Rogozin asked the Investigative Committee and the FSB to check whether Fridman financed the Armed Forces of Ukraine – Kommersant

A member of the Federation Council from the Zaporozhye region, Dmitry Rogozin, said that he sent an appeal to the Investigative Committee of Russia (ICR) with a request to check information about possible financing of the armed forces of Ukraine (AFU) from the billionaire, co-owner of Alfa Bank Mikhail Fridman.

“I asked the Investigative Committee to check reports about Fridman’s financing of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, since this falls under a strict article of the Criminal Code,” Mr. Rogozin told RIA Novosti, clarifying that he also sent similar appeals to the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Federal Security Service.

This week it became known that Mr. Friedman left Great Britain and decided to move to Israel. However, due to the war between Israel and the Hamas movement, the businessman decided to temporarily stop in Moscow. According to Mikhail Fridman himself, his life in the UK became “impossible” due to sanctionsintroduced by the UK government.

In 2022, 27 EU countries, as well as the UK and Canada, imposed personal sanctions against Mr. Friedman. The co-owner of Alfa Group until recently continued to live in London, from where in December of that year he filed a lawsuit with the European Court to achieve his exclusion from the sanctions lists.

Last September, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Ukrainian Alfa Bank asked the Ukrainian authorities to allow the transfer of $1 billion from Mr. Friedman’s personal funds to the organization’s account. The newspaper reported this with reference to the chairman of the bank’s supervisory board, Roman Shpek. WSJ sources said that Friedman hoped in this way to achieve the lifting of personal sanctions from Great Britain, suggesting that the funds received by Kiev could also go to the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The entrepreneur, in a comment to the WSJ, denied that he had offered Ukraine a “quid pro quo.”

At the same time, in September of this year, the Security Service of Ukraine notified Mr. Fridman in absentia of suspicion of “financing the military actions of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, committed by a group of persons by prior conspiracy.” On October 6, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) announced that the court had seized all the assets of Mikhail Fridman, as well as his business partners Petr Aven and Andrey Kosogov, totaling more than UAH 17 billion. (RUB 46.5 billion).

Alexander Kislov