‘A dirty game’: Russians in UK rail at calls to seize oligarchs’ assets
Yevgeny Chichvarkin, the multimillionaire owner of the Michelin-starred Mayfair restaurant Hide, was walking through Belgravia on Monday when he came across the mansion of another super-rich Russian that had been occupied by protesters demonstrating against the invasion of Ukraine.
Although Chichvarkin, 47, is a longtime vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, he was alarmed by the squatters’ occupation of the £50m property owned by the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, describing their action as “a dirty game”.
“To stop the war it will be helpful to send Javelins [a weapon system] and anti-tank missiles to Ukraine,” he said, adding that he supported a Nato no-fly zone over the country. “But to seize expensive ships or expensive houses, it’s a play for the next election by leftwing people. It’s a dirty, dirty game.”
Chichvarkin, who also owns the luxury wine store Hedonism, is one of a group of high-profile exiled Russian public figures, including the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who last month founded an anti-war committee to hold Putin and other regime officials accountable for violations of international law.
He and his partner, Tatiana Fokina, have attended anti-war protests in London with their six-year-old daughter, Alice, and earlier this month he delivered a lorryload of medicine to Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw. He described the pain he felt for Ukraine and Russia as “like two bullets in one heart”.
But like several Russians I spoke to in Mayfair, Chichvarkin, who fled Moscow in 2008 claiming he was forced out by demands from corrupt officials to pay bribes, is perturbed by calls from some UK politicians, including government ministers, to seize oligarchs’ assets, including mansions, yachts and private jets.
“There is a lot of
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