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When Western governments announced on Friday their goal of freezing assets belonging to Russian President Vladimir Putin as punishment for invading Ukraine, there was no indication that they knew of any significant assets that could be related to him.
In fact, very little is known about what Putin has and where he might be. Despite years of hypotheses and rumors, the extent of his wealth remains infuriatingly opaque, even as billions of dollars have leaked into the accounts of his close friends and luxury homes. have been connected to members of the circle of relatives.
Officially, Putin earns about $140,000 a year and owns a small apartment, according to his public monetary statements.
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But that wouldn’t take into account “Putin’s Palace,” a vast Black Sea property estimated to have grossed more than a billion dollars, with a history of Byzantine owners that doesn’t come with the Russian president but has yet to be connected. to his government in some way. The revelations also wouldn’t take into account “Putin’s yacht,” a $100 million luxury shipment that has long been linked to speculative news reports. before the invasion of Ukraine. )
There’s also the $4. 1 million apartment in Monaco, bought from a company abroad through a woman believed to be Putin’s mistress. And there is the beloved villa in the south of France connected with his ex-wife.
The Challenge for the U. S. The U. S. and its allies are that none of those assets can connect with the Russian president.
So far, Western governments have targeted their sanctions at those suspected of serving as Putin’s proxies, hoping this will increase tension over him. And most of the new sanctions, such as those that followed Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, continue. These include Kirill Shamalov, his former son-in-law and majority shareholder of a Russian petrochemical company; Boris Rotenberg, a structure tycoon; and Gennady Timchenko, an investor in Russia’s sixth richest user.
The sanctions would save targeted Americans from assets or conducting monetary transactions in the United States, Britain and the European Union, where the sanctions were announced last week. They would necessarily freeze on the spot cash and assets that can be attributed to those on the list, putting cash and securities or even the sale of real estate out of reach.
But Russian elites, who have lived under Western sanctions for a peak of the past decade, have long favored scrutiny of the complex labyrinths of corporate ownership. Often, their movements and transactions only come to light with the leaking of files from offshore lawyer companies or secret banks. who cater to those who need to hide their wealth.
Paul Massaro, a senior adviser to the U. S. Helsinki Commission. While the U. S. government, which called on members of Congress to oppose sanctions against Russia, said it was not transparent to U. S. officials. In the U. S. , which assets would be affected.
“This means that the sanctions with which we hit those other people are going to be largely glorified through press releases, because without knowing what those assets are, we can’t freeze them,” he said.
However, while the United States has only a limited picture of Putin’s wealth, the sanctions are worth it “just to freeze what we can, freeze what we know, and let other people know that those other people are not welcome in our system,” Massaro. Said. .
A European diplomat pressed the symbolic price of the effort, describing it as “a political signal. “
Upon being added to the U. S. Treasury Department’s list. UU. de “specially designated nationals,” Putin joins a small but infamous subset of heads of state, adding Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Syria’s Bashar Assad. Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, also issued sanctions.
“We are united with our foreign allies and partners to ensure that Russia pays high economic and diplomatic value for its new invasion of Ukraine,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Friday.
Estimates of what Putin might secretly be worth vary widely. One of the most sensational claims came from Bill Browder, a U. S. -born financier. The U. S. was expelled from Russia in 2005 after confronting oligarchs there. wealth can only total $200 billion, an ordinary sum that would have made him the richest guy in the world at the time.
Anders Aslund, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and of the 2019 e-book “Russia’s Crony Capitalism,” estimated the Russian president’s wealth at around $125 billion. He argued that much of it could be hidden in a network of tax havens owned by Putin’s allies. , friends and relatives.
On rare occasions, other people close to Putin’s inner circle have spoken publicly about his wealth. In 2010, Sergei Kolesnikov, who claimed to be a business partner of a Putin ally, wrote an open letter to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, stating that Putin built a massive property on the Black Sea coast that would become known as Putin’s Palace. He collected more than a billion dollars raised through “corruption, bribery and theft,” Kolesnikov wrote in his letter, which he sent after leaving Russia.
The massive allocation includes a movie theater, a living room with hookah and a pole dance stage, according to a report and documentary released last year by jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his associates. Several oligarchs close to Putin have been implicated on several occasions, adding Shamalov’s father. Last year, billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, a friend of the Russian president during the formative years, came forward to claim that he owned the assets and turned them into a hotel and apartments.
The Kremlin insists that Putin is a guy of undeniable likes, handing out photographs of himself in the harshest way in the forests of Siberia, and denying that he owns palaces.
“Putin doesn’t want luxuries,” state TV host Dmitry Kiselyov said on his screen early last year after Navalny’s video investigation into the property.
Currency data leaks have also presented tantalizing clues about Putin’s proximity to wealth, even if he himself doesn’t seem to be in on it. The Panama Papers, a treasure trove of offshore legal company files that were exposed in 2016, revealed the secret wealth of many of his relatives, adding Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and longtime friend who earned more than $8 million a year, according to documents delivered to a Swiss bank. (He once told the New York Times: “I don’t have millions. »)
Last year, a new leak of files from corporations specializing in offshore tax havens, called the Pandora Papers, showed that the woman said to be Putin’s mistress had acquired the apartment in Monaco. It was one of many assets he had amassed worth about $100 million.
But at the end of the day, said Nate Sibley, a researcher with the Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative, Putin doesn’t want to own a huge fortune because he’s an autocrat who “controls everything. “
“When other people say this or that is worth it, what does that mean?” he asked. “Are they saying he will invest money and retire to Saint-Tropez?”
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