A sumptuous cream-colored villa, perfectly trimmed box trees, a midnight blue Tesla parked near a glazed outbuilding and a decoration contractor’s truck – that’s all we can guess from 16 Kensington Palace Gardens, the one of Roman Abramovich’s London addresses in the famous “Billionaires Alley”, behind Kensington Palace and a stone’s throw from the Russian Embassy. Passers-by are rare, signs remind us that it is “prohibited to photograph” the driveway. Does the Russian oligarch, reputedly close to Putin, still live there? “We don’t see many people there”, testified a neighbor at the very beginning of March.
The calm is deceptive in this ultra-chic district of West London, one of the most concentrated in the world in terms of the number of oligarchs. Abramovich formalized the sale of Chelsea football club on March 2, and according to the Times, for fear of quickly appearing on the British sanctions list, he also wants to sell this prestigious address, as well as a triplex in the Chelsea Waterfront tower, on the banks of the Thames. Property estimated at around 180 million pounds sterling (214 million euros). On Thursday morning, March 10, the Johnson government finally announced that Mr. Abramovich was joining the list of Russian personalities sanctioned by London, along with industrialist Oleg Deripaska, founder of Rusal, one of the world’s leading aluminum producers, and Igor Sechine, executive director of Rosneft.
“I was talking to a lawyer this morning, bombarded with calls from clients asking him how to move their assets. Same with an acquaintance who works in a private bank,” testifies Tom Keatinge, director of the center devoted to the fight against financial crime at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), contacted on March 3. On the same day, on BBC Radio 4, Nigel Kushner of the law firm W Legal said: “Some of our clients try to move their assets, but it’s not easy, the banks refuse deposits if you are threatened with sanctions. »
A reality denounced by NGOs
With a list of fifteen relatives of Vladimir Putin sanctioned since the end of February, including Alicher Ousmanov, a major shareholder of the Arsenal football club, the Johnson government says it wants to put an end to “Londongrad”, these decades during which London thus baptized became “the place to be” for the oligarchs of the whole world, Russians in particular: sure and not very attentive on the origin of their funds. “The oligarchs will no longer have anywhere to hide”, says Foreign Minister Liz Truss since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “So last month or last year, the authorities knew that this money was there, but they didn’t have a problem with it? », chokes Tom Burgis, investigative journalist at the FinancialTimes and author of the book Kleptopia dedicated to dirty money in democracies (HarperCollins, 2021, untranslated).
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