The United Kingdom will freeze approximately £ 10 billion in assets held by two longtime business partners of Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch best known for his ownership of Chelsea Football Club.
Sanctions against Eugene Tenenbaum and David Davidovich have brought the total number of oligarchs, family members and allies with Russia to 106 on the UK list, the government said Thursday.
According to the government, corporate documents show that Tenenbaum, the director of Chelsea, took control of Ervington Investments, an investment vehicle linked to Abramovich, on February 24, the day Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine.
Davidovic then took over Ervington Investments from Tenenbaum last month, the government said, adding that Davidovic faces a travel ban as well as an asset freeze.
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called the move “the biggest asset freeze in the history of the UK”.
The scale of the freeze shows exactly how much of his wealth Abramovich has invested in the United Kingdom, whose capital was renamed London because of the embrace of Russian oligarchs in the early 2000s.
The 10 billion pounds that the United Kingdom has frozen is higher than several leading estimates for the total net worth of the Russian oligarch, with Forbes setting it at $ 8.2 billion.
The new round of sanctions comes a day after a Normandy Jersey court ordered the freezing of more than $ 7 billion in Abramovich-related assets. The UK government has said it has coordinated with the Jersey authorities.
“We are tightening the ratchet mechanism of Putin’s military machine and targeting the circle of people closest to the Kremlin,” Trus said. “We will continue to impose sanctions until Putin fails in Ukraine. Nothing and no one is off the table. ”
Chelsea declined to comment after the Financial Times made a request to Tenenbaum through the club. Davidovic was not available for comment.
Both are among Abramovich’s longest-serving lieutenants, as they both worked for Sibneft, the oil company the oligarch sold to the Russian state in 2005 in a $ 13 billion deal that cemented his fortune.
Tenenbaum has been on the Chelsea board since 2003, when Abramovich bought the Premier League club he now sells. A biography on Chelsea’s website describes Tenenbaum as “one of Abramovich’s closest associates.”
The sanctions against Tenenbaum come on the same day as candidates struggling to buy Chelsea have to submit their revised bids, with a series of North American billionaires vying for a club funded by Abramovich for the past two decades.
Declarations by the London Stock Exchange last month revealed that Abramovich transferred legal entities that held investments in companies registered in the United Kingdom to both Davidovich and Tenenbaum after the invasion of Ukraine.
Davidovic now controls Norma Investments in the British Virgin Islands, one of the oligarch’s main investment instruments – whose name is an anagram of Roman. She eventually owned one of his superyachts, as well as shares in British companies.
Corporate documents in the United Kingdom state that Davidovich lives in Israel and Tenenbaum in Jersey.
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