Oligarchs: punishing the billionaires
Last Wednesday, French officials seized a yacht thought to be owned by Igor Sechin, the boss of Russia’s largest oil company, Rosneft. On Saturday, Italian police boarded another superyacht belonging to Gennady Timchenko, an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. Across the EU and in the US, Putin’s cronies are being targeted and their assets swiftly frozen, said The Times. Yet for all Boris Johnson’s claims that Britain is “leading the West” on sanctions, the UK has been noticeably slow to react. It initially targeted only 11 “relatively obscure oligarchs”. Alisher Usmanov, a Kremlin-linked billionaire with extensive UK interests, was only recently added to the list. The Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu has been sanctioned by the EU and US, but not yet by the UK. The Government has pointed to the legal difficulties of building a watertight case. But it has had years to prepare for this moment. Its slow progress on sanctioning the oligarchs is becoming a “national embarrassment”.
Ministers say they are preparing a new “hit list” of figures with Kremlin links, but the fear is that, in the meantime, their UK assets will be “spirited away”, said The Guardian. “Moscow-linked money” is long established in this country, and protected by an “army” of hired professionals. This must change. “Mr Johnson has to end the era of oligarchal cash.” There’s no doubt that the UK needs a “massive course correction” in its attitude to dubious foreign money, said Simon Jenkins in the same paper. But what exactly can Johnson do? “Confiscate private houses, fine their owners for being Russian, expel them from the country? Unless they are criminals, we surely do not punish people for their nationality.” Russia is a mafia state and many of its oligarchs are mere “bystanders” in the current crisis. Putin terrorises them “with a mix of extortions, bribes, imprisonment and attempted murder”.
It’s true that “oligarchs are not what they used to be”, said Oliver Bullough in The Spectator. Most have no power to put pressure on Putin. Nevertheless, credible estimates suggest that half of the Russian elite’s wealth is held overseas. Putin uses this money for his own ends, which is why we need sanctions, and why they must be “total” – to ensure that their money will not be used to support the war. The legal obstacles can be overcome, said Richard Ekins and Stephen Laws on Conservative Home. Parliament can immediately enact emergency legislation freezing the assets of those named by the US and EU. It would be a drastic step. But “Russia is a hostile state engaged in lawless war”, which the UK is opposing by any means short of armed conflict.