A billionaire against the Kremlin List: Forbes rating participant demanded that it be excluded from among the oligarchs

The first lawsuit was filed against the American court against the US Treasury from the Russian billionaire demanding to exclude it from the Kremlin List. The plaintiff, the owner of the American IPG Photonics company and a participant in the Russian Forbes list, Valentin Gaponsev, complains that due to undeserved inclusion in the list, he lost American business partners.

• In the lawsuit against the US Treasury and personally, his head Stevens, Mnuchin Gaponites, demands to recognize the decision to include him in the “Kremlin list” of the oligarchs, published in January 2018, and exclude it from the list. Gaponsev complains that the American authorities did not conduct a serious investigation when compiling a list, but simply reprinted the first hundred of the Russian Forbes list, and the businessman, who has been living in the United States since 1998, is least suitable for the role of an “oligarch close to Putin”. As a result of the billionaire’s list, there were problems with counterparties and officials who considered that they could no longer work with the IPG Photonics - even though the inclusion in the “Kremlin list” itself does not mean imposing sanctions.
• The most problems in IPG arose with companies working on American state contracts. They said that, in their opinion, after including the owner, they could not work with IPG, the lawsuit said. At least one large international database for checking counterparties, Visual Compliance, marked Gapontsev as a potentially problem businessman. This deprived IPG potential orders. The company also encountered problems with banks, which, after including Gapontsev, began to conduct additional checks of the company in the list. All these problems are aggravated by the fact that in the sanctions bills Deter ACT and DASKA ACT, which the Congress will consider this year, the introduction of sanctions against “Russian oligarchs” says, lawyers write.
• The Kremlin Report with the application in the form of officials and businessmen, "close to Putin", was published in late January. Its compilation was the requirement of the Caatsa sanctions law signed by Donald Trump in August 2017. The list of businessmen fully repeats the top 100 relevant at that time rating of billionaires of Russian Forbes. The report does not imply any sanctions against its participants, but businessmen who fell on the list complained about problems with banking compliance and the wary attitude of partners and counterparties who are afraid of US secondary sanctions.
• Gaponsev is really one of the most “undeserved” (if I may say so) participants in the list of oligarchs. A former employee of the Soviet Research Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics left Russia back in 1995, at first he worked in Germany, and in 1998 he registered the IPG company in the United States, which by the beginning of the 2010s controlled 80% of the global market of industrial fiber lasers. Forbes estimates the state of Gaponsev at $ 3 billion.

What am I to me?

The outcome of Gapontsev’s trial with the US Ministry of Finance will probably closely monitor dozens of other defendants in the “Kremlin report” - if the billionaire manage to achieve exception from the list, you can expect new claims. It will be much more difficult to achieve justification to those businessmen who eventually fell under sanctions. Victor Vekselberg has already stated the intention to challenge them in court.