The National Crime Agency of Great Britain (NCA) has arrested Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman in London on charges of money laundering and conspiracy. Initially the agency did not name names but spoke of “a wealthy 58-year-old businessman with a multimillion-dollar house in the British capital”. It was the Ukrainian newspaper Kyiv Independent to put forward the confirmed hypothesis that it was Fridman, a man very close to Putin. Born in Ukraine at the time of the USSR, in 1964, he is the co-founder of the Russian investment conglomerate Alfa-Group. Forbes claims that in 2017 he was the seventh richest man in Russia in 2017, while in August 2022 despite the sanctions according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index he had a net worth of about 11.2 billion dollars. Fridman was released on bail. During the searches of his home in London, several devices and a huge amount of cash were seized.
Two other men were arrested as part of the same operation: a 35-year-old accused of money laundering and attempting to block access to an NCA officer, and a 39-year-old former partner of Fridman’s current partner. The three are awaiting the possible indictment on British soil. To date, the NCA has allegedly carried out around one hundred “disturbing actions” linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his circle of oligarchs. The kingdom has so far sanctioned at least 1,200 individuals and 120 Kremlin-linked tax entities since the start of the war in Ukraine. All this was possible thanks to the Combating Kleptocracy unit created at the beginning of the year by the Nca. According to the director of the agency, Graeme Biggar, the new unit is having “a great impact” against money laundering “by the corrupt elites”: “We will continue to use every means available to counter this threat”.
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