Roman Abramovich has been sanctioned – for all the good it will do

Putin’s preferred oligarchs keep their riches because he allows them to, not because we allow them to

What is the point of sanctioning Roman Abramovich? Is he ‘complicit’ in Putin’s invasion? (Reuters)

These are worrying times for Vladimir Putin. What are the consequences for his war machine, now that Chelsea Football Club is no longer permitted to spend more than 20 grand on travel to away matches?

The government has acted. The “Oligarch Task Force” has shown it means business, and it has the social media memes to prove it. The Foreign Office has been busily tweeting pictures of the oligarchs it has SANCTIONED this morning, leaning heavily on the STAMP font favoured by anyone who’s ever had to knock up a WANTED poster for some sort of Wild West-themed student disco.

However, it is unclear how many oligarchs have been SANCTIONED. The claim that sanctions had been applied to Rossiya Bank chairman Dmitri Lebedev has been deleted, though this is understood to be only because the work experience kid had accidentally knocked out the cowboy poster using a picture of Dmitri Medvedev, the former Russian president.

But one person who certainly has been SANCTIONED is Roman Abramovich, just weeks after his lawyers, Harbottle and Lewis, were sending out threatening letters to anyone who dared suggest their client could possibly be sanctioned. We await the next ones.

It means, shock horror, that Chelsea can no longer buy and sell players, sell replica shirts and even sell tickets to their matches. The sanctions are, according to foreign secretary Liz Truss, because Abramovich and the rest are “complicit” in Putin’s aggression. “The blood of the Ukrainian people is on their hands. They should hang their heads in shame,” she has said.

Which they certainly should. But while those heads are hung, it remains somewhat inconvenient that European countries continue to deposit somewhere in the region of one billion euros a day in the Kremlin coffers, in return for oil and gas that, at time of typing, they’ve got precisely zero idea how to survive without.

One billion euros a day is a lot of Romelu Lukakus. It is certainly enough to cover any nervousness Putin might have about whether his invasion will be able to survive the sudden drop in revenues from ticket sales at Stamford Bridge, money which he was certainly not receiving anyway.

So what is the point of sanctioning Roman Abramovich? Is he “complicit” in Putin’s invasion? Probably not. The most obvious point, though this is an aspiration more than anything else, is that Putin’s preferred oligarchs, unhappy at their new-found pariah status, their toys taken away, will be able to pressure Putin into acting differently.

Is this likely? Probably not. To paraphrase the words of an unnamed European diplomat recently quoted in the Financial Times, if Mr Oligarch calls up Mr Putin and says “they’ve taken four billion of my five billion off me and I want it back. Please change your ways,” the response will be, “well, would you like to keep the one billion?”

The relationship between Abramovich and Putin was well documented in a four-month court case in 2011, in which Abramovich was sued for £6bn by his now deceased business partner, Boris Berezovsky. I happened to attend almost every day of that trial, covering it for this newspaper.

Abramovich was not an easy character to try to understand. His face was never less than entirely inscrutable. I cannot recall seeing anyone who more resembled what Andy McNab calls “the grey man,” a person so nondescript, so unreadable, as to be rendered almost invisible.

In the early days of the trial, the two oligarchs and their minders would park their fleet of Maybachs and Bentleys directly outside the courthouse and just hoover up the parking tickets. Eventually, they were warned this wasn’t on, and so Abramovich would regularly have to loiter on the street for a couple of minutes waiting for his car to arrive. On one occasion, it became a paparazzi feeding frenzy and he ducked into the nearby Pret, went downstairs, and I watched him take a seat at a table next to two City boys eating tuna baguettes, clearly without a clue as to who had joined them.

He would occasionally walk laps around the glass balconies of the Rolls Building. On one occasion I asked him: “Is John Terry a racist?” (it was in the news at the time). The corner of his lips raised into roughly an eighth of a smile and he carried on. I don’t think he had even understood the question.

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He got rich to begin with because Boris Berezovsky connived with the then president Boris Yeltsin to buy vast oil assets for next to nothing in return for support from Berezovsky’s TV channel in the 1995 presidential election. The assets, bought for about $100m, became Sibneft, now part of Gazprom, and were eventually sold back to the Russian state for $7bn, the money going directly to Mr Abramovich.

At the time, he was a lot younger than the gang of billionaires he was hanging out with. It is regularly said of him that he penetrated their world because while they jostled for position with one another, they all liked little Roman. None of them saw him as a rival. They had political ambitions, grand plans to be kingmakers in the Kremlin, whereas he was a far simpler man, who had come from an oil town, and had been working as a kind of Muscovite Del Boy, selling plastic ducks out of his apartment. He did not want to bestride the narrow world as doth a colossus. He just wanted to make money, and he certainly did.

So now it appears to be one of the west’s key hopes that Abramovich and co will be so horrified by their treatment that they’ll turn on their Kremlin enabler.

What is that hope worth? There is no hard evidence to go on, but the softer stuff doesn’t augur well. Since Putin invaded Ukraine, Chelsea Football Club has released three official statements, with a combined word count of about 600 words.

None of them contain even a whiff of condemnation of Putin’s actions. None of them mention the destruction of a maternity hospital in Mariupol. At the time the most recent statement was issued, women in labour were still trapped under the rubble.

Naturally, these sanctions make us all feel good. And they’re the right thing to do. But they don’t alter the reality that we have all been ignoring for far too long. Putin’s preferred oligarchs keep their riches because he allows them to, not because we allow them to. Chelsea Football Club is the icing on the cake. But the baker is still in the Kremlin.