Capital Economy, Business and Finance
Blavatnik is sanctioned by Ukraine and made his first fortune in post-Soviet Russia
Robert Jenrick has accepted £25,000 from Leonard Blavatnik, a businessman born in Soviet Ukraine who was sanctioned by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky last year.
The contribution was made via Blavatnik’s company, Access Industries, which also donated £1.25 million to the Conservatives during the UK’s election campaign earlier this year.
Blavatnik has donated lavishly to Oxford and Harvard universities and been knighted in the UK for services to philanthropy, but all before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Ukraine’s decision to sanction him.
There is nothing unlawful about his donation to Jenrick, who is one of two candidates still in the running for Tory leadership. But Jenrick’s decision to accept it may raise questions about his judgement.
A dual US-UK citizen, Blavatnik has also donated to many US politicians across the spectrum – including Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Blavatnik was part of Alfa-Access-Renova, a consortium whose members included the now-sanctioned billionaires Mikhail Fridman, Viktor Vekselberg and German Khan. (Fridman has won an appeal against the sanctions at the European Court of Justice but remains subject to their effects.)
In 2013, Jenrick’s wife, the lawyer Michal Berkner, advised the group on the $56 billion sale of TNK-BP to the Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft. However, it is understood that she did not advise Blavatnik directly.
When sanctioning Blavatnik last year the Zelensky government said only that “sanctioned people either have Russian citizenship or still have business in Russia or Crimea”. Blavatnik does not have Russian citizenship and is understood to have sold his last remaining Russian asset – a $610 million stake in the Rusal aluminium giant – in the second half of 2022.
He made his initial fortune in the 1990s as a participant in the privatisation of the Russian aluminium sector along with Vekselberg, a friend and former university classmate. He reportedly earned $7 billion from the TNK-BP deal and currently ranks 38th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with an estimated net worth of $30-40 billion.
Jenrick did not respond to requests for comment but his team previously told the Mirror: “Michal is a lawyer. Robert has been personally sanctioned by the Kremlin for being amongst the most stridently anti-Putin MPs in Parliament.”
Separately, Jenrick faces a potential investigation by parliament’s standards commissioner over a total of £100,000 in contributions from The Spott Fitness, an indebted software firm that has never made a profit but which accepted an undisclosed sum from a company registered in the British Virgin Islands.
As Tortoise has reported, the entrepreneur Philip Ullman has identified himself as the ultimate source of the funds. Even so, the Labour party chairman Ellie Reeves has written to the commissioner saying the donations raise “more questions than answers”.
Access Industries did not respond to requests for comment but has previously strenuously denied “dealings with the Russian government or its leaders”.
Blavatnik, who was born in Odesa, moved with his parents to Russia as a child and emigrated to the US in his twenties. He returned to Russia after the Soviet collapse to build his fortune but was a “phantom presence” there, according to sources who spoke to Bloomberg for a 2022 profile. He has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “unimaginable”.