how is the hunt for Russian oligarchs organized in France?
A new yacht of a Russian oligarch immobilized yesterday in Spain, or frozen assets. So many sanctions from the European Union supposed to curb Russian ardor in Ukraine. Pour as much, hard to imagine behind the scenes of this unprecedented hunt. The main targets are the oligarchs, they are in fact politicians, senior military officers, but also and above all business leaders close to power.
Very rich, sometimes at the head of fortunes of tens of billions of euros, some are part of the first circle of Vladimir Putin: childhood friends, comrades of his judo club or even ex-colleagues of the KGB. Others do not know him directly. Friends of friends who at one time provided a business boost like the awarding of juicy government contracts.
On the blacklist of the European Union, they are about 900 to be targeted, but the list is regularly expanded. Names are added almost daily. Their assets are frozen, which means that they no longer have access to all their assets in Europe. Their financial assets first : their bank accounts, their rents, their shares in companies. Everything is blocked.
But also, and this is new, material goods : yachts, apartments, villas especially on the French Riviera, private jets. Or even works of art and even sometimes vineyards, in Saint-Emilion for example, as explained by Olivier Dargans, a lawyer specializing in economic sanctions: “it means that concretely a boat will be forced to stay at the quay, but that it will still belong to the oligarch. The day these sanctions are lifted, the oligarch will be able to take his boat out of the port of Saint-Tropez or will be able to deposit the seals that will have been placed on his property at Cap d’Antibes.” , he explains.
French services are struggling to get their hands on all the goods
To track down and flush out all that rests those close to Putin in France, Bercy has set up a “intervention force”, a special team made up of several dozen people. The exact quantity of frozen goods is not known, it is confidential, Bercy tells us. It’s actually three times nothing. The reality is that services are having a hard time getting results.
The oligarchs have done everything for years, at Putin’s request, to make the search ultra complex, in particular by never buying in their name, says lawyer Olivier Dargans: “an oligarch will, for example, buy a villa in Cape Town d’Antibes. He is going to set up a civil real estate company that he is going to domicile in Monaco. And then you go to several companies that are going to be domiciled in tax havens and which can sometimes be in the name of their wife or their child, or even of their relative. We know that, for example, the ex-wife of Vladimir Poutine has a villa in Biarritz, but the French government is not able to prove that it belongs to him and that it can be seized”, he continues.
If 10% of the assets of the oligarchs in France are discovered, “it will be a great victory”, says a specialist. It is also this opacity that makes it impossible to quantify the heritage of those close to Putin in France. On the other hand, there is no doubt about the unit of measurement: it it is indeed the hundred billion euros.
A symbolic procedure?
Showing a yacht worth 500 million immobilized, whether in La Ciotat, Italy or Spain, makes for beautiful images. But in fact, they are still the property of Putin’s friends, which makes certain associations say that France and Europe do not go far enough.
We have to carry out investigations, prove that the goods are bought with dirty money and seize them. This is what Sarah Brimbeuf, a money laundering specialist at the NGO Transparency Internationale, wants: “in this context, the purpose of the seizure is confiscation, so we withdraw the definitive property. Indeed, the seizure can have an impact in terms of deprivation of property that goes much further than freezing. It is a symbol of justice and this money can be used to repair Ukraine after the war,” she said.
The main objective is therefore to make life in Europe impossible for the Russian oligarchs. Create frustration by depriving them of part of their fortune and hope to turn them against the master of the Kremlin.