Former Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich was spotted in a VIP lounge at Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod, near Tel Aviv, as Israel warned that sanctioned Russians would not be allowed to enter the country.
Roman Abramovich, the former owner of Chelsea, has been seen in public for the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as new details surface about the “shady deals” that made him a millionaire.
The oligarch sat in a VIP lounge at Ben Gurion international airport in Lod, near Tel Aviv, looking disheveled in jeans, puffer jacket, and scuffed boots, staring closely at his phone.
After Israel warned that it could not provide a safe haven for sanctioned Russians like Abramovich, he had a lot to think about.
On a visit to Slovakia, which borders Ukraine, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said his country will “not be a route to bypass sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States and other Western countries.”
According to flight monitoring services, Abramovich went from Tel Aviv to Istanbul aboard a Gulfstream jet and arrived yesterday.
It was his first public appearance since Chelsea’s victory in the World Club Cup in Abu Dhabi on February 12. Since then, the United Kingdom has seized his assets, putting Chelsea’s finances in jeopardy in the final weeks of the Premier League season.
Abramovich, 55, is expected to lose $2.6 billion from the sale of the club alone, and his other multi-million pound assets, including London mansions, have been seized. The EU has placed him on a list of sanctioned oligarchs operating in the 27 member countries, and is now attempting to take his assets in Europe, according to reports.
On Saturday, his $ 600 million superyacht Solaris arrived in Montenegro. Meanwhile, the UK government is “looking” for helicopters and jets that belong to Russians who have been sanctioned.
His lawyers claim there is no evidence for alleging he has gained extremely large money through criminality. However, Panorama reported that Abramovich agreed to make corrupt payments to help seal the Sibneft sale in a UK court.
Boris Berezovsky, a longtime business colleague, sued him in London in 2012.
Although Abramovich won the case, he testified in court about how the original Sibneft auction was manipulated in his favor and how he paid Mr Berezovsky $9.9 million to settle a Kremlin official.
A document believed to have been smuggled out of Russia was obtained by the program.
The information was given to the programme by a confidential source, who said it was secretly copied from files held on Abramovich by Russian law enforcement agencies.
The BBC said checks with other sources in Russia had backed up many of the details in the five-page document. It stated that the Russian government was cheated out of $2.6bn in the Sibneft deal, a claim supported by a 1997 Russian parliamentary investigation.
The document said Russian authorities wanted to charge Abramovich with fraud. It said: “Dept of Economic Crimes investigators came to the conclusion if Abramovich could be brought to trial he would have faced accusations of fraud… by an organised criminal group.”
Panorama 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 details of the Sibneft sale.
Mr Skuratov was sacked after the release of a sex tape in 1999. He claimed 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.” Abramovich remained in the Kremlin inner circle when Putin replaced Yeltsin in 2000.
The document contains details of another rigged auction two years later, involving a Russian oil company called Slavneft.
Abramovich formed a partnership with another firm to buy Slavneft but a rival Chinese company planned to bid almost twice as much.
Many powerful people, from the Kremlin to the Russian parliament, stood to lose out if the Chinese won the auction. The document says one of the Chinese delegation was kidnapped when they arrived in Moscow for the auction.
Abramovich’s lawyers told the BBC the kidnap claim was “entirely unsubstantiated” and he had “no knowledge of such an incident”. They said allegations of corruption in the Slavneft and Sibneft deals were false and Abramovich denied he was protected by President Yeltsin.
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