An Ultrachic neighborhood of West London concentrates the number of oligarchs in the world. One of his figures of Proue, Roman Abramovych, was written Thursday on the list of British sanctions.
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A sumptuous Cream Color Villa, perfectly cut boxes, a Tesla blue night parked near a glazed dependence and a decorative contractor’s truck – that’s all we guess of the 16 Kensington Gardens, One of the London addresses of Roman Abramovich in the famous “Alley of Billionaires”, behind the Kensington Palace and close to the Russian Embassy. The passers-by are rare, panels recall that it is “forbidden to photograph the driveway. The Russian oligarch, renowned near Putin, he lies there again? “We do not see a big world,” a neighbor at the beginning of March.
The calm is misleading in this Ultrachic district of West London, one of the most concentrated in the world in the number of oligarchs. Abramovych has formalized, on March 2, the sale of the Chelsea football club, and to believe the Times, for fear of figuring quickly on the list of British sanctions, he also wants to give this prestigious address, as well as a Triplex in the Chelsea Waterfront tower, on the edge of the Thames. Goods estimated at about 180 million pounds sterling (€ 214 million). Thursday, March 10th In the morning, the Johnson government finally announced that Mr. Abramovich joined the list of Russian personalities punishable by London, with the Industrial Oleg Deripaska, founder of Rusal, one of the world’s leading aluminum producers in the world, and Igor Setchine, Executive Director of Rosneft.
“I was talking to a lawyer, this morning, assaulted customer calls asking how to move their assets. The same with a knowledge that works in a private bank,” says Tom Keatinge, Director of the Center devoted to the fight against Financial crime at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Joint March 3rd. On the same day, on the BBC Radio 4, Nigel Kushner, of the law firm W Legal, entrusts: “Some of our customers are trying to move their assets, but it is not easy, the banks refuse deposits if you are threatened with sanctions. “
A reality denounced by NGOs
With a list of about fifteen relatives of Vladimir Putin sanctioned since the end of February, including Allicher Ousmanov, a significant shareholder of the Arsenal Football Club, the Johnson government says he wants to finish with “Londongrad”, these decades during which London thus baptized has become “The Place to Be” for oligarchs around the world, in particular: safe and little looks at the origin of their funds. “The oligarchs will no longer have anywhere to hide,” says the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Liz Truss, since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “So last year, the authorities knew that this money was there, but it did not put them a problem?” Stretch Tom Burgis, an investigative journalist in Financial Times and author of the Kleptopia book dedicated Dirty money in democracies (Harpercollins, 2021, not translated).
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