The Treasury Department imposed penalties on Petr Aven, Mikhail Fridman, German Khan and Alexey Kuzmichev, billionaires behind the Alfa Group financial services conglomerate.
The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday imposed sanctions on Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, two Russian billionaires behind Alfa Group, a prominent financial services firm — a sign that the Biden White House is trying to increase pressure on Russian elites who have carved out international profiles while maintaining business operations in Russia.
Until Friday, the two men’s cultivation of allies in the West appeared to have helped keep them off the U.S. sanctions list. Aven had spent much of the past year and a half since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at his residence in the Hamptons in New York, while Fridman has been living in a mansion in Highgate, in north London, while mounting his legal challenge against the sanctions.
The report cited Russian government contracts as showing that Alfa-Bank had provided loans to a slew of Russian defense enterprises, including a major bullet producer in Tula at the height of the war last year, and currently has credit lines extended to the Uralsky Optiko-Mekhanichesky plant, an optical-systems maker for Russian bombers, and to raw-materials suppliers for nuclear weapon and missile producers.
The Alfa Group billionaires have long maintained a delicate balance between their business operations and relationships in the West, and their business interests in Russia. They funneled a large part of the $14 billion in proceeds from the 2014 sale of their stake in TNK-BP, a Russian oil concern, into international investments spanning retail to energy. Both have stressed that they are politically neutral.
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