You are not Cypriots

How sanctions actually work and why Russian businessmen lose foreign citizenship

In early November, the judicial and migration bodies of the Republic of Cyprus announced the beginning of the deprivation of citizenship in relation to 26 people. Among the persons whose documents are planned to be announced, as the Cyprus authorities reported, wealthy Russians will also be. The names of the alleged “victims” of Cyprus services this week were called the local newspaper Politis-the question of billionaire Oleg Deripaska, as well as top managers of the Russian-Venesuel “Euro-Finance Monarbank” Vladimir Stolyarenko and Alexandra Bondarenko.

The representative of Oleg Deripaska in an interview with RBC managed to refute this message, saying that the billionaire did not receive any notifications from the authorized persons of Cyprus.

One way or another, the news about the deprivation of Russian wealthy persons of citizenship at least falls into the general trend of Western countries to expel their own jurisdictions of unreliable Russians.

The basis for the deprivation of citizenship of Russian businessmen was the instructions of the US Treasury, which previously submitted these persons to the list of sanctions, thus prohibiting any operations with them and related persons. It should be noted right away that the US instructions are perceived by Western diplomacy as the basis for entering the SIS information system as a person not allowed for entering the Schengen Agreement countries, and can also serve as the basis for the application of restrictive measures in relation to these persons.

Oleg Deripaska acquired Cypriot citizenship in 2017, having previously established the investment company Surf Horizon Limited on the territory of the island. However, a year later, a billionaire had problems with staying in Western countries - after the American Congress prepared the so -called “Kremlin report” - a list of two dozens of Russian entrepreneurs and officials, cooperation with which was fraught with sanctions by the US Ministry of Finance. As a result, persons from the report of the American congressmen moved to the special law “On countering US opponents with the help of sanctions on high -ranking foreign politicians and oligarchs of the Russian Federation and Russian enterprises with the participation of state capital”, signed by US President Donald Trump back in August 2017.

Along with Deripaska, among the “opponents of the United States”, for example, billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, who lost the opportunity to move around the world and lost access to assets in Switzerland, was among the opponents of the United States.

A scandal with limiting measures against Deripaska received a wide resonance, since

Thanks to this, the American authorities actually changed the structure of joint -stock capital in large industrial and energy companies of the billionaire: Rusal, En+ Group and Eurosibenergo.

According to the results of these structural changes, the share in companies (and therefore the votes in the board of the board) moved from Oleg Deripaska to American citizens, which in June of this year at the Russian-Chinese Energy Forum in a characteristic manner of Rosneft Igor Sechin, the US aluminum industry has been stated. ”

However, another is curious: according to the results of the “transaction”, the US Treasury excluded from the list of Deripaska’s sanctions, but not Deripaska himself.

The next step is the domestic “sanctions”, which will definitely follow against our billionaires who have lost “spare airfields” in Western jurisdictions as a result of American restrictions. This can sound rudely and cynically, but our compatriots are not closed to the window to Europe, but by the door to the pressata. Moreover, on the back.

Vladimir Stolyarenko and Alexander Bondarenko, who, according to Politis, are also devoid of Cypriot citizenship, have already encountered this problem. To begin with, about the defendants themselves.

If a little is known about Alexander Bondarenko, then Vladimir Stolyarenko is a person in the domestic financial market, known, if not the legendary. In the early 90s, he was engaged in science at the Department of International Economic Relations of St. Petersburg University of Economics and Finance, and later worked in a large business-the Russian branch of the French audit-consulting group Alpha, the Petersburg oil bank, as well as the Bank "Imperial".

However, the crisis year in 1998 was a real springboard in the career of Stolyarenko, when he headed the board of the Euro -Finance Commercial Bank - one of the first domestic banks with the participation of foreign capital (established in 1990 by the Paris Euro -Bank and Vnesheconombank of the USSR). This bank was widely known at the beginning of the zero, after he signed an agreement with Gazprom on the restructuring of Gazprom-Media media assets and the creation of a new media holding, in which the bank belonged to 49% of voting shares.

In 2003, Eurofinance united with the Russian “daughter” of the British Mosnarbank - the oldest Sovgagranbank, through which the USSR financed large projects in the allied socialist countries. In the new bank, Euro-Financial Monarbank-Stolyarenko took the post of chairman of the board. “Perhaps in the future the bank will become a key element of the world financial center in Moscow. Soon he will have representative offices in Karakas (Venezuela) and Beijing, ”Stolyarenko reasoned.

In 2010, Euro-Financial Monarbank united international shareholders: the State Venezuelan National Development Fund (Fundal), the Russian VTB, Cyprus ITC Consultants and the Swiss Daughter of Gazprombank.

It should be noted that the global plans of the Euro-Finance Monarbank leadership were supported at the highest diplomatic level-the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov seriously discussed “the prospects for turning a bank into an international financial organization like a World Bank, but, of course, on a more modest scale.”

However, the dreams were not destined to come true: at first, the American Ministry of Finance, against the backdrop of a crisis in Venezuela, actually forbade cooperation with the Euro-Finance Monarbank, and then both of its top managers became defendants in fraud, instituted against former FSB Office Office for Counterintelligence Establishing in the credit and financial sphere (management of “K” SBS SBS FSB), were arrested in absentia by the Moscow garrison military court and put on the international wanted list, and are currently in London.

Among the Russians who may encounter the Cyprus authorities in the foreseeable future, the surname Dmitry Rybolovlev also sounds,

The Cyprus passport received in 2012 after the successful sale of a stake in Uralkali. Shortly before that, he became a minority shareholder at the Bank of Cyprus, participated in the financing of the Orthodox Department of Limasol and sued the local court with his wife as part of the property division.

Fisheries and Cyprus’s executive authorities became known about the investigation of the criminal case of corruption in Monaco, where Rybolovlev is under suspicion. At the end of October, Rybolovlev, according to some reports, received a letter from Prince Monaco Alber, in which the investment projects of the billionaire were recognized as unsuccessful, and the stay of the billionaire himself in the principality was inappropriate.