Date: 2025-01-15 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00025958
RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS
Petr Aven
Petr Aven
Original article: https://www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/oligarchs-offshore-clients/
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
Petr Aven
Co-owner of Alfa Group and LetterOne
Entities in the leak:
15 Companies
2 Trusts
Sanctioned by:
United States - 2023
United Kingdom - 2022
European Union - 2022
Offshore providers:
Cypcodirect
About:
Petr Aven is an economist, banker and art collector from an academic family, who is a key shareholder of Alfa Group, a Russian private-sector financial services giant. He also served as the president of Alfa Bank, the group’s flagship company and Russia’s largest private bank, from 1994 to 2011. In March 2022, Aven resigned from his board positions at ABH Holdings, the bank’s Luxembourg-based owner, and at LetterOne, a Luxembourg-based private equity fund, just days after he was sanctioned by the European Union, which labeled him “one of [President Vladimir] Putin’s closest oligarchs.” He was also sanctioned by the United Kingdom, the United States and other jurisdictions following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but has repeatedly denied wielding influence in Russian politics.
Aven is one of Russia’s wealthiest people, worth an estimated $4.2 billion, and is considered one of the most influential businesspeople in the country. He has regularly met with Putin to discuss economic matters, including on Feb. 24, 2022, the day of the invasion, alongside dozens of other top Russian industrialists. During the 1990s, Aven served as Russian minister of foreign economic relations in the Kremlin before joining Alfa. He has not publicly condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine. He has told media in Latvia, where he now lives, that he wants to step back from business and focus on art collecting and writing. He wrote a 2018 book about fellow oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who died in the U.K. in 2013 under suspicious circumstances.
Cyprus connections:
Aven is a longtime client of Cyprus’s financial services industry, which he uses to manage his private and family wealth as well as his holdings in Alfa Group and other business interests, according to leaked files, public records and court documents.
Previously unpublished court records and leaked files from Cypriot corporate services providers show that much of Aven’s wealth is held by Cyprus-based trusts, primarily administered through a low-profile firm called Abacus Ltd., which handled his most sensitive transactions. Abacus, for its part, denied any wrongdoing and said it stopped providing services to sanctioned clients as soon as they were targeted, including Aven. An Abacus representative also said it reported all of Aven’s holdings to the regulator and co-operated in freezing his assets.
Documents submitted in court from the National Crime Agency (NCA), the U.K.'s top law enforcement agency for international financial crime, and files contained in the Cyprus Confidential leak show that, in this nexus of trusts, shell companies and bank accounts, Aven held both personal assets, such as an imposing mansion in the U.K., known as Ingliston House, and handled business dealings with LetterOne and Alfa Group.
The NCA investigation was triggered by Aven’s transfer of around $5 million from an Austrian account to a U.K. bank account connected to his mansion’s manager, initiated on the same day he was sanctioned by the EU, according to the court records. The NCA is using civil courts to attempt to seize more than $1 million of these funds.
Number of companies and trusts in the leak:
Aven controlled 17 companies and trusts in secrecy jurisdictions. One of his companies was administered by Cypcodirect, while several Alfa and LetterOne companies appear in the i-Cyprus data. PwC provided services to 10 companies he owned or controlled; nine of those also received services from Abacus.
Response:
Aven has denied wrongdoing through his lawyers’ court filings, and he declined to comment to ICIJ for its coverage of the freezing orders and his Cypriot affairs. Neither he nor his wife, Ekaterina Kozina, nor aide Stephen Gater — all of whom feature in the NCA’s civil lawsuit — have been charged with a crime. The NCA also does not allege Aven committed any crime.