UK allowed sanctioned Abramovich associate to sell £16m mansion
A close associate of Roman Abramovich was given permission by the Treasury to sell his Surrey mansion for £16m, a month after the government designated him for UK sanctions and froze all his assets.
The Guardian can reveal the government agreed to allow the former Chelsea Football Club director Eugene Tenenbaum to sell Park Hill, in Weybridge’s exclusive St George’s Hill estate, under a licence issued by sanctions officials on 12 May 2022. Tenenbaum was added to the UK sanctions list on 14 April last year.
The sale, to the chief executive of a Singapore hotels group, completed on 17 May 2022, according to Land Registry records.
Park Hill, an eight-bedroom mansion set in 1 hectare (2.6 acres) of grounds, was jointly owned by Tenenbaum and his former wife, a British citizen and who is not under UK sanctions.
Lawyers for Tenenbaum told the Guardian the sale of the property was completed in accordance with the law and with the consent of the UK government. They said “his proceeds of the sale were frozen on completion of the transaction in accordance with the sanctions regime”.
The transaction raises questions about the UK government’s approach to enforcing sanctions. Liz Truss, who was then foreign secretary, said last year that UK financial restrictions would “tighten the ratchet on Putin’s war machine and target the circle of people closest to the Kremlin”. Allies in the US and EU have also imposed similar sanctions.
Tenenbaum was Abramovich’s right-hand man as the billionaire oligarch built his empire, serving as the head of corporate finance at his oil company Sibneft, a director of Chelsea, and a board member at his mining group Evraz. Tenenbaum, a Canadian citizen born in 1964 in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union,
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