(Bloomberg) -- Russian billionaire Petr Aven’s estate manager has agreed to forfeit more than £750,000 ($963,260) to end a near-two year investigation by British police over sanctions dodging.
Thousands of pounds in cash seized at Aven’s mansion outside London was also handed over under “proceeds of crime” legislation, Annabel Darlow, a lawyer for the National Crime Agency said in a London court on Monday.
The NCA had accused Aven of being a “pro-Kremlin oligarch” who’d acquired his wealth in the last days of the Soviet regime, an allegation denied by his lawyers.
The billionaire is separately seeking to lift the UK sanctions against him. Aven’s personal beliefs put him in “a position of opposition to the current regime,” his lawyer, Hugo Keith said at Westminster Magistrates Court.
The money, held in bank accounts at HSBC Holdings Plc and Monzo Bank Ltd., was forfeited after Aven’s wife and his estate team accepted that the funds were either “recoverable property or were intended for use in unlawful conduct,” according to a court order.
Aven himself has no UK bank account but was suspected of using those held by his wife and estate management firms as a personal “piggy bank” to fund his lifestyle, lawyers for the NCA said previously.
The investigation focused on around £3.7 million routed to the UK from an Austrian trust in the hours before European sanctions were imposed.
The NCA had previously demanded that Aven forfeit as much as £1.2 million, according to the court order.
“The NCA’s first successful forfeiture of funds from an investigation into the proceeds of alleged sanctions evasion is a major milestone that should spur greater ambition for future sanctions enforcement action,” James Bolton-Jones, a senior advocacy adviser at Spotlight on Corruption, said in a statement.
The NCA, which started out as an agency focused on organized crime, has retooled to target the outsize influence of oligarchs and their enablers. It set up what it called a Kleptocracy Unit to tackle the problem and sought to target those who have proximity to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
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