French chess star and businessman Jöel Lautier was added to the list of people targeted by US sanctions over the war in Ukraine back in March, French business daily Les Echos reported on Wednesday, the only non-Russian to be targeted by the American authorities.
On a list of affluent Russians, one name stands out. Of the more than 340 individuals sanctioned by the United States on 24 March over the war in Ukraine, only one of them is not Russian: Frenchman Joël Lautier, the former international chess champion turned mergers and acquisitions consultant.
Lautier’s inclusion on the ever-growing US blacklist went completely unnoticed until French business daily Les Echos mentioned him in an article published on Wednesday April 20.
Lautier, the head of a mergers and acquisitions consultancy, actually appears twice on the US sanctions list: once under his French name (Joël Raymond Lautier) and once under the "Russified" version of his surname, Zhoel Raimon Lote.
Why Lautier?
He even gets a special mention from the US Treasury because he is quoted separately in a press release about Washington's efforts to target "the elite close to Russian President Vladimir Putin". The 48-year-old Frenchman is named alongside 15 other wealthy Russians, including Gennady Timchenko, a businessman and longtime friend of Putin.
However, unlike the oligarchs targeted by the American and European authorities, Lautier is not targeted by US sanctions for making a fortune from his ties to Putin.
Instead, he owes his inclusion on the list to the fact that in 2020 he became a non-executive director and member of the supervisory board of the Russian bank Sovcombank.
One of Russia's "systemically important" banks, Sovcombank is suspected of helping the Russian elite to enrich themselves illegally. It was one of the first targets of US sanctions, as soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February.
A month later, Washington decided to ramp up the pressure on Sovcombank by individually targeting all of its executives, including members of the board of directors.
For Les Echos, it is "bizarre" that Joël Lautier should come under fire from Washington. Firstly, the daily points out, he resigned from his position at Sovcombank on 25 February, the day after the bank was placed on the sanctions list. This decision is only effective after "an AGM [of shareholders]", Les Echos says. Since the US sanctions were announced, all references to the members of the board of directors have disappeared from the bank's website.
Moreover, there seems to be a double standard at play in Washington. Lautier was officially sanctioned because he was on the supervisory board of Sovcombank. But the German national Regina von Flemming became a non-executive director of the Russian bank in 2020, a position she held just before the start of the war ... and yet she does not appear on the US sanctions list. When contacted by FRANCE 24, the US Treasury did not comment on this "oversight".
From chess champion to businessman in Russia
When contacted by Les Echos, Lautier made no comment on his inclusion on the US sanctions list.
His listing means that any assets he holds in the United States or in an American bank can be seized, and that he cannot do business with Americans.
Ironically, Lautier was put on the US sanctions list on the same day as Anatoly Karpov, the former world chess champion who became a Russian MP and voted for the war in Ukraine. These two have clashed in the past on several occasions ... on the chessboard.
Lautier’s feelings for Russia, a superpower in the chess world, appear to stem partly from his chess career.
Until 2006, Lautier was the greatest chess star in France. He was world junior champion in 1988, competed in the Chess World Cup 2005, and is one of the few players to have beaten the living chess legend Garry Kasparov twice, in 1994 and 1995.
His love of the board game has taken him to Russia on numerous occasions. He became fluent in Russian by devouring the chess books of the Russian grandmasters.
When he retired from chess in 2006 to turn to finance, "Russia offered me the best bridge to go from chess to business", he told French business daily Les Echos in 2016. He also used the interview to publicly denounce, two years after the annexation of Crimea by Russia, the "demonisation of Russia in Europe" and called for more business ties with Moscow.
In 2006, he founded his own mergers and acquisitions consultancy RGG (Russia goes global) which specialises in buying and selling assets in Russia. At the same time, he trained at Skolkovo, the leading management school in Moscow.
Since then, he has advised several large Russian groups in sectors as diverse as oil, electricity and pharmaceuticals. In addition to his role at Sovcombank, Lautier was also a non-executive director for Evropeyskaya Elektrotekhnica, a Russian electronics company.
Perhaps it was a role too many for the US Treasury and the former chess champion pushed his pawns too far into Russia, forgetting one of the golden rules of the game: pawns are the only chess pieces that can’t be moved backwards.
This article has been translated from the original in French.
