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Statement from Roman Abramovich
- dakial1 5y agoRelevant: How Oligarchs use english football teams to launder money http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/9/investigation-reveals-football-used-to-launder-money-men-who-sell-football http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/9/investigation-reveals...
- fmajid 5y agoIt's quite remarkable that he is being allowed to sell Chelsea and his extensive property assets in Londongrad without the proceeds being frozen. Perhaps sanctions will be levied on him after he has finished leisurely sheltering his assets offshore. The British government and establishment is truly rotten to the core.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y agoFor context, it's rumored the loans mentioned in the statement are 1-2 Billion pounds.
- znkynz 5y agoI mean, it's not rumored - its there in black and white in the club financials: https://twitter.com/swissramble/status/1476816609851367431?lang=en https://twitter.com/swissramble/status/1476816609851367431?l... specifically, https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1476819216909099162 https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1476819216909099162 "CFC only have £30m debt in the football club, down from £47m prior year, though it should be noted that the holding company, Fordstam Limited, does have £1.4 bln of debt in the form of an interest-free loan from the owner, theoretically repayable on 18 months notice." This is from FY21, so will have shifted since then, of course.
- dljsjr 5y agoFor those of us that don't follow Premier League Football, what's the context here?
- haunter 5y agoOligarch, one of the richest russian businessman, a close ally to Yeltsin and Putin too [0] Few days ago revealed that because of the current situation he will hand over "the stewardship and care of Chelsea FC" to a foundation, then pretty much everyone on the board stepped away [1] Then today he announced he will sell the whole club instead 0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Abramovich#Relationship_with_Russian_leaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Abramovich#Relationship_... 1, https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/chelsea-foundation-trustees-report-roman-154748592.html https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/chelsea-foundation-trustees...
- wartijn_ 5y agoRoman Abramovich is a billionaire and the owner of Chelsea. The context is that he is Russian, Russia invaded Ukraine and now there are many calls to boycott Russian companies and block its oligarch from doing business outside of their home country.
- biesnecker 5y agoChelsea FC, one of the larger clubs in the Premiership, is owned by Roman Abramovich, one of the Russian oligarchs personally named as a target of sanctions as a result of Russia invading Ukraine. Given that, and the possibility that his assets in the UK will be seized, he's selling his stake in the club. It would be like if the Dallas Cowboys were actually based in Moscow and the Russians had made it impossible for Jerry Jones to do business there and so he was selling his stake in the team.
- desas 5y agoAbramovich bought Chelsea for £140million in 2003, they were frequently trophyless but one of the top 5-6 teams. Since then he's loaned them £1.5billion and they've won the premier league and European champions league multiple times. They're the current European and Club World Cup champions. The football club don't own the football stadium or the rights to the name, they're on a ~180 year lease from the fan-owned trust. Abramovich also owns some expensive property in London. MPs have been asking questions in parliament about why he hasn't been sanctioned given his close links to Putin, he has been named in the Navalny 35 and the US CAATSA His first step was to hand over the running of the club to a charitable foundation, but then the charity commission started asking questions about it, and the directors started stepping away.
- giarc 5y ago>Moreover, I have instructed my team to set up a charitable foundation where all net proceeds from the sale will be donated. The foundation will be for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine. That's quite the statement coming from one of Russia's biggest oligarch.
- duxup 5y agoHow likely is it to happen?
- nemo44x 5y agoI think it implies Ukrainian and Russian (and other!) people. It's very much not taking a stance and if anything agreeing that the war has to be done, people will unfortunately be hurt, and he plans on helping them all. But still supports the invasion.
- davrosthedalek 5y agoAt least he calls it a war. Something the state media in .ru is instructed not to do.
- vernie 5y agoCalling it a war is already a departure from Russia's "special military operation" messaging.
- axiosgunnar 5y agoHe might be referring to the """Ukraine nazi government war on the independent people's republics in the Donbas region"""
- vernie 5y agoFair point.
