Roman Abramovich is said to be suspected of belonging to an organised crime group that cheated the Russian government out of £2 billion.
The claim related to his involvement in two deals to buy oil companies that made his fortune. BBC Panorama said a document smuggled out of Russia showed that the government had been cheated out of $2.7 billion in his deal to buy Sibneft.
The oligarch was seen on Monday at an airport in Israel as sources said that leading EU diplomats had agreed to sanction him.
He paid about £190 million for Sibneft in 1995, and sold it back to the government for $13 billion in 2005. Two years after Vladimir Putin became president, Abramovich was involved in the purchase of Slavneft, Panorama said.
His lawyers told the BBC there was no basis for alleging that he had amassed his wealth through criminality. The BBC said it had not been able to verify the five-page document, but that other sources in Russia had backed up many of the details.
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Abramovich, 55, told the High Court in London in 2012 that he had given a business associate, Boris Berezovsky, $10 million to pay off a Kremlin official in the Sibneft auction.
Yuri Skuratov, Russia’s former chief prosecutor, said he had investigated the deal involving Abramovich and Berezovsky and their links to Boris Yeltsin, who was president at the time.
He told Panorama: “Basically, it was a fraudulent scheme, where those who took part in the privatisation formed one criminal group that allowed Abramovich and Berezovsky to trick the government and not pay the money that this company was really worth.”
The authorities wanted to charge him with fraud over the Sibneft deal, the show said, but the investigation was dropped because he was close to Yeltsin.
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Skuratov was dismissed in 1999 after images of him in bed with two prostitutes were shown on a state-controlled television station. The video was broadcast hours after he appeared on television announcing that he had the names of some “fairly well-known” Russian officials who had illegally transferred dirty money to Swiss bank accounts.
The alleged law enforcement document obtained by the BBC claim that files on Abramovich were moved to the Kremlin and an investigation by Skuratov was stopped. The document says: “Skuratov was preparing a criminal case for the confiscation of Sibneft on the basis of the investigation of its privatisation. The investigation was stopped by President Yeltsin . . . Skuratov was dismissed from his office.”
Skuratov told the BBC: “This whole thing was obviously political, because in my investigations I came very close to the family of Boris Yeltsin, including via this investigation of the Sibneft privatisation.”
In 2002 Abramovich formed a partnership with another firm to buy Slavneft, another oil company. A member of the delegation from a rival Chinese bidder was kidnapped when they arrived in Moscow for the auction and was released after the company declared its withdrawal, the document claims. There is no suggestion that Abramovich knew anything about the kidnapping plot.
Abramovich was seen at Tel Aviv airport shortly before a jet linked to him took off for Istanbul. Yair Lapid, Israel’s foreign minister, had said: “Israel will not be a route to bypass sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States and other western countries.”
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Amid concerns that other sanctioned oligarchs are hiding assets in Israel, Lapid said the foreign ministry was “co-ordinating the issue together with partners including the Bank of Israel, the Finance Ministry, the Economy Ministry, the Airports Authority, the Energy Ministry, and others”. Last week Britain became the first country to sanction Abramovich.
He and Berezovsky both attended Putin’s 2000 inauguration ball in Moscow. Berezovsky became an opponent of Putin and was granted political asylum in Britain. He was found dead at his mansion in Sunninghill, Berkshire, in March 2013.
A coroner recorded an open verdict after hearing Berezovsky feared assassination and was at risk of bankruptcy after a 2012 high court fight with Abramovich over the ownership of Sibneft. Abramovich’s lawyer told the BBC allegations of corruption in the Slavneft and Sibneft deals were false, and denied he was protected by Yeltsin.
