back to the Russian government for $13bn in 2005. His lawyers say there is no basis for alleging he has amassed very substantial wealth through criminality. The Russian billionaire has already admitted in a UK court that he made corrupt payments to help get the Sibneft deal off the ground.
Next 👉 Abramovich is sued in London - revealing corruption
Sued by his partner in crime, Boris Berezovsky
Abromovich’s elevation into an oligarch is unusually well documented, chronicled in painstaking detail in an English high court judgment of Lady Justice Gloster in 2012, when Abramovich succeeded in defending a lawsuit brought by his former mentor, Boris Berezovsky. but he described in court how the original Sibneft auction was rigged in his favour and how he gave Berezovsky $10m to pay off a Kremlin official. In the case, both men described their careers, and routes to becoming billionaires, as “a uniquely Russian story”.
BBC reported one the corruption revealed during the course of the trial, it had obtained a document that is thought to have been smuggled out of Russia. The document says that the Russian government was cheated out of $2.7bn in the Sibneft deal - a claim supported by a 1997 Russian parliamentary investigation.
The document also says that the Russian authorities wanted to charge Mr Abramovich with fraud. It says: "The Dept. of Economic #Crimes investigators came to the conclusion that if Abramovich could be brought to trial he would have faced accusations of fraud… by an organised criminal group."
The BBC tracked down Russia's former chief prosecutor, who investigated the deal in the 1990s. Yuri Skuratov did not know about the secret document, but he independently confirmed many of the details about the Sibneft sale.
Mr Skuratov told the programme: "Basically, it was a fraudulent scheme, where those who took part in the privatisation formed one criminal group that allowed Abramovich and Berezovsky to trick the government and not pay the money that this company was really worth." The document also suggests Abramovich was protected by former Russian President #BorisYeltsin.
#Skuratov was sacked after the release of a sex tape in 1999. He says it was a stitch-up to discredit him and his investigation. He said: "This whole thing was obviously political, because in my investigations I came very close to the family of Boris Yeltsin, including via this investigation of the Sibneft privatisation."
Next 👉 The curious case of kidnapping the Chinese bidder
The secret documented Chinese Kidnap Saga:
Abramovich remained in the Kremlin inner circle when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000. Mr Abramovich formed a partnership with another firm to buy #Slavneft, but a rival Chinese company was planning to bid almost twice as much. Many powerful people - from the #Kremlin to the Russian parliament - would have stood to lose out if the Chinese won the auction.
The document says that a member of the #Chinese delegation was kidnapped when they arrived in Moscow for the auction. "#CNPC, Chinese company, a very strong competitor, had to withdraw from the auction after one of its representatives was kidnapped upon arrival at Moscow Airport and was released only after the company declared its withdrawal."
Vladimir #Milov was Russia's deputy energy minister in the run up to the Slavneft sale. He didn't comment on the kidnapping story, but he said senior political figures had already decided that Mr Abramovich's partnership would win the auction. "I said, look, the Chinese want to come in and they want to pay a much bigger price.
They say it doesn't matter, shut up, none of your business. It's already decided. Slavneft goes to Abramovich, the price is agreed. The Chinese will be dragged out somehow." His lawyers told the BBC the kidnap claim "is entirely unsubstantiated" and he has "no knowledge of such incident".
Abramovich’s barrister in the London trial, Jonathan Sumption QC, “accepted that Abramovich was privy to that #corruption, but submitted that the reality was that that was how business was done in Russia in those times”. The court judgment also noted that Abramovich had “good relations” with Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s successor, and unlike Berezovsky and other oligarchs who fell out with the new president, Abramovich continued to flourish.
According to the judgment he made another fortune from the acquisition of companies in Russia’s aluminium industry, and in 2003 he sold a 25% stake in the #RusAl aluminium company to another oligarch, Oleg #Deripaska, for $1.9bn. He sold a further 25% for $540m. Abramovich emerged from this brutal environment, described in the court case as “the wild east”, to global fame and celebrity when he bought Chelsea in 2003.
He and his management team, some of whom have remained trusted associates throughout, improved Sibneft and modernised its operations. Then in 2005, Gazprom, the huge fuel company majority-owned by the Russian state, bought his then 72% stake, paying £7.4bn.
The billions Abramovich made from Russia’s privatisations funded his famously lavish lifestyle: grand houses, private jets, yachts and fast cars, the £1.5bn he pumped into Chelsea, and a portfolio of further investments.
The most public is a 29% stake in #Evraz, a London Stock Exchange-listed industrial conglomerate with steel production plants in Russia, the US and Canada, which had revenues of $14bn in 2021.
The oligarch has previously vehemently disputed reports suggesting his alleged closeness to Putin and Russia, or that he has done anything to merit sanctions being imposed against him.
UK Sanctions against Abramovich
Roman Abramovich has been sanctioned by the UK government as part of its response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He is one of seven oligarchs to be hit with fresh sanctions, including asset freezes and travel bans. (March 2022).
The government says Abramovich, who has an estimated net worth of £9.4bn, is "one of the few oligarchs from the 1990s to maintain prominence under Putin".
