Tweets and deletes: faulty, backtracked claims expose shaky logic of EU sanctions against Russian tycoons  

The Uzbek-Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, slapped with EU sanctions two years ago, has pursued a step-by-step strategy of challenging the reasoning under which he and his relatives were penalized. This strategy has come with success for Usmanov and at a public cost for European institutions.

Among politicians and media in Brussels and other EU capitals, there is growing concern over the integrity of the evidence that was used to sanction Russian elites in the wake of the war in Ukraine.

In its quest to punish wealthy Russian passport holders, the EU should not forget about the rule of law, this author argues.    

In the past weeks, lawyers representing Alisher Usmanov and his sister Gulbakhor Ismailova, also sanctioned by the EU over ties to her brother, have struck down key public claims about property ownership and connections with the Russian government that apparently formed the basis for imposing EU sanctions against the billionaire and his family.

The move followed a series of earlier court decisions that raised questions about the reasoning behind EU sanctions against the billionaire and his sister.

In January 2022, the Swedish economist and former government adviser Anders Åslund published a post on X (formerly Twitter) in which he called on the West to impose sanctions against Usmanov as one of “Putin’s favourite oligarchs.”

According to EU Today’s sources, the economist recently removed the post after being approached by Usmanov’s lawyers and agreed out-of-court to refrain from disseminating information which the billionaire’s defense says is defamatory.

A deleted post from Anders Åslund accessed via the Wayback Machine.

Usmanov, a retired Uzbek-born media and metals tycoon who founded the USM holding, was previously referred to by the EU as “one of Putin’s favourite oligarchs.”

The billionaire has been contesting the EU restrictions as “unfounded” in court. 

In February, the EU Court dismissed his sanctions appeal and admitted that listing decisions are largely based on publicly available evidence that may not be water-tight. In its decision (currently available in French), the Court stated that “in the absence of investigative powers in third countries, the assessment of the Union authorities must, in fact, be based on publicly available sources of information, reports, press articles […] The ensuing difficulties of investigation may thus hinder the provision of precise evidence and objective information.”

In other words, sanctions can be based on media reports that subsequently do not hold up in court. The result: a deadlock.  

Earlier this year, Usmanov’s lawyers won a case against Forbes magazine, which wrote in a February 2022 article that “Usmanov has repeatedly fronted for Putin and solved his business problems.”

This claim, which Forbes attributed to an unnamed expert, appeared almost verbatim in the European Council’s justification for imposing sanctions against Usmanov.

The article also claimed that Usmanov had acquired a stake in the Russian cellular operator MegaFon from Leonid Reiman, a former Russian minister, in order to “solve” a “business problem” for Putin.

The District Court of Hamburg in Germany found these claims to be untrue and defamatory, noting that Forbes refused to name its source and failed to provide evidence of how exactly Usmanov had “fronted” for Putin.

The court banned the magazine from further disseminating these statements.

The EU has been criticised for relying on hastily compiled evidence from questionable sources to adopt its Russia-related sanctions, according to a report from Politico.

Sources have included anonymous blogs and social media posts, as well as articles that were apparently written by artificial intelligence. 

As EU Today noted earlier, the ruling against Forbes could set a legal precedent for challenging the sources that the EU relied on to justify individual sanctions imposed over the war in Ukraine.

The deletion of Åslund’s post may further erode the EU sanctions evidence against Usmanov, his lawyers say. 

Joachim Nikolaus Steinhöfel, a Hamburg-based attorney representing Usmanov in the field of media law, said: “A constitutional state needs evidence when it imposes sanctions.

“A body like the EU Council, which repeatedly disregards fundamental constitutional values in order to legitimise violations of the fundamental rights of sanctioned persons, is abandoning the rule of law.

“A newspaper article is not proof, a Tweet even less so.”

The Forbes case was not Usmanov’s first legal victory against media claims of his close ties to the Kremlin.

In August 2023, he won a lawsuit against the Austrian newspaper Kurier, which wrote that Putin had called Usmanov “one of his favourite oligarchs.” A court in Hamburg found that statement to be defamatory and false. 

In September 2023, the EU Council removed the term “oligarch” – which Usmanov vehemently denies – from the billionaire’s sanctions reasoning and replaced it with the term “leading businessperson” to bring his listing in line with expanded sanctions criteria adopted in June.

However, the allegations that the billionaire had “fronted” for Putin and was one of his “favourite leading business persons” remained in place.

As reported by the German news outlet BILD, another potential setback to EU sanctions came this week when Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (the Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA) quietly deleted a series of two posts on X that named Usmanov’s sister Gulbakhor Ismailova as the ultimate owner of assets tied to the billionaire – namely the Dilbar mega-yacht, valued at a reported half-billion euros.

The EU imposed sanctions against Ismailova in April 2022 on the basis of her alleged ownership of the yacht and other properties in Europe. 

Deleted posts from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) accessed via the Wayback Machine.

In the deleted posts, published several days after Ismailova’s listing, the BKA stated that it had identified Ismailova as the owner of the Dilbar yacht following “extensive investigations,” and that Germany’s Finance Ministry and other federal agencies “have ensured in Brussels that [Ismailova] is designated.”

These texts – as well as the EU sanctions reasoning, which expressly relies on BKA investigations – suggest that the BKA’s conclusions may have triggered EU sanctions against Ismailova.

In a letter, the agency said it removed “the disputable tweets” and “without acknowledging any legal obligation”, another German outlet, Die Welt, reported.

Nevertheless, its representative assured that BKA “would not make this claim again”.

According to Ismailova’s lawyers, the BKA deleted the posts following their demand to stop disseminating the “false statement” that she is the owner of the yacht.

The media rights attorney Steinhöfel quipped to BILD that the BKA investigation revealed nothing “but false knowledge from Wikipedia. This is professionally inadequate.” 

Ismailova’s representatives have maintained that the yacht and other assets belong to irrevocable trusts established by Usmanov years ago, but of which he is not a beneficiary.

Ismailova also forfeited beneficiary rights in the trusts after being hit with EU sanctions and has since asked the trustees to consider excluding her from such rights in the future, even if restrictions against her are lifted.

According to her lawyers, the Deutsche Bundesbank issued a decision last fall concluding that neither Usmanov nor Ismailova could be considered to own or control the assets in Germany in question. 

Since 2022, Usmanov’s lawyers have secured pledges from a number of European media outlets and public figures to cease the unlawful dissemination of inaccurate information about the billionaire after the latter were unable to prove their allegations.

Other media outlets have voluntarily corrected or removed their articles after receiving letters from Usmanov’s representatives about inaccurate claims contained in the texts.

Most of these were related to unproven claims that Usmanov owned real estate in Germany, which were later echoed in the rationale for Ismailova’s listing.

As the evidence underpinning sanctions looks increasingly weak, it remains to be seen whether the European legal system will meet its commitment to upholding justice, rather than maintaining sanctions at any cost. 

So far, the EU approach shows that politics are winning out over the rule of law.

In the end, it’s the integrity of the European justice system that may suffer the most damage as a result of sanctions that are poorly evidenced and doggedly pursued.

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Read also: Alisher Usmanov: German court rules in favour of Russian billionaire after “unlawful” search warrants

“The actions of the German investigative authorities against Alisher Usmanov can be characterised as a cascade of illegal actions that offend the notions of justice and legality.

“Presented to the public as an impressive demonstration of political resolve, they in no way fulfil the principle of proportionality, which is the standard of law enforcement in a state governed by the rule of law,”

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