Of all the sanctions taken on Tuesday by Western capitals, in retaliation for the Russian coup in the Donbass, those decided by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson are perhaps the best targeted. They target neither the Russian army, whose tanks threaten to descend on Kiev, nor even the Russian economy. They strike three intimate men of Vladimir Poutineand through them the way of life – and the concealed fortune – of the master of the Kremlin.
London financial institutions have been ordered to check whether they hold accounts linked to Boris Rotenberg, 65, and his nephew Igor, 48, and if so to freeze their assets; the doors of the United Kingdom are now closed to them.
Friends who became billionaires
The Rotenberg family had already been sanctioned by the US Treasury, in the spring of 2014, in retaliation for the invasion of Crimea. Boris and Igor’s father Arkadi, 70, have known Putin for a long time. Natives of Saint Petersburg, childhood friends of “Volodya” (Putin’s nickname), they were his partners on the tatami mats for judo and sambo – a Russian martial art – and in a few street or nightclub fights in shores of the Baltic.
They were only middleweight oligarchs before the gas giant Gazprom sold them for a modest price (348 million dollars anyway), in 2008, five of its subsidiaries in the construction sector. Their fortune will explode with the awarding to their companies SGM Group (BTP) and Mostotest (motorways) of contracts for the Winter Olympics in Sochi (7 to 10 billion), the construction of the Kerch bridge linking annexed Crimea to Russia without going through Ukraine, or even the Nord Stream II gas pipeline supposed to double deliveries to Germany. The Swedish economist Anders Aslund, who advised liberal Russian and Ukrainian governments, described these opaque circuits at the top of the Russian state in detail, in his books, but also during a deposition (pdf) before the European Parliament in 2019.
Shell companies, tax havens and questionable flows
Since then, explosive revelations from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (Icij) revealed behind the scenes of this success story : a tangle of screen companies in tax havens (Virgin Islands, Panama…), dubious flows of hundreds of millions to accounts in Cyprus or Luxembourg, used for money laundering and tax concealment.
The Rotenberg family leads the way and knows how to return favors. In 2016, Société Générale reported a questionable transfer of $186 million to Sunbarn’s accounts in Luxembourg. This company belongs to a famous but modest (court side) Russian cellist, Sergei Roldugin, who claims the New York Times play on a used instrument. Except that (on the garden side) Roldugin, another great friend of Volodya’s youth, holds multiple structures collecting “donations” from businessmen… whose experts believe that the real beneficiary is called Putin. Hence Roldugin’s nickname: the caretaker.
Behind Putin’s Palace
When in January 2021, the anti-corruption opponent Alexei Navalny revealed on Youtube the existence of a Putin palace -17,000 m² in a 7,000 ha park, estimated value 1.12 billion dollars – in Guelendik, on the Black Sea, Arkadi Rotenberg comes out of retirement and clears the Russian president, claiming to be the owner.
It is not on the tatami mats, but by hitting the ice hockey puck that Gennadi Timchenko, 69, the third oligarch targeted by London on Tuesday, rubbed shoulders with Vladimir Putin. Sanctioned by the United States after the 2014 invasion of Crimea, he sold Gunvor, one of the world’s biggest oil traders. The 6th Russian fortune has withdrawn among others to Novatek (gas) and Sibur (petrochemicals).
Vice-president of the Russian Olympic committee, Timchenko was also cited by the ICIJ, among the holders of offshore financial structures concealing the fortunes of relatives of the Kremlin, and designated by the opponent Navalny as one of the secret financiers of the palace. of Putin on the Black Sea.
Boris Johnson has warned: Tuesday’s sanctions are just a “first salvo” and other oligarchs close to Putin are on his list. He has plenty to hand: the British government has often been criticized for turning a blind eye to the dubious origin of the Russian fortunes that have flowed into the real estate and coffers of the British capital, sometimes nicknamed Londongrad. This, paradoxically, provides it with leverage today.