- adolph 5y agosed -e 's;"special military operation";"special" military operation;' Transported by short bus
- redwood 5y ago
- axiosgunnar 5y ago> The foundation will be for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine. Whoever formulated this is a PR genius. The West will read it as "the [Russian aggression] war in Ukraine". Putin can be made believe it meant "the [Ukrainian nazi government] war in [the Donbas region of] Ukraine".
- desas 5y agoThey don't call it a war in Russia, it's a "special military operation". Calling it a war is perhaps a small step away from Putin for Abramovich, or a mistake.
- axiosgunnar 5y agoOk, you make a good point.
- dylan604 5y agoIf I were Abramovich, I'd make sure my local hospitals had a supply of antidotes for the common toxins Russians have been known to use, and maybe ones that haven't been just yet.
- decebalus1 5y agoWhich shows that even the rich and powerful are a bunch of fucking cowards
- honkycat 5y agoThis war just makes 0 sense to me. Are things so horrible in Russia they feel they need to invade and subjugate another country? I realize you could make the same argument for the US invasion of Afganistan, or Iraq, or many many other idiotic blunders the US political class has made to undermine the US's ability to weigh in on these sorts of situations. I suppose the difference is that Ukraine is a healthy liberal democracy. But if you ask the people of these countries, I don't know if they would agree there is a difference at all. Not to get hung up on the hypocrisy of the US position. I'm more asking what Russia has to gain from this. It felt like we had a healthy trade relationship, and the Russian economy was supporting an educated middle class. What was the point of smashing all of that into pieces and destroying your country's stock market and currency?
- lnsru 5y agoLots of bad things can happen when one sits alone in bunker. On drugs, with some alcohol, health is declining. Whole world is threatening and isolating. One’s imaginary friends are laughing. It’s time to retaliate and show them all!
- xxpor 5y agoThe only plausible explanation I've heard (other than Putin is just mentally ill), is that Putin has gotten high on his own supply of propaganda. He truly believes that Ukraine is being run by Nazis, and the US/West are building up to a Russian invasion. Supposedly during Covid, it's gotten a lot worse due to Putin's extreme isolation tactics. He's been truly surrounded solely by yes men over the past 2 years.
- davrosthedalek 5y agoIt's a man who ordered the murder of several people via covert-but-clearly-attributable means. In his position, wouldn't you wonder if your tea is polonium-free? You have to get paranoid. The COVID isolation was too much -- just look at the size of that table. Or maybe he is terminally ill. Just by coincidence, I just read "Red War". Eerily similar story line.
- localhost 5y ago
- TedShiller 5y agoFor billionaires, philanthropy is simply PR
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> For billionaires, philanthropy is simply PR For the jaded, everything is PR. (For a PR person, everything is PR.) Just because something has PR benefits doesn't mean that's the primary purpose, or that the other benefits are somehow negated.
- bloodyplonker22 5y agoRight, then why are there so many anonymous huge donations?
- TedShiller 5y agoIf a donation is anonymous we don’t know who it’s from, so it can’t be PR by definition
- thundergolfer 5y ago“So many” feels like a misdirect using absolute numbers instead of percentages. Of the money and assets donated by billionaires, do you believe more than 10% of it is done so anonymously that no one ever finds out who donated?
- TedShiller 5y agoexactly lol
- outside1234 5y agoThe only just outcome of this is to seize the proceeds and put it in a trust fund for the Russian people after democracy is restored. This money was stolen from the Russian people and it should go back.
- nonamenoslogan 5y agoA tear rolls down John Terry's cheek.
- slibhb 5y agoIt's creepy to see how quickly people turned on Russian nationals living abroad. What exactly is an "oligarch" anyway? Someone with money? Someone with links to Putin? What kinds of links? I don't think punishing rich Russians living abroad even with some connection to Putin or the Russian government is helpful. It's likely illegal and the kind of thing that we'll look back upon as excessive.
