The penthouse overlooking Central Park made headlines in New York. The 650-square-meter apartment broke a record in 2011 as the most expensive in the city until then, when it changed ownership for US$ 88 million. The buyer? Russian oligarch Dmitri Ribolovlev, fertilizer billionaire.
The room, he explained, would accommodate his daughter enrolled at a university in Manhattan. Ribolovlev — who in 2008 had bought from Donald Trump and immediately demolished a Florida mansion for such an inflated amount that he left no doubt about money laundering in the transaction — has so far escaped sanctions on oligarchs imposed by the US, UK and Union. European.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has proved to be the most witnessed real-time war in history. The instant visual documentation of razed cities, fleeing mobs and bombed hospitals sparked a global wave of outrage and solidarity.
There are those who believe that it also awoke the West from the apathy with which it accommodated the most recent emergence of populist fascism, whether in Washington, London, Budapest or Brasilia.
If tortured Ukraine emerges independent of Vladimir Putin’s extermination campaign, it is unlikely that the Moscow dictator’s suddenly pious facilitators will examine his role in the period leading up to the invasion. For more than 30 years, the buccaneers who looted the Russian treasury between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union have laundered and housed their fortunes in metropolises that boast of being bastions of democracy.
London acquired the nickname Londongrad when it had Boris Johnson in its mayor’s office — infamous for receiving a political donation of $270,000 for a tennis match with the wife of Russian banker Lubov Chernukhin.
In a letter sent to the Financial Times this week, a former British military attaché at the Moscow embassy scolded his compatriots who said they were surprised by the decision to invade Ukraine. “We prepared regular reports on the inevitability of conflict,” writes Carl Scott, who served in the Russian capital from 2011 to 2016.
Putin, he sensibly argues, has never hidden his intentions. It wasn’t until he returned to the Brexit-divided UK — which Russian intelligence famously promoted — that he says he understood how much the financial market had corrupted British foreign policy.
In a leafy, affluent town 30 kilometers from Manhattan, executives at Concord Management, a wealth management firm, are scrambling to avoid the unwanted attention brought by sanctions imposed on their client Roman Abramovich, the billionaire oligarch who was forced to divest from Chelsea FC.
A New York Times report showed that Concord is just one example in the network of American companies and law firms that have facilitated the injection of illicit Russian fortunes into hedge funds and investment brokerages.
The spectacle of impounded yachts and locked up mansions in Europe and the US satisfies the gratification impulse in these times of exploding inequality and pandemic exhaustion. But funding for the tragedy in Ukraine has grown close to addresses that do not fear bombing.
