Chelsea - Roman Revolution or Praetorian Guard?

Whether the revelations will end the British media’s love affair with Abramovich, portraying the reclusive billionaire as a boy in a candy store, ever since he bought the Chelsea soccer club and moved to London in 2003, remains to be seen. Chelsea fans interviewed at the end of the programme clearly did not care. Abramovich and allies got Sibneft for 150 million dollars; it is worth 15 billion dollars- a ten thousand per cent mark up. Dividends are a billion dollars a year, yet the company pays only seven and a half per cent tax.

A spokesman for Sibneft in Russia told Sweeney that the company’s affairs were transparent. However when Sweeney tried to trace the shareowners of the company he followed a trail of companies that led to Cyprus. Here he discovered a trust that allegedly owns Sibneft, in turn this was owned by a Greek Cypriot accountant working from a shabby little office in Limassol. Hardly the HQ of a mega oil corporation.

But if much of the British press hasn’t seemed to care the EBRD does "We have as much money as he does, and we'll see this through. We will pursue him anywhere he goes," a London-based EBRD source told the BBC. "We can last as long as he can. He may think he can get away with this in Russia, but he can't in Switzerland.

John Sweeney, the narrator and investigator of "Sweeney Investigates," claimed that court documents prepared by the EBRD suggest that Runicom SA's expenses when Abramovich was its chief included the purchase of two yachts from a boatyard in Cannes, France, and a £12,000 beauty treatment for Abramovich's wife, Irina (Sweeney commented that it would certainly buy a lot of cucumber).

The BBC claims that "Sibneft was a 'shadow' director of Runicom. Sibneft, as well as Mr. Abramovich and Mr.Shvidler, former Runicom directors, had caused Runicom to transfer its assets to third persons for no or inadequate consideration," (i.e. they had emptied the company of its assets), according to an EBRD memo dated last fall and obtained by Sweeney. Money from Runicom SA was transferred to Gibraltar-registered Runicom Ltd., (Sweeney stressed the remarkable similarity between the two names) which the EBRD believes was also controlled by Abramovich, according to EBRD findings cited by Sweeney.

The allegations of forgery are connected to the EBRD's quest to receive repayment for a loan it issued to the now-defunct SBS-Agro bank. The EBRD opened a multimillion-dollar credit facility to SBS-Agro to fund a small-business development program. But SBS-Agro went bankrupt after the August 1998 crisis and claimed it could not repay the $14 million owed to the EBRD. Instead it offered the EBRD a $14 million principal it was owed by Runicom SA.

The EBRD has never managed to recover the debt from Runicom SA, which has claimed that the debt was repaid in an offset to a third bank. After a series of lawsuits in Russia, the EBRD finally won an appeal in the Supreme Court in 2002. Runicom SA, however, declared itself bankrupt shortly after the ruling.

The EBRD suggested to "Sweeney Investigates" that Runicom SA had used fake documents in Russian courts in 2000 claiming that it had repaid the $14 million loan to the third bank. Senior EBRD official Elizabeth Wallace is quoted as writing in an EBRD dossier, obtained by the BBC, "We discovered that the documents produced by Runicom contained numerous inconsistencies," "For example, the addresses on the seals were wrong and did not coincide with the current address of the organization," She is also reported as writing "The loan repayment term and amounts were wrong."

It would seem the issue is not just a matter of money owed but of fraud and forgery.Meanwhile former associates in London claim that Abramovich has been snuggling up to Putin to win and keep his friendship in the way he did with Yeltsin. An ex Russian Prosecutor alleged that Abramovich and allies would never have got hold of Sibneft without Yeltsin’s help. Roman’s nickname in Moscow was "Yeltsin’s Wallet".He even sold an anti-Putin TV company to Putin’s allies, who promptly shut it down.