- 0xB31B1B 5y ago"Oligarchs" are people who were friends with Boris Yeltsin in the 90s. USSR was collapsing, government upheaval, etc. In this period, the government of Russia sold off state owned enterprises for extremely cheap prices, fractions of a penny on the dollar, to Russian nationals. The state owned enterprises were things like mines, shipping companies, iron smelting, etc. The people who bought these state owned enterprises are "the oligarchs". They have extreme political power in Russia and own or have monopolistic control of huge parts of the Russian economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarch It's not a generic slur for "billionaire" its a much more specific term relating implicating them as beneficiaries in a kleptocratic system.
- slibhb 5y agoYou might not be using it "as a generic slur for billionaire" but lots of other people are. Further, according to many people, every rich person is a "beneficiary in a kleptocratic system".
- senko 5y agoThose people clearly do not live in countries in which this is literally true, like Russia and many Eastern European countries. Otherwise the difference would be blindingly obvious to them. Think Bezos is filthy rich? Imagine the president selling Library of Congress to him for the nominal price of the building(s) and paper stored. It's next level.
- rodgerd 5y agoThey aren't going to give your their money if you shill for them, you know.
- nindalf 5y agoContext for people unfamiliar with football/soccer: Roman Abramovich is a Russian oligarch who grew rich in the 90s by buying state owned companies at rigged auctions. He was close to the previous President Yeltsin and allegedly recommended that Yeltsin appoint Putin as his successor. His relations with Putin have remained cordial with Putin unlike some other oligarchs like Mikhail Khordokovsky, who crossed Putin and lost everything. Around the same time Abramovich used the proceeds of his dealings in Russia to buy London based football club Chelsea. It was speculated he wanted a productive asset that would be beyond Putin’s reach as well as building up a public profile so he couldn’t be disappeared like Khordokovsky. In the last 20 years, he has loaned around £1.5 billion of his money to the club because it made losses most of the time he owned it. This despite winning almost all available trophies at least once during that period. Still a sound investment, because the club he bought for £140 million is worth at least £2.5 billion today. There’s a few interesting things we can infer from this statement where he says he’s selling the club and giving all proceeds to victims of the war in Ukraine - Abramovich thinks that the war and sanctions are going to last a while. As someone with access to Putin, he must have realised that Putin isn’t planning to back down, and therefore neither is the US and EU. He can’t ride this one out. - he knows that sanctions are coming for him and most of his US and EU based assets are going to be seized. Might as well say you’re giving them to charity if they’re gone anyway - he retains some measure of control here. A charitable foundation with some trusted members controlling the money is preferable to control by Her Majesty’s Government. Ironic that he got the club to avoid seizure by Putin but it got seized in the end anyway.
- sam1r 5y agoThank you for this.
- yosito 5y agoMy first reaction was, "He lost it anyway, so why not make it look like a charitable donation that makes him look like one of the good guys?"
- bidirectional 5y agoDonating all of the proceeds to the victims of what he explicitly calls the war in Ukraine is quite a statement. It's not something one would do if they wanted to remain in Putin's graces.
- cjensen 5y agoAt first it was "this will be put into a trust" as if that solves the problem of the club being owned by an oligarch. Now it's "it will be sold but not fast-tracked and the proceeds given to a foundation." Why not just transfer it to a foundation along with the debts? The weasel-wording and slow-rolling gives the appearance of an attempt to evade consequences.
- 1-more 5y agoalso why does it need a new foundation? A foundation he controls (or controlled by someone he controls) is a cool way to get some money off his books but still control it.
- jayflux 5y ago> Why not just transfer it to a foundation along with the debts? That wouldn’t be a very responsible thing to do. How are the foundation going to service the debts? How can they prove they have the capital to both run the club and pay Roman back? It wouldn’t be possible. Chelsea runs at a loss which Roman just writes off most years, a foundation can’t do that.
- jacquesm 5y agoStalling to avoid outright seizure.
