Long saved by the sanctions, the billionaires close to the Russian President are now in the viewfinder of Europe and the United States for their support brought to the Kremlin.
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This is a date they will not forget soon. On February 24 at the beginning of the evening, 40 Russian oligarchs take place under the blue and gold moldings of the former Senate Palace, in the Kremlin enclosure. Sitting on chairs, his hands on the knees, they face, several meters away, to the Russian President Vladimir Putin installed behind an office, as students in front of their master.
The Assembly, exclusively male, succeeded the Security Council that was held little before in the same place, and whose meeting, filmed, showed pillars of power – yet seasoned – tetanized and stuttering. In turn, now. Dazed, the richest businessmen of the country realize the enormity of “the special military operation” triggered on the same day in Ukraine by the head of the Kremlin: the war. “Even [Guennadi] Temtchenko did not know it,” blows a source, still under the shock ten days later.
The oligarch Timtchenko, a close to Vladimir Putin, active in the gas sector, among others, and whose fortune was estimated at $ 22 billion (20 billion euros) in 2021 by the magazine Forbes , is not in the room. But other heavyweights are there, like Alexei Mordachov ($ 29 billion, steel and investments), Vladimir Potanine ($ 27 billion, metals and mining), Vagit Alekperov ($ 25 billion, oil) or Piotr Aven ($ 5.3 billion, oil, bank and telecoms). Also present are the “vatists” Alexei Miller, patron of the Russian giant hydrocarbon giant Gazprom, and Igor Setchine, at the head of the second largest oil producer of the country, Rosneft.
duty of “solidarity”
On their behalf, Alexandre Chokhine, President of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, speaks. “We are well aware that the new sanctions will be much more severe than previous restrictions, and that they will affect many sectors, the financial sector, extractive industries and technological equipment supplies,” he says. They will affect. They will affect Some types of raw materials and components, and supply chains as well as transportation and logistics could be disturbed. “The Kremlin Head is content to recall his interlocutors to their duty of” solidarity “.
Only concession, a small package of measures adopted urgently, the next day, by the Council of the Federation, the Upper Chamber of the Russian Parliament, whose lifting lifting, the suspension of the repayment of certain debts or the extension of An amnesty on the return of capital held abroad. Lean consolations for those who see falls on them a stolen of Western penalties.
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