Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich was finally slapped with sanctions the day after pal Vladimir Putin bombed a maternity hospital in Ukraine.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said Abramovich and six other oligarchs were sanctioned to “ramp up the pressure on the Putin regime and choke off funds to his brutal war machine”.
She said: “With their close links to Putin they are complicit in his aggression. The blood of the Ukrainian people is on their hands. They should hang their heads in shame.”
Abramovich, whose third wife Dasha was the daughter of another Russian oligarch, Alexander Zhukov, has a big stake in Evraz, a firm which allegedly supplies steel for Russian tanks, a claim his spokesman denied.
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Ministers had been under pressure to sanction Abramovich and finally acted on day 15 of the invasion.
The measures against the 55-year-old billionaire include an asset freeze which will thwart his bid to offload Chelsea FC, which he bought in 2003.
He is also banned from selling his £125million 15-bed mansion in London’s Kensington Palace Gardens, his £22m three-storey penthouse in the Chelsea Waterfront tower and a £9m, three-storey flat in Chelsea.
Citizens and firms are forbidden from doing business with Abramovich, who split from Dasha in 2017, meaning that he cannot even pay a cleaner, gardener or housekeeper, or pay gas, water or electricity bills.
A travel ban means Abramovich, who has Israeli, Russian and Portuguese citizenship and is thought to now be in Israel, cannot visit Britain.
If his yachts, Solaris and Eclipse, together worth £1.2bn, are found in British waters, or his planes land at UK airports, they will be detained.
Chelsea FC can keep playing after the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport issued a special licence. But fans have been told their club can no longer buy or sell players and only season ticket holders can attend matches at Stamford Bridge.
Supporters who already have tickets for upcoming games can still attend. But no new tickets will be sold and the merchandise shop will close.
Mobile phone network Three last night asked the Premier League club to suspend its sponsorship deal, demanding “the removal of our brand from shirts and around the stadium”. No10 said it is “open” to Chelsea being sold off but a separate licence must be approved by the Treasury.
“Under no circumstances” could Abramovich, who is worth an estimated £9.4billion, profit from the sale. Officials have spent weeks building a case against the oligarch that they believe will survive legal challenges.
Labour leader Keir Starmer, speaking as he visited British troops protecting NATO’s eastern flank in Estonia, said: “I called for these sanctions against Abramovich two weeks ago. A feature of the Government’s reaction here is that they are too slow.
“We do want a Government to go further and faster, and not be so slow.”
Outlining the grounds for the sanctions, the Government highlighted Abramovich’s role as a “stakeholder in Evraz PLC”. On March 1, Grzegorz Kuczynski, director of the Eurasia program at the Warsaw Institute, said Evraz’s products were used to make tanks involved in the invasion.
Abramovich’s spokesman claimed Evraz steel made in Russia was only used for “rail and construction”.
Ministers faced criticism for failing to take action earlier but Prime Minister Boris Johnson defended the Government’s “very careful” approach.
He said: “The right to property is something that English law, UK law, takes very seriously. You have got to go through due process.
“You have got to have clear evidence that people are connected to the Putin regime. That has been established, that’s why we are going ahead with the sanctions that we are. I think when you look at what is happening in Ukraine and you look to the casual rejection of every norm of civilised behaviour in bombing a maternity hospital, I think people in this country can see that people connected to the Putin regime need to be sanctioned.”
Whitehall officials stressed the UK was the first country to target Abramovich, last seen in Britain in October.
That was believed to be his first visit since 2018, when his entrepreneurial visa expired.
