Vladimir Putin may have ordered the assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal because the former Russian spy harboured secret information about the Russian president’s “criminal embezzlement” of profits from metals production, the UK government believes.
A leading intelligence official on Russia has said he took “at face value” Skripal’s assertions that secrets he knew about how Putin may have made money led to the nerve agent attack on him in Salisbury.
An inquiry into the poisonings has heard that Foreign Office experts concluded Putin personally ordered the attack as it was inconceivable that such an audacious action would have been carried out without his say-so. A central remaining question has been why Russian agents were sent to Salisbury to kill Skripal.
In his witness statement, Skripal said that when he worked for the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, he had access to “secret information” and “was aware of allegations that Putin had been involved in illegal activity to do with the disposal of rare metals”.
When Skripal was interviewed by British police after the nerve agent attack in March 2018, he talked about Putin “embezzling” the proceeds of aluminium sales.
Asked by counsel to the inquiry, Andrew O’Connor, whether knowledge of Putin’s “criminal embezzlement” could have been the motive for the attack at the inquiry, Jonathan Allen, the director general of defence and intelligence at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, said he took Skripal’s claim at face value.
He said: “It makes sense that if he [Skripal] was working as a senior member of the GRU he would have access to secret information. On the allegations regarding President Putin, it is very difficult to know exactly what happens in Russia. The civil society is pretty nonexistent, the independent media has been shut down, the judicial system operates to protect the government and President Putin.
“There have been numerous open-source works which link senior figures in the government including the president to control of natural resources, to control of the sources of Russian wealth and suggestions they profited from those. Certainly President Putin is at the top of a state that is highly corrupt and which ensures loyalty through patronage and fear. I would say they could be motives.”
Since October, an inquiry in the UK has been looking at the circumstances surrounding the death of Dawn Sturgess, who was poisoned with novichok in June 2018, three months after the attack on Skripal.
On the final day of evidence last week, Allen was asked about an email chain produced at the inquiry involving Foreign Office and UK Cabinet officials in which they reported remarks Putin had made about Skripal and Sturgess, who died after spraying herself with nerve agent from a fake perfume bottle found by her partner Charlie Rowley.
The officials said Putin had described Skripal as a “traitor” and suggested he may have worked with the UK after he came to England after a spy swap. Putin is reported to have said: “He left and continued cooperating and he consulted some special services.” Allen said he could not comment on this claim.
Of Sturgess and Rowley, Putin reportedly said: “Do you want to say we have also poisoned some homeless person? Some guys come and begin poisoning homeless people there. Nonsense. What, do they work for some kind of cleansing department?”
Allen said the comments were “rather callous”. He said: “They are offensive in the extreme, and again rather indicative perhaps of his rather dismissive attitude to what’s happened.”
On the final day of the inquiry on Monday, Sturgess’s legal team will argue that more could have been done to protect the British people from the Russian threat.
