Former Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich has been pictured in public for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine as new revelations emerged about the “shady deals” that made him a billionaire.
Looking dishevelled in jeans, puffer jacket and scuffed boots, the oligarch stared intently at his phone as he sat in a VIP lounge at Ben Gurion international airport in Lod, near Tel Aviv.
He had much to ponder after Israel warned it could not provide a safe haven for sanctioned Russians such as Abramovich.
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, on a visit to Slovakia, which borders Ukraine, said his country would “not be a route to bypass sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States and other Western countries”.
Flight-tracking websites suggest Abramovich flew from Tel Aviv in a Gulfstream jet to Istanbul, arriving yesterday.
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It was the first time he had been seen in public since Chelsea ’s victory in the World Club cup in Abu Dhabi on February 12. Since then, the UK has seized his assets, placing huge financial constraints on Chelsea in the final weeks of the Premier League season.
Abramovich, 55, is facing a £2billion loss on the sale of the club alone and other multi-million pound assets, including properties in London, have been frozen. It is understood the EU tonight placed him on a list of sanctioned oligarchs operating in the 27 member countries and are now looking to seize his assets in Europe.
His £460million superyacht Solaris arrived in Montenegro on Saturday. Meanwhile, the UK Government is “searching” for helicopters and jets belonging to sanctioned Russians.
Tonight, a BBC investigation reported that Abramovich made billions after buying an oil company from the Russian government in a rigged auction in 1995. Abramovich paid around £190m for Sibneft before selling it back to the Russian government for £9.9bn in 2005.
His lawyers say there is no basis for alleging he has amassed very substantial wealth through criminality. But Panorama said Abramovich had admitted in a UK court that he made corrupt payments to help clinch the Sibneft deal.
He was being sued in London by his former business associate Boris Berezovsky in 2012.
Abramovich won the case, but told in court how the original Sibneft auction was rigged in his favour and how he gave Mr Berezovsky £7.6m to pay off a Kremlin official.
The programme obtained a document thought to have been smuggled out of Russia.
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 £2bn in the Sibneft deal, a claim supported by a 1997 Russian parliamentary investigation.
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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.
