Treasury releases £60,000 a month to Putin oligarch
Petr Aven, who is accused of breaching sanctions, is being allowed to take cash from his frozen accounts
A RUSSIAN oligarch suspected of breaching UK sanctions against Vladimir Putin has been granted living expenses of £60,000 a month by the Government to maintain his lifestyle.
The Treasury has authorised the living allowance to Petr Olegovich Aven, 67, plus a one-off payment of £388,000 to settle “pressing debts”.
These include fees to keep one of his children at a private school in the UK for the following summer term and take the yearly total to £1million.
Mr Aven, who owns a £300 million art collection along with three luxury homes in London and Surrey – including a £25 million mansion on the Wentworth Estate – is the subject of an National Crime Agency investigation over allegations that he has broken international sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
In March, he was subjected to both financial prohibitions and a travel ban after being designated by UK authorities as “a pro-Kremlin oligarch involved in supporting the government of Russia” and being “associated with Putin”.
But after the sanctions were imposed, the Treasury agreed to release the cash from the oligarch’s linked accounts.
Mr Aven told the Treasury Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) that the money was essential to meet his “basic needs” and those of his dependent family.
The NCA took action after it was alerted to suspicious transactions concerning the importation of luxury cars, and went to court to freeze nine accounts linked to Mr Aven’s companies over claims they were being used to dodge sanctions. The High Court has now set aside the terms of the freezing orders, ruling that the lower court had erred in law, allowing the case to be now reconsidered afresh by Westminster magistrates. Mrs Justice Collins Rice said: ‘Where some or all of an applicant’s assets are subject to sanctions, that is not necessarily an end of the matter. It may, in an appropriate case, be relevant to consider the prospects that other Treasury licences, not yet applied for, could permit the availability of funds not subject to AFOs for meeting ‘basic needs’ and ‘reasonable living expenses’.”
The judge added: “A case where an applicant has considerable wealth, and complex arrangements for applying it, may be an appropriate case.
“A Treasury licence is not a blade for hollowing out AFOs, and the sanctions regime is not a shield for protecting ‘other assets’. Their potential application in any case is a matter for consideration of the evidence by the court dealing with an exclusions application.”
The Treasury decision to unfreeze part of Mr Aven’s accounts has been condemned by critics of the Putin regime. Chris Bryant, the Labour MP, said: “The Government boasts of its sanctions regime but it seems they are quietly letting Putin’s ally oligarchs carry on regardless.”
Bill Browder, the British financier and arch critic of the Russian president, told The Sunday Telegraph: “Putin and every other Russian is watching like a hawk to see what the chinks are in our armour and this sets a very bad precedent for other oligarchs looking to loosen their sanctions. It’s a slippery slope; first it’s £60,000 a month, then it’s the unfreezing of the accounts entirely.”
Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland and Butler to the World, said: “£60,000 a month does seem an awful lot of money to maintain a certain kind of lifestyle. And it does raise questions about the effectiveness of the sanctions, even if it is restricting Aven spending his own money. It’s really part of a wider problem of not having a stated sanctions strategy in this country. Are we punishing Putin and Russia, depriving oligarchs of their wealth or using the sanctions to help rebuild Ukraine?”
Mr Aven, pictured with the Russian president on the day the invasion of Ukraine began, was also sanctioned by EU authorities in March. He has an estimated fortune of £4billion, derived from an empire that includes Russia’s largest commercial bank and a stake in the ownership of retailer Holland & Barrett.
A patron of the Royal Academy and Tate until he was sanctioned, he has no bank account in the UK, but uses private companies to run his three homes and his family’s personal security and pay for his children’s school fees.
Mr Aven was one of the Russian oligarchs who used the UK courts to sue journalist Catherine Belton over claims in her book Putin’s People that he had links to the Russian President. That case has been settled but Ms Belton told MPs in March that Mr Aven had used UK data laws to try to silence her, which she described as “reputation-whitewashing”.
Mr Aven has been approached for comment. A Whitehall source said sanctions legislation allowed Treasury licences to be granted to “enable economic activity to continue, where there is an appropriate derogation, that would otherwise be prohibited under the applicable sanctions regime”.