- benjaminwootton 5y agoThe guy is giving away £3 billion+ to charity and writing off a £1.5 billion loan, and yet the whole thread is looking for holes in the short statement. Nice gesture I say as he didn’t start the war.
- lr1970 5y ago> The guy is giving away £3 billion+ to charity and writing off a £1.5 billion loan Don't forget that all his wealth he obtained through stealing and corruption in the early days of russian robber capitalism (for a while he was a close associate of notorious Boris Berezovsky). Abramovitch is also rumored to be one of the putin's "purses" [0]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/21/is-abramovich-paying-price-for-being-too-close-to-putin https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/21/is-abramovich-...
- machineleaning 5y agoAlso, while he grew up in Russia and made his fortune there, he's lived in the West for almost 20 years now. The amount of influence he has over war-peace decisions in Russia is zero. He's not Timchenko or Rotenberg.
- s_dev 5y agoFrom an article on Sky News: >It is not clear if his reference to "all victims" means just Ukrainians, or Russians as well. I don't want to be cynical but this could be donated to "victims" in Russia. The Aggressor. Also the elephant in the room is why does he have 30 days to sell assets before sanctions. It should be frozen immediately.
- parthdesai 5y agoA common person in Russia isn't the aggressor. That's like blaming entire western population for the shit their government does. Russian ruble has tanked significantly, which means things in Russia are gonna cost way more for an average person.
- mcfedr 5y ago
- dylan604 5y agoWill this allow them to no longer be referred to as Chelski?
- james-redwood 5y agoAl-Chels is probably going to be the new one.
- SauciestGNU 5y agoOf course, only to probably go through all this again when MBS goes on a murderous tear that the Western media can't sweep under the rug.
- paxys 5y agoCalled it a war and basically took Ukraine's side. This guy isn't entering Russia anytime soon.
- tmalsburg2 5y agoExcept, perhaps, as Putin‘s successor?
- martinko 5y agoWas there just a few hours ago https://twitter.com/RUOligarchJets/status/1498678608524677128 https://twitter.com/RUOligarchJets/status/149867860852467712...
- alkonaut 5y agoThe positive: he calls it a war - which is a very clear distancing from Moscow. The more questionable: “all victims”. The correct call would be to clarify that all victims are on the Ukrainian side. That would have made an even clearer message against Putin too.
- sharikous 5y agoI don't get why we are so concerned with the purity of his heart. As I see it it pales near to his gesture and the simple fact that he (a Russian man, a friend of Putin, a person with a lot of personal and business connections to Russia) is doing it. I feel he is already beyond all expectations.
- alkonaut 5y agoI'm not that concerned about the purity of his actions but I'm concerned that e.g. something is claimed to be a charity and ends up actually being pouring every penny into the russian war machine as e.g. "help to russian veterans". I'm not saying that's the case, but I'm not exactly going to give an oligarch the benefit of the doubt.
- unmole 5y ago> all victims are on the Ukrainian side. So, a Russian conscript, beaten into submission and then sent off to fight a war against people who might as well be his cousins. If this conscript is killed in action, is he not a victim?
- alkonaut 5y agoCould be, but he shouldn't be helped in Russia in that case. They should be given incentives to surrender (as is already the case - but it needs to be extended). Providing those who return from the war in russia, no matter how poorly informed or treated they were with any support sends the completely wrong signal.
- ledauphin 5y agoto me, this sounds ominously like Abramovich doesn't think he'll be spending much time in the UK over the next few years. In other words, the situation in Russia has spun out of control even for the oligarchs.
- mudil 5y agoNavalny 35 (aka Navalny's List https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navalny_35 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navalny_35) is a group of Russian "human rights abusers, kleptocrats, and corruptioners". The list been created by the Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation. Abramovich is on the top of the list. This list is a primary starting focus of Western govs to sanction Putin cronies. I hope Abramovich et al loose everything, not only for this war, but for robbing Russia and its people of their natural resources wealth.