AS Monaco has published a press release on its official website Wednesday, announce that the Monegasque club, via its Russian owner Dmitri Rybolovlev, had donated a large sum to the Red Cross to help the Ukrainian people directly affected by the conflict.

“Responding to the appeal launched by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), AS Monaco and its president Dmitri Rybolovlev, in a personal capacity, made donations to the Monegasque Red Cross, in order to come to the aid of civilian populations who will avoid armed conflict in Ukraine”indicates the press release from the Principality club.

This same press release concludes with a statement by Dmitri Rybolovlev: “It is absolutely necessary to support those who support the most,” he stresses. This is why AS Monaco, Cercle Brugge (held by ASM) and myself, as well as different companies in which the Rybolovlev family trust is invested, have decided to make donations in order to provide humanitarian aid”.

Neither the club nor the Rybolovlev family trust wished to communicate on the amount of this donation, qualified however as “consequent”.

Rybolovlev absent from EU list

Majority shareholder of AS Monaco since 2011 and Monegasque resident since this period, Dmitri Rybolovlev disappeared from Russia in 2010. He has a Cypriot passport and his name does not appear in the lists of Russian personalities whose European Union has frozen assets.

His fortune, estimated at more than six billion euros, comes mainly from the forced sale of his shares in Uralkali, a global potash giant, of which he was the majority shareholder, to relatives of Vladimir Putin in 2010.