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“Today, for the first time, our task force is seizing assets belonging to a sanctioned individual with close ties to the Russian regime. It won’t be the last,” Garland said in a statement with Assistant Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray. “Together with our international partners, we will do everything we can to hold accountable any person whose criminal acts enable the Russian government to continue its unjust war.”
Sanctions were imposed on Vekselberg and the company he founded, Renova Group, by the Treasury Department in April 2018 after Western intelligence officials blamed Russia for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.
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Vekselberg was hit again after Russia invaded Ukraine under new sentences imposed by the US government on March 11, which included him, three family members of Putin’s spokesman, 12 members of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, and 10 People on the board of VTB called Bank, the second largest lender in Russia.
All of Vekselberg’s assets in the United States are frozen and US companies are barred from doing business with him and his companies, which the Treasury Department says have metals, mining, technology and other assets with a net worth in excess of US$6 billion -Dollars belong to department.
Vekselberg was also included in a list of 50 Russian elites compiled on March 16 by the department the United States considered the top priority for a new multinational body-hunting fortune for Kremlin supporters, dubbed Task Force Russian Elites, Proxies and Oligarchs (REPO).
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The warrant states that despite his status as a sanctioned person, Vekselberg and those working on his behalf made payments in US dollars to support the Tango and its owner, including for a stay in December 2020 at a luxury water villa resort in The Maldives.
The new international task force is a key tool for the United States and more than half a dozen of its allies to identify and track where Russian oligarchs are parking their fortunes, a task made more difficult by the opaque or complicated financial instruments used commonly used by the United States ultra-rich to hide their holdings from the public.
“In a war that is partly about morale on both sides, the sight of Russian oligarchs being confiscated and auctioned off – the sight of the police in their mansions, in their luxury apartments – is going to be a tremendous pain to Ukrainians and Russians who hate Putin Giving lift,” Rep. Tom Malinowski (DN.J.) said last month. “This is one of the ways we can weaken this regime’s support structure… The more we make the sanctions act like a shock and awe campaign, the better.”
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The Treasury released 28 of the 50 names on the list — including Putin — but didn’t name the 22 others so as not to give them a clue.
France, Italy and Spain have seized several boats belonging to billionaires in recent weeks, while others dating back to Russia’s wealthiest have weighed anchor for the Maldives, which has no extradition treaty with the United States or is stranded in European ports seem who can’t buy fuel.
France on March 2 seized a yacht in a Mediterranean port near Marseille whose main shareholder was Igor Sechin, head of Rosneft, Russia’s state-controlled oil giant. Spanish authorities on March 15 seized another ship — the 440-foot Crescent — in Catalonia said to belong to Sechin.
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Spain has also seized a $140 million 280-foot yacht registered to the stepdaughter of Sergei Chemezov, a former KGB officer who runs state defense conglomerate Rostec and who lives with his wife and stepdaughter US sanctions lists.
Italy has reportedly seized at least three yachts – ships worth up to $580 million each – owned by Russian steel, oil and coal tycoons who have been hit by sanctions.
However, according to CBS News, a satellite image shows a yacht said to belong to Putin docked in a Russian port — and out of reach of any potential sanctions or confiscations.
The Justice Department said Monday’s seizure was coordinated by an interagency KleptoCapture task force responsible for sanctions, export restrictions and economic countermeasures against Russia, which Garland announced on March 2 of sanctioned individuals.
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Vekselberg was born in western Ukraine in 1957 to a Jewish father who lost several relatives in the Holocaust. Dollar Pied-a-Terre in New York City and a $5 million home in Weston, Connecticut.
A former state laboratory researcher, Vekselberg joined the rush to take over parts of Russia’s privatized extractive sector after the collapse of the Soviet empire in the 1990s, eventually founding the Swiss-headquartered oil and metals conglomerate Renova Group.
He temporarily became Russia’s richest man with an estimated fortune of $18 billion in 2012 when he sold his majority stake in a joint venture with British oil giant BP to Kremlin-controlled Rosneft. He’s also president of the state-funded Skolkovo Technology Developers Foundation, rumored to be Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley.
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Vekselberg was among the Russian businessmen close to the Kremlin whose ties to Donald Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign were being investigated by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Vekselberg and Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, met with Vekselberg’s cousin Andrew Intrater, a New York investment manager, days before the 2017 inauguration at Trump Tower in New York. Later that month, Cohen signed a lucrative consulting deal with Columbus Nova, Intrater’s investment firm.
Vekselberg has been active in Russian cultural and philanthropic circles, and in 2004 he bought nine Fabergé eggs from the Forbes family for $900 million. Once prized possessions of the tsars, the eggs were looted when the Bolsheviks came to power over a century ago, and returned to Russia as a patriotic gesture by a person who reportedly owns more of the tiny, jeweled treasures than anyone other person, some of which were later exhibited in the Kremlin and St. Petersburg.