The Trump administration drew fire yesterday after it declined to apply sanctions demanded by Congress on wealthy Russians, while a list of oligarchs who could face future penalties was found to have been cribbed from a magazine.
The US Treasury published a list of 114 Russian “senior political figures” and 96 “oligarchs” who had been “determined by their closeness to the Russian regime and their net worth”. However, a US Treasury official later admitted to the Buzzfeed website that the oligarch list had been “inspired” by a ranking of the richest Russians compiled by Forbes magazine.
Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, said the lists included figures who were not close to the Kremlin. “I know many of the business people on this list. Some are very close to Putin. Some are not. Obviously, little work was done to distinguish between the two.”
President Putin dismissed the publication of the list as a hostile and pointless attempt to scare Russia.
The White House was condemned by Republicans and Democrats alike when it said that new sanctions called for in a law passed last year were not necessary. The bill, passed overwhelmingly by Congress in response to Russian meddling in the US election, had demanded sanctions against entities doing “significant” business with Russia’s defence and intelligence sectors.
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Claire McCaskill, a Democratic senator for Missouri, wrote on Twitter: “Congress voted 517-5 to impose sanctions on Russia. The President decides to ignore that law. Folks that is a constitutional crisis.”
The 96 “oligarchs” named on the Treasury list matched 96 billionaires included on Forbes’s list of Russia’s richest people. One Russian senator said US intelligence had failed to find compromising material on officials and instead “ended up copying the Kremlin phone book”.
Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea football club, and Alisher Usmanov, Arsenal’s second-largest shareholder, were among the tycoons listed.
It emerged yesterday that one prominent Russian on the Treasury’s sanctions list has been able to visit the US. Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was in the US last week for talks with his American counterparts about the “joint struggle against terrorism”, the Russian embassy in Washington revealed.