More than $17bn (£13bn) of global assets – including offshore bank accounts, yachts, private jets and luxury properties in London, Tuscany and the French Riviera – have been linked to 35 oligarchs and Russian officials alleged to have close ties to Vladimir Putin.
Today, the Guardian, working in a partnership with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and other international news organisations, is unveiling the initial research in an ongoing project to track the wealth of Russia’s most powerful operators.
The Russian asset tracker project will start by focusing on a list of 35 men and women named last year as Putin’s alleged enablers by the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. It will record assets outside Russia where the reporting partners have seen evidence connecting them to these individuals.
Navalny’s organisation wrote to western governments requesting the names on its list be considered for sanctions and all but one have since been blacklisted by either the US, EU, UK or Canada.
The names include four of the wealthiest oligarchs, plus heads of state-controlled companies, prominent broadcasters, spy agency chiefs, ministers, political advisers and regional governors. They have been read out in the US Congress by lawmakers seeking tougher penalties for the Russian elite and in the UK parliament by the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesperson, Layla Moran.
Moran told the Commons: “Putin’s cronies must be subject to the strongest possible sanctions now, because it is through them that Putin and his inner circle keep their wealth. If we go after his associates, we go after him. Actually, we are rather uniquely placed to do so, because they choose London. They live here: it is ‘Londongrad’ to them.”
The Russian asset tracker has identified UK properties or plots of land – collectively worth more than half a billion dollars – that are linked through companies, trusts or relatives to four leading figures on Navalny’s list: Roman Abramovich, Alisher Usmanov, Oleg Deripaska and Igor Shuvalov. The Guardian will report on these findings over the coming days.
The research so far has seen evidence, most of it dating from 2020 to the present, of the names being connected to more than 145 assets consisting of 35 mansions, 43 apartments and 27 other pieces of real estate. Seven yachts, plus 11 private jets and helicopters, worth a combined $2bn, have been identified as linked to just six individuals.
Some of the assets in the tracker are in the public domain – including Deripaska’s Belgrave Square mansion in central London, which was taken over by squatters last week, as well as the Dilbar, Lena and Amore Vero superyachts, linked to the oligarchs Usmanov, Gennady Timchenko and Igor Sechin respectively.
Other possessions have gone largely unnoticed, or…
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