Background Aquind’s Russian links explained
Aquind, which is part-owned by Russian-British oil and gas tycoon Viktor Fedotov, has donated £700,000 to the Tory party and Conservative MPs since the project began, including £72,500 to the now Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, between July 2019 and February 2021.
In 2021, it emerged that Mr Fedotov secretly co-owned a company called VNIIST that benefited from hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts from Transneft, the Russian state-owned oil and gas pipeline company.
A 2008 audit report suggested that Transneft had lost huge sums to corruption and one of the contractors that benefited was VNIIST. Mr Fedotov has strenuously denied the claims, which emerged in the leaked Pandora Papers.
Alexander Temerko and his son Vladimir have donated £749,000 to Tories as individuals. Mr Temerko Snr has given a further £450,000 via Offshore Group Newcastle, an oil and gas engineering company of which he was once a director.
During the events preceding the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mr Temerko Snr became a prominent figure in the team of former president Boris Yeltsin. From early 1992, he held a series of positions in charge of supplies and armaments in Moscow’s defence ministry.
He made his fortune in Russia’s oil and gas sector, but fled to London shortly after he was examined by criminal investigators in October 2004. In December 2005, Vladimir Putin failed to extradite him back to Moscow to face corruption charges.
Mr Temerko has consistently maintained that he is a strong political critic of Mr Putin and has regularly voiced his opposition to the Russian war in Ukraine.
Kirill Glukhovskoy, the managing director of Aquind and a former lawyer for some of Russia’s largest oil and gas companies, was also on the legal team at Interros, the Russian conglomerate run by Russia’s wealthiest man and Putin ally, Vladimir Potanin.
Mr Potanin, who is worth about £24bn, was also Russia’s deputy prime minister under Yeltsin and was subject to UK sanctions for being one of the major oligarchs in “Putin’s inner circle” following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2014.
Mr Glukhovskoy also worked alongside Mr Temerko Snr at Offshore Group Newcastle between April 2002 and April 2004, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Richard Glasspool, a Britishborn director at Aquind, is a former partner at KPMG Russia and former executive at a Russian bank run by Putin-friendly oligarch Roman Avdeev.
Mr Glasspool, a chartered accountant from Southampton who is fluent in Russian, worked at KPMG for 17 years.
From 2007-8 he was a director on the board of the Russian insurer RESO-Garantia. From March to October 2008 he was a director on the board and head of the audit committee of Sobinbank.
From 2008-2014, he also sat on the supervisory board of the Credit Bank of Moscow, controlled by Mr Avdeev.
While Mr Avdeev is not subject to sanctions, his bank was subject to the UK’s asset freezing restrictions after the Kremlin went to war in Ukraine.