UK has all tools to sanction oligarchs

French customs officials impounding a Russian billionaire Igor Sechin’s superyacht on the Cote D’Azur made for sensational headlines, but it was just one of the moves against a string of oligarchs by the US, Europe and UK.
It is easy to mistake these actions simply as punishment. But hitting individual Russian billionaires with sanctions isn’t some mindless act of revenge for their country’s invasion of Ukraine. It isn’t even simply an attempt to upset powerful people in the hope that they can influence President Vladimir Putin.
Sanctions are there to disrupt the economy and finances of Putin’s regime directly. Their purpose is to frustrate Russia’s efforts to prosecute its unprovoked war against its neighbor. Western governments can’t just target any rich person they fancy for the spectacle of it; the targets need to be connected to the regime and its aims.
In the UK, there’s a growing drumbeat of demands that the government go after more oligarchs moreaggressively, having sanctioned far fewer than the US and European Union. Britain has sanctioned 13 people, including Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the invasion began.
The US has put full blocking sanctions or visa restrictions on dozens of Russian elites and their families, and sanctioned other individuals accused of spreading misinformation in Ukraine. The European Union last week added 26 oligarchs, state company bosses and other individuals involved in Putin’s regime.
A number of prominent people have been sanctioned by the EU or US or both and not the UK, including Sechin, who runs Rosneft Oil Co. and Alexey Mordashov, chairman of steelmaker Severstal PJSC, who has interests in telecoms, media and banking groups, including the sanctioned Rossyia Bank.
Mordashov’s yacht was impounded in Italy. British government ministers have said they are slowed by UK law. But the country has all the legislation it needs to move just as quickly as other jurisdictions if it wanted to, according to experts.
Britain’s Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act says the government must have reasonable grounds to suspect that an individual benefits from or is involved in supporting a sanctioned regime.
“Reasonable grounds” is about the lowest evidentiary hurdle possible. The person also must be relevant to the aim of the sanctions against the regime. The government has to say why the individual is being sanctioned but doesn’t have to disclose anything that could damage national security, criminal prevention or detection or the interests of justice.
The current laws were enacted only in 2018 and gave ministers a lot of
leeway, according to Paul Feldberg, a London-based partner at Jenner & Block, a US law firm.

—Bloomberg