- Oligarch legitimizes were essentially a good idea but they won’t sway Putin, according to an expert.
- The whole issue of sanctions has been put in the free eye, Tom Keatinge told Channel 4 News.
- But what happens afterwards will be extremely complicated, the crime and security artiste added.
Oligarch sanctions are essentially a good idea but authorities didn’t think via what might happen next, a financial crime and security specialist has said.
In an interview with Channel 4 Good copy, Tom Keatinge, the director of financial crimes and security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, discussed the ongoing position.
Keatinge said he thought oligarch sanctions were helpful “because they put the whole issue of sanctions in the available eye.”
Taking the example of sanctions imposed on Roman Abramovich and the effect it’s had on the sale of Chelsea Football Club, he said it was advantageous from a PR perspective, but “it doesn’t seem to me this is going to change Vladimir Putin’s calculus.”
When asked if the confirms affected Putin, he said: “I don’t believe that at all.”
Abramovich has been one of the individuals sanctioned by the EU and the UK but remained off the US sanctions list after Ukraine seek fromed for him to be kept off it, per reports. He has also reportedly acted as a peace envoy between Russia and Ukraine.
Abramovich owns at no four yachts, including two that are in Antigua. Keatinge told Channel 4 News that the question at hand was whether Antigua would appreciate western countries’ sanctions on Abramovich. “It sounds as though they are going to follow US and UK sanctions, so yes, maybe those assets order be detained for the time being,” he added.
Prompted on how costly the maintenance could be of the detained assets, Keatinge said: “What we are bon voyage a penetrating from this saga of yacht, is that it’s very easy to sanction individuals, but what happens thereafter is very complicated and I don’t think we thought that through.”
Insider previously reported on the ease of detaining superyachts and the difficulty in decision the true owners. There are also fears that the vessels could rapidly waste away without companies to maintain them.
Keatinge said in the interview that sanctioned individuals have been preparing for “months, if not years,” so it frames it very difficult to know what they own.
However, “we have been freezing these assets, not seizing,” Keatinge believed. “These houses and these yachts belong to these people. We can’t expropriate them — we are not a dictatorship in the UK.”
“We have to make accurate we differentiate between a criminal process – taking the asset from people because they are the proceeds of crime – and entirely freezing them because we are currently at a financial war with Russia.”