A British banker close to President Putin has been added to the US sanctions list for his alleged role as part of Russia’s “financial sector elite”.
Yuriy Soloviev, 51, has been targeted as part of a crackdown on the financial backers of the Putin regime which has helped the president build up a personal fortune estimated between $100 billion and $200 billion.
Soloviev worked in the City of London for 12 years and is an executive at VTB, a state-controlled Russian bank that has boasted of investing hundreds of billions of dollars abroad.
His wife, Galina Ulyutina, is also subject to sanctions and accused of being implicated in a “golden passport scheme” in which investors could obtain citizenship in countries in the West. She was stripped of her Bulgarian citizenship in 2019.
Soloviev, who has both Russian and UK citizenship, had lived in a £1.3 million home in Notting Hill, west London, and a £2 million home in Westminster near the Houses of Parliament. He was an executive director in the emerging markets department at Lehman Brothers investment bank in London from 1996 to 2002. After receiving an MBA from the London Business School in 2002 he became head of global markets in Russia and former Soviet Union states for Deutsche Bank in London until 2006.
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Soloviev was a director of London-based VTB Capital from 2008 to 2010 and is chairman of the parent company’s management board. VTB Capital has been suspended from trading on the London Stock Exchange after the UK’s imposition of sanctions.
VTB’s chairman, Andrey Kostin, 65, is a member of the supreme council of United Russia, the country’s biggest political party. Dmitry Grigorenko, 43, Russia’s deputy prime minister, is chairman of the bank’s supervisory council. Maxim Reshetnikov, 42, the economic development minister, is also a member of the council.
Putin’s presidential salary is about £105,000 and official records show he owns three cars, a trailer and an 800 sq ft apartment. He has no assets recorded abroad. Unofficially, the 69-year-old is reported to own “Putin’s Palace”, an Italianate mansion on the Black Sea coast near Gelendzhik estimated to have cost more than $1 billion.
The EU has imposed sanctions on a series of Russian oligarchs including three said to have been involved in financing the “palace complex . . . which is widely considered to be personally used by President Putin”.
The oligarchs are Igor Sechin, 71, chief executive of Rosneft, the Russian state oil company; Nikolay Tokarev, 71, chief executive of Transneft, another major Russian oil and gas company; and Alexander Ponomarenko, 57, chairman of Sheremetyevo international airport in Moscow.
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A $100 million superyacht, Graceful, allegedly owned by Putin, suddenly left a shipyard in Hamburg, Germany, recently before repairs were completed, to avoid sanctions, it was reported. The 270ft yacht features an indoor swimming pool which converts to a dance floor. Svetlana Krivonogikh, 46, a woman alleged to have been in a relationship with Putin, paid $4.1 million for an apartment in Monaco, according to leaked financial papers. She is reported to have assets estimated at $100 million.
Putin’s former wife Lyudmila, 63, is linked to the purchase by her new husband of a €7 million art-deco villa called Reverie in Biarritz in southern France.
Sergei Roldugin, 70, a cellist with close ties to Putin, received more than $8 million a year, according to leaked documents from a Swiss bank. The EU describes him as “part of Putin’s network financial scheme”.
The EU claims he owns at least five offshore entities. He is suspected of “shuffling at least $2 billion through banks and offshore companies as a part of Putin’s hidden financial network”.
Bill Browder, a London-based financier and critic of Putin, told the US Senate in 2017 that the president was “one of the wealthiest men in the world”, with assets totalling up to $200 billion.