The UK government cited Evraz as a reason for targeting Abramovich with sanctions, along with its assessment that he had “a close relationship for decades” with Putin. Evraz was accused of providing services or goods to the Russian state, “which includes potentially supplying steel to the Russian military which may have been used in the production of tanks”.
Next 👉 Connecting Putin to Abramovich
2023 Leak establishes firm connections between Abramovich and indicted war criminal Putin
The details of Abramovich’s art collection came to light thanks to the Oligarch Files, a leak from the Cyprus-based offshore financial services provider MeritServus, analysed in collaboration with the OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) and other international media partners.
In September 2023m a leak revealed Russian Oligarch Abramovich hid a $1 Billion Art Collection, which despite being sanctioned, the collection has escaped being seized or frozen.
An investigation by The Guardian newspaper has revealed that the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and his ex-wife Dasha Zhukova amassed a collection of 367 works valued at $963m in 2018, featuring artists such as Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian, René Magritte, Paula Rego and Lucian Freud. Around 2014, the collection was stored in a warehouse in south London, though its whereabouts today are unknown.
Documents leaked from Cyprus show that, just before Russia invaded #Ukraine and Abramovich was sanctioned last year, the billionaire passed the massive collection to his ex-wife.
After Abramovich had warnings that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could bring sanctions packages, the trust that holds the artworks was restructured so that Zhukova was entitled to 51 percent of its assets — and Abramovich 49 percent - a tactic to protect the collection from being frozen or seized in the event Abramovich was sanctioned.
In February 2022, just days after the U.K. government warned oligarchs close to the Kremlin that the anticipated invasion could bring sanctions packages, the #Cypriot trust that held the collection was restructured, reducing Abramovich’s share below the crucial threshold of 50 percent.
“The 50 percent rule works slightly differently in [various] jurisdictions, but under any version of the rules, it would have been attractive to reduce the interest of a trust beneficiary who was likely to be sanctioned,” said Tom Keatinge, director of the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the U.K.-based think tank Royal United Services Institute.
Next 👉 Abramovich dupes UK government sanctions
The leaked records show that, before being sanctioned, Abramovich had certain pieces transferred to his European mansions or to his $1.3 billion yacht. According to loan agreements between Seline and companies associated with Abramovich’s properties, the pieces were moved out of storage for private display.
Abramovich was indeed sanctioned by the U.K. and EU in the first half of March 2022 for his alleged association with Putin. While some of his prominent assets were frozen, and he was forced to sell the Chelsea FC soccer team, the artwork remained untouched.
The art collection was acquired over the years by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and his ex-wife Dasha Zhukova, corporate documents newly leaked from #Cyprus reveal.
Despite the sanctions leveled against wealthy Russian oligarchs in the wake of last year’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, the former married couple still enjoys access to these invaluable works.
The details are revealed in files found by the Guardian, OCCRP, and other media partners among data leaked from a Cypriot corporate service provider and released by the whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets.
Abramovich and Zhukova’s penchant for art is nothing new. The couple cultivated reputations as art lovers over their nine years of marriage, co-founding a major contemporary art museum in Moscow. #Zhukova is a trustee of New York’s #MetropolitanMuseum of Art.
Zhukova, a U.S. citizen, has not been sanctioned, and has spoken out against Russia’s attack on Ukraine. There is no suggestion she was aware of or involved in the change in beneficial interest in Ermis, since administrators of the trust had the power to make such alterations without her knowledge. The location of the works is unknown. The documents show that some of them were kept in storage in London over the years.
Unlike some other famous art investors, Abramovich and Zhukova have not put their full collection on display for the public. Some pieces have occasionally been loaned to exhibitions, but usually anonymously, their labels reading only “private collection.”
The Guardian says that files, which run until March 2022, show that a company called #SelineInvest, originally incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and redomiciled in 2017 to #Jersey, owned the works. It acquired them in 2017 and 2018 from the #HarmonyTrust, of which Abramovich was the sole beneficiary, via a series of 11 transactions.
Seline-Invest was in turn controlled by a Cyprus-based trust, the Ermis Trust Settlement, initially set up in 2010 for the sole benefit of Abramovich. In February last year, via a “deed of amendment”, Zhukova became “irrevocably entitled to 51%” of the trust’s distributions, the documents state. The Guardian reports that it understands that no pieces from the collection have been sold or disposed of since the change of beneficial interest last year.
Perhaps @NCA_UK and @NCA_UKFIU might want to get their A into G and fix this ??
@10DowningStreet is too busy faffing about the PM’s own job security to bother.
Next 👉 Sources and references
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60690362
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60736185
The audio version for my visually impaired subscribers and followers 👇
https://trinitymedia.ai/player/share/3e4bd28469c4f6e67347d8195cba6be5e316
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After the sale of Chelsea Football Club, Abramovich's £2.5billion donation is resolutely stuck in a London bank. Ukraine, the main beneficiary is yet to see a penny. The UK government's refusal to expedite its release is a disgrace.