St.George’s Hill, near Weybridge
St George’s Hill, near Weybridge, has been called
Britain’s Beverly Hills. At least a quarter of its houses are owned by people
from former Soviet states. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
Tensions rise at the £3bn Surrey estate Russian
oligarchs call home
The secretive owners of mansions at St George’s Hill
will be nervous about making an appearance on Liz Truss’s hitlist
Rupert
Neate
Rupert
Neate Wealth correspondent
@RupertNeate
Mon 28 Feb
2022 07.00 GMT
The warning
to rich Russians linked to Putin that the UK government “will come after you”
and ensure oligarchs have “nowhere to hide” is likely to hit hard at the gated
luxury housing estate in Surrey dubbed “Britain’s Beverly Hills”.
Russians
and those from former Soviet states own more than a quarter of the 430
luxurious homes in St George’s Hill, a heavily guarded 964-acre estate near
Weybridge, Surrey, where mansions have changed hands for more than £20m each.
Liz Truss,
the foreign secretary, said on Sunday that the government was drawing up a
“hitlist” of oligarchs with links to Putin who will be added to the sanctions
list in coming days and weeks.
“We have to
make it deeply painful for the oligarchs that support the Putin regime. There
are over a hundred Russian billionaires,” she told the Sunday Times. “Nothing
is off the table in terms of who or what we are targeting. We are very clear
about that – we are very prepared to do what it takes.”
Brad, one
of six fluorescent jacket-wearing security guards who prevented the Guardian
from entering St George’s Hill, said there were more Russians living on the
estate now than at any time in his six years working at the gate.
“I imagine
they are getting a bit nervous now about what Boris [Johnson] might do now that
Putin has invaded