Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich trying to find ‘peaceful resolution’ to Ukraine crisis, allies say

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Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich is trying to broker a deal end to the war in Ukraine and has already arrived in Belarus to assist in peace talks, it has today been reported.

The Russian-Israeli billionaire is believed to have flown into the eastern European country ahead of crunch talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials later today.

The businessman has come under pressure to speak out following the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s forces.

And there have been calls in Parliament for him to face sanctions as a major oligarch ‘with links to the Russian state’.

On Saturday, amid the mounting pressure, Mr Abramovich announced plans to hand over the stewardship of his beloved Chelsea to the club’s charitable trust.

But today, in a surprising move, a spokesman for the club revealed that the businessman has been ‘trying to help’ in brokering a peace deal 

‘I can confirm that Roman Abramovich was contacted by the Ukrainian side for support in achieving a peaceful resolution, and that he has been trying to help ever since,’ a Chelsea spokesman said.

‘Considering what is at stake, we would ask for your understanding as to why we have not commented on neither the situation as such nor his involvement.’ 

According to the Jerusalem Post, Mr Abramovich is already in Belarus, where delegations from Russia and Ukraine are today set to meet on the border town of Gomel.

Ukraine’s Ambassador to Israel Yevgen Kornichuk told the news site he would not comment specifically on Abramovich’s involvement in the talks.

However he added: ‘We appreciate anyone who can help, if he has enough influence.’ 

Mr Abramovich’s involvement is said to have followed a request from Ukrainian film producer Alexander Rodnyansky. 

No further details have been released about his role, although it was acknowledged his influence was ‘limited’.

‘I can confirm that the Ukrainian side have been trying to find someone in Russia willing to help them in finding a peaceful resolution,’ Mr Rodnyansky said.

‘They are connected to Roman Abramovich through the Jewish community and reached out to him for help.

‘Roman Abramovich has been trying to mobilize support for a peaceful resolution ever since.

‘Although Roman Abramovich’s influence is limited, he is the only one who responded and taken it upon himself to try.

‘If this will have an impact or not, I don’t know, but I am in contact with (Ukraine President Volodymyr) Zelensky’s staff myself, and know that they are grateful for his genuine efforts.’

Mr Abramovich stepped back from day-to-day running of Chelsea on Saturday night, handing stewardship to the west London club’s charitable foundation trustees.

In a statement posted on the club’s website on Saturday he said: ‘During my nearly 20-year ownership of Chelsea FC, I have always viewed my role as a custodian of the Club, whose job it is ensuring that we are as successful as we can be today, as well as build for the future, while also playing a positive role in our communities. 

‘I have always taken decisions with the Club’s best interest at heart. I remain committed to these values. That is why I am today giving trustees of Chelsea’s charitable Foundation the stewardship and care of Chelsea FC.

‘I believe that currently they are in the best position to look after the interests of the Club, players, staff, and fans.’

The statement was followed by a seperate 24-word club statement on Sunday, which described the conflict as ‘horrific and devastating’.

‘Chelsea FC’s thoughts are with everyone in Ukraine. Everyone at the club is praying for peace,’ the club added.

Mr Abramovich has been the owner of Chelsea since 2003 and since his arrival has seen a transformation in the fortunes of the west London side from bit-part title challengers to five-time league winners and two-time European champions.

The trustees of the Chelsea Foundations are Bruce Buck, John Devine, Emma Hayes, Piara Powar, Seb Coe and Hugh Roberston. 

In the Commons last week, Labour former minister Chris Bryant called for Mr Abramovich to be banned from owning the club.

He highlighted a leaked 2019 Home Office document which said that Mr Abramovich ‘remains of interest to HMG (Her Majesty’s Government) due to his links to the Russian state and his public association with corrupt activity and practices’.  

Mr Abramovich vehemently denies he is close to the Kremlin or has done anything that would merit sanctions being imposed against him.  

Reports last week suggested Mr Abramovich effectively barred from living in Britain ever again. 

Though the Russian businessman was spotted cheering on Chelsea during its Club World Cup triumph in Abu Dhabi earlier this month, the billionaire has not been seen at his Premier League football club’s south-west London home, Stamford Bridge, for some time.

He withdrew his application for a British Tier 1 investor visa in 2018, after reported delays in his application following criticism of Russian oligarchs in the wake of the Salisbury poisonings. 

According to The Sun, senior security sources now say it is unlikely that the 55-year-old will ever be allowed to live in Britain again.

Immigration officials are reportedly under instructions to make it impossible for Mr Abramovich – who owns a £125million mansion near Kensington Palace – to base himself in the UK. 

His case is said to be being handled by the Home Office’s ‘Special Cases Unit’.

In 2018 Mr Abramovich became an Israeli citizen, allowing him to enter for Britain for up to six months. 

He used his Israeli passport last October to make a short trip to London. 

However, a senior source told The Sun that any attempt by the oligarch to apply for a permanent visa would ‘almost certainly be rejected’.

Mr Abramovich has an estimated wealth of £8.4billion. As well as his huge property portfolio, he also owns a series of superyachts, including the £450million Solaris, which has a missile detection system. 

Mr Abramovich has never held UK citizenship and made his money selling assets purchased from the state when the Soviet Union broke up. 

How Roman Abramovich went from penniless orphan to one of the world’s richest men boasting superyachts and London mega-mansions as he gives up control of Chelsea while accused of being one of Putin’s ‘key enablers’ 

By James Gant for MailOnline

He is best known in Britain for being the secretive Chelsea FC owner who would while away the hours cheering on his superstars at Stamford Bridge.

But Roman Abramovich, who last night ceded ‘stewardship’ of the top-flight team to the club’s charitable foundation, has a checkered history as an oligarch and alleged crony of Vladimir Putin.

The billionaire has been embroiled in court battles throughout the last 20 years, including allegations of blackmail, bribery and loan fraud.

He has also been questioned over his links to the Russian president, with him last year denying in court he was Putin’s ‘cashier’ in the West – but is still seen as one of his ‘enablers’.

Until recently he had mostly lived his hugely privileged life in peace, either onboard his superyachts, in his mansions or on one of the private jets that make up his £8.4billion empire.

He has also found time to create a large family, including seven children – Ilya, Arina, Sofia, Arkadiy, Anna, Aaron and Leah – from two of his three ex-wives.

But he is now under threat after Putin invaded Ukraine, which swiftly brought calls for Abramovich to face sanctions and have his beloved west London football team stripped from him.

Last night the tycoon released a cryptic statement handing over Chelsea FC to the trustees of the club’s charitable foundation. He gave them ‘stewardship’ of the side but it is understood he still retains control.

The businessman, 55, had a remarkable rise to make his billions, having been born a penniless orphan in Saratov, south west Russia. He was instead raised by his grandparents in Komi, Siberia, from the age of four.

He started off flogging plastic dolls on a market stall after dropping out of two colleges, but has been accused of using ruthless determination to become one of the richest men in the world before he was 40.

His first move into making serious money came during the perestroika – meaning openness – reforms as the Soviet Union started to wind down under Mikhail Gorbachev.

The changes loosened the regime’s grip on businesses, meaning oligarchs could rise by making their firms legal and buy up state-owned companies.

Yet Abramovich was arrested in 1992, having allegedly used false documents to get 55 tankers of diesel, before the charges were dropped.

He said of the incident in 2011: ‘I have never falsified any documents. None of the people close to me has ever faked a document.’

He added: ‘If backdating documents is something that is not very ethical, then perhaps we could be accused of that.

‘This practice existed in Russia and, for sure, we must have done it. In the course of this case we say that certain documents have been signed two days early, or not.’

His fortune boomed when he linked up with Boris Berezovsky, who run the national car dealer firm Lada, but who was also close with President Boris Yeltsin.

It gave the rising businessman key access, which was pivotal to making huge sums in post-Soviet Russia, and he even lived in a flat in the Kremlin.

When the USSR’s industry was carved up at the top table, Abramovich was there to make his first few billions – mainly by buying up oil company Sibneft.

Berezovsky and Abramovich purchased the firm for just £100million using the controversial loans-for-shares program – when it was estimated to be worth around £600million.

It was the starting blocks for the tycoon’s huge wealth, with him raking back around £1.8billion from the sale of Sibneft.

The bulk of Abramovich’s UK wealth is to be found in Evraz, a steel and mining giant listed on the London stock market, which he is the largest shareholder.

Aside from business, Abramovich also worked in politics, becoming the governor of the far eastern Chukotka region in 2000 – after winning 92 per-cent of the vote – and pumped £180million into it.

He first came on the radar to ordinary Britons when he bought Chelsea football club in 2003, and put enough money on the table to help them compete.

He transformed the team from outside challengers to a Premier League giant with the help of Jose Mourinho and huge signings such as Didier Drogba.

Despite being highly secretive and preferring a life out of the spotlight, the billionaire has still led a glitzy lifestyle, with superyachts and private planes aplenty.

His two jets, which have two pilots reportedly on £160,000 a year, are personalised inside with a study and supposedly a bedroom with a mirror on the ceiling.

Once asked if the mirror helped improve his sex life, Abramovich replied: ‘No, but it does allow me to shave in bed.’

He also had three Eurocopter helicopters, two of them that were based in England, which meant he could avoid congestion in London. The helicopter pilots were also reportedly paid around £90,000 per year.

The billionaire is said to be less keen on road travel, but still boasted a range of stunning cars including a Ferrari, two Maybach limos, a Porche and a Rolls-Royce.

Meanwhile his property portfolio was also extensive – and expansive. In London, he created a five-storey town house in Belgravia by knocking six flats into one, making the house worth around £150million.

There was a £35million house in St Tropez, south of France, and he also owns homes in Russia, Sardinia, France, the West Indies and the US.

Abramovich lost a number of properties during his 2007 divorce from his second wife Irina, with whom he has five children.

She bagged a £30million home on the Riviera called Chateau de la Croe as well as an estate in Sussex called Fyning Hill, which Abramovich had bought for £18million.

She fared better than his first wife, Olga, who he married when he was still a penniless student back in the Soviet Union.

When Abramovich, then 20, spotted Olga, a 23-year-old daughter of a high-ranking government diplomat, across a crowded restaurant in Ukhta in Russia’s Komi Republic in 1987, he was shy.

Afraid Olga would reject him, he sent a friend over to ask the geology student to dance. They later married and went on to share a one-bed flat in a tower block with Olga’s daughter Nastya – from a previous relationship.

But when Olga’s marriage to Abramovich ended in 1989 – amid him working long hours to make his fortune – he gave her only enough money to live on for two years.

He rented another flat for her further out of Moscow, but on the understanding she and her daughter would later move back into the flat on Tsvetnoi Boulevard because Olga wanted Nastya to attend a better school near there.

Abramovich soon shacked up with Irina, a London-based former Aeroflot stewardess who wed the Russian tycoon in 1991 as the USSR crumbled.

The then Ms Malandina met him when the Chelsea owner travelled on an Aeroflot plane when she worked as a flight attendant. Her father had died when she was two, and she grew up in poverty in the Soviet era.

During their marriage he switched from being a powerful but reclusive figure in Russia’s post-Soviet rollercoaster business and political world to becoming a household name in the West as owner of the London football club.

Their life together was compared to living in a ‘gilded cage’ with security guards who formerly worked for Russian and British intelligence.

They parted on good terms in 2007 – with their divorce settlement a closely guarded secret but thought to be £150million – and did not speak ill of each other.

Abramovich married his third wife, the magazine editor Dasha Zhukova, in 2008 but they divorced in 2017 and she is now with billionaire shipping heir Stavros Niarchos.

Dasha had son Aaron Alexander and daughter Leah Lou with her ex-husband and said they were committed to jointly raising their children together.

Court documents filed in New York showed Abrahmovich and Zhukova finalising their divorced in 2017 showed the settlement included over £90million worth of property to Dasha – including a Manhattan mansion. More recently he has been romantically linked to ballerina Diana Vishneva.

During his marriages Abramovich also had to fight off a number of controversies that threatened to bring him down.

In 2011 the High Court heard he had used well-connected oligarch Boris Berezovsky as his ‘political godfather’ to help him conduct business deals in a country where police were ‘corrupt’ and courts ‘open to manipulation’.

The court heard the Chelsea owner believed it was his ‘moral obligation’ to hand Mr Berezovsky £1.3billion to fund his lavish lifestyle.

He gave his former friend the cash because he felt it was part of the ‘code of honour’ that had replaced the rule of law in Russia after the collapse of communism, it was alleged. But Abramovich won the case in 2012.

The judge said the claimant was ‘an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes’.

Meanwhile in 2008 he was accused of bribery, with court papers reportedly showing he admitted paying billions for political favours and protection fees for shares of Russia’s oil and aluminium assets.

There was also a claim in Switzerland he had links through a former firm to using a multi-billion pound loan from the IMF as a slush fund.

In 2005, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said it would suing him for £9million but he said the loan had already been paid back.

More recently, Abramovich has been linked to controversial Israeli settler organisations. A BBC probe found the businessman controlled companies that donated around £74million to Elad in Jerusalem.

But today’s debate raging over whether to sanction the tycoon is the most severe pressure he has come under, with him last night handing over Chelsea FC to the trustees of the club’s charitable foundation.

In a statement posted on its website just before 7pm he said: ‘During my nearly 20-year ownership of Chelsea FC, I have always viewed my role as a custodian of the Club, whose job it is ensuring that we are as successful as we can be today, as well as build for the future, while also playing a positive role in our communities.

‘I have always taken decisions with the Club’s best interest at heart. I remain committed to these values. That is why I am today giving trustees of Chelsea’s charitable Foundation the stewardship and care of Chelsea FC.’

He added: ‘I believe that currently they are in the best position to look after the interests of the Club, players, staff, and fans.’

The trustees of the Chelsea Foundations are Bruce Buck, John Devine, Emma Hayes, Piara Powar, Seb Coe and Hugh Roberston.

His move came after Parliament was told he had been named as a person of interest in 2019 because of alleged links to the Russian state and alleged ‘association with corrupt activity and practices’.

And on Friday night it was claimed any attempts to place sanctions upon him could have been disastrous for the club.

The Times reported if that did happen it could have prompted him to ask Chelsea to pay him back £1.5billion it owes him.

Liverpool University football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire said: ‘If he feels he is being made a scapegoat for the activities of Putin then the worst-case scenario is he tries to call in the loan.

‘Then we’ve got a crisis. He and Putin could argue that it is the British government that has destroyed Chelsea Football Club.

‘There could be a lot of misrepresentation and accusations made from all parties if the British government does go down this route.

‘But I suspect this government will not want to upset football fans as we have a populist government. I suspect Chelsea’s legal team would be going through all the options.’

The billionaire was named in papers leaked to an MP yesterday that linked him to Vladimir Putin‘s regime and ‘public association with corrupt activity and practices’.

The release of the Home Office document led to calls for him to be stripped of his right to own a football club in Britain.

Downing Street did not name him among those to be punished in the wake of Putin’s strike against Kyiv, instead naming five senior Russia-based cronies of the regime.

But he has been affected nonetheless, via turmoil created in global markets. Shares in mining firms Evraz and Polymetal International fell by between a quarter and a third.

Abramovich is Evraz’s largest shareholder and its shares tumbled to close 30 per cent down on the day – wiping nearly £300 million off his holding.

He has faced renewed focus on his business activities in recent days but has always denied any wrongdoing or grounds for him to be sanctioned.

Yesterday morning Labour MP Chris Bryant used parliamentary privilege to  share a leaked Home Office document in the Commons.

He said the document was from 2019, and questioned why no action had yet been taken against the 55-year-old based on its warnings.

At business questions this morning the Rhondda MP and former minister said: ‘I have got hold of a leaked document from 2019 from the Home Office which says in relation to Mr Abramovich – ”As part of HMG’s Russia strategy aimed at targeting illicit finance and malign activity, Abramovich remains of interest to HMG due to his links to the Russian state and his public association with corrupt activity and practices.

”An example of this is Abramovich admitting in court proceedings that he paid for political influence.

”Therefore HMG is focused on ensuring that individuals linked to to illicit finance and malign activity are unable to base themselves in the UK and will use the relevant tools at its disposal, including immigration powers to prevent this”.

‘That is nearly three years ago and yet remarkably little has been done in relation. Surely Mr Abramovich should no longer be able to own a football club in this country?

‘Surely we should be looking at seizing some of his assets including his £152million home? And making sure that other people who have had Tier 1 Visas like this are not engaged in malign activity?’

The billionaire has not been seen at his Premier League football club’s south-west London home, Stamford Bridge, for months.

He withdrew his application for a British Tier 1 investor visa in 2018, after reported delays in his application following criticism of Russian oligarchs in the wake of the Salisbury poisonings.

Downing Street would not be drawn on the claims about Roman Abramovich made in the Commons. The PM’s official spokesman said: ‘I couldn’t comment on individuals in that way or on leaked documents of that type.’