Eugene Shvidler: oligarch pays high price for close ties to Abramovich
Billionaires are not usually happy to play second fiddle, but Eugene Shvidler has for decades operated under the shadow of his more famous (not to mention richer) business partner, Roman Abramovich.
That close association has now caught up with him, with Shvidler added to the UK’s sanctions list on Thursday as part of the response to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The UK government said Shvidler, whose fortune is valued at $1.6bn by Forbes, was a “longstanding business partner” of Abramovich, and that through his shares in the oligarch’s Evraz metals and mining business, he had “been involved in obtaining a benefit from or supporting the Government of Russia”.
Shvidler had two weeks’ notice that he could be in the government’s sights, after he was named in Abramovich’s designation for sanctions on 10 March. A day earlier, the UK impounded a Bombardier Global 6500 private jet thought to be linked to Shvidler because of suspected ties to Russia.
The UK is uniquely placed to target Russia’s oligarchs, given their attraction to trophy properties in “Londongrad” and the home counties. Like several others on the sanctions lists, Shvidler is the owner of a Surrey mansion beside the exclusive St George’s Hill estate, and he is thought to have sold another £22m property in Belgravia, central London.
Yet Shvidler also has an unusual distinction among the oligarchs hit by sanctions: he claims to be a citizen of the US and UK since 1994 and 2010 respectively and never to have held a Russian passport.
His homeland was called the USSR when Shvidler was born in 1964 to mathematician parents in Ufa, 700 miles east of Moscow. He grew up and studied engineering and applied mathematics in the capital.
“I grew up with communism, and if you live through
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