Back at the start of 2022, Roman Abramovich was sanctioned for his connections to Vladimir Putin as Russia began their invasion of Ukraine.
Those sanctions led directly to him having to sell Chelsea, with the money from that sale supposedly going to victims of the war, but instead as of today remaining frozen in a bank account as the UK government decides how to proceed.
Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph have today announced that Abramovich is going to protest his sanctions in the European Court of Justice. Chelsea are intimately connected with this, because the argument made by Abramovich’s lawyers is that he is being punished for being a well known Russian – and the reason that he is a well known Russian is that he owns Chelsea.
Their argument is quoted as running thus:
“Ask yourselves, when the war started, did the most famous Russian individual stand a chance against the restrictive measures? Did the fact that he had lived, worked, and invested in the west for over 20 years and during that time been an upstanding citizen in each community grant him any due process prior to these measures being imposed?
“The answer is no, because as we will demonstrate today, he was not sanctioned because of evidence relating to the criteria, he was sanctioned simply because politically, the most famous Russian businessman had to be even if this is a manifest of error.”
It seems that our name will continue to be associated with all this for some time to come.
