An oligarch’s arrest exposes how criminals can hide on a slither of silicon
OLIGARCH ARRESTED
Exciting news from the U.K.’s National Crime Agency, which last week arrested “a wealthy Russian businessman on suspicion of offenses including money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the Home Office and conspiracy to commit perjury.” It didn’t actually say who the gentleman in question was, but it provided a photograph of officers walking through the hall of his tremendously bland mansion (or, possibly, through the foyer of a tremendously bland hotel), which was clue enough for the internet’s sleuths.
Maria Pevchikh, head of investigations for Alexey Navalny’s FBK, concluded within hours that the photo was taken in Athlone House, a grand Victorian building which Mikhail Fridman got planning permission to “transform to its former glory” six years ago.
- “It intrigued me that the building had originally been designed as a family home about 130 years ago for a wealthy industrialist working in London,” Fridman said at the time. “It felt like fate that I, as a businessman, would be similarly drawn years later to the same property and grounds.”
Fate, eh? It’s a funny old thing. I haven’t yet seen a daguerreotype of bobbies removing ledgers from Athlone House when it was owned by a Victorian paterfamilias whose assets were frozen in a geopolitical crisis, but that’s not to say they don’t exist. For that matter, I also haven’t seen any official confirmation that Fridman was indeed the man arrested, or any information on the identity of a 39-year-old (“the former boyfriend of the businessman’s current partner,” which sounds a bit icky, to be honest) arrested on suspicion of money laundering and conspiracy to defraud, or of a 35-year-old who was arrested after being seen leaving the premises with a big bag full of thousands of pounds in cash. So, it may not be Fridman at all (and here’s an interview from March in which he says he has no influence over Putin and did nothing wrong) but it does show that the National Crime Agency’s new anti-oligarch unit is out there sniffing around, which is good.
- “The NCA’s Combatting Kleptocracy Cell, only established this year, is having significant success investigating potential criminal activity by oligarchs, the professional service providers that support and enable them and those linked to the Russian regime,” said NCA head Graeme Biggar.
I remain frustrated that the Combating Kleptocracy Cell, a unit of the National Crime Agency, is tasked not with investigating how large fortunes were accumulated, but instead with investigating efforts to evade the sanctions on those fortunes imposed since February, but that isn’t the NCA’s fault. Sanctions, as has become depressingly clear, are — in the U.K., as in most other countries — a foreign policy tool, not a law enforcement one. So, well done to the Combating Kleptocracy Cell’s officers for doing this, but once again for anyone who’s not read my newsletters before: they need more resources and more people if we are to expect them to tackle oligarchs more broadly, not least because oligarchs remain extremely litigious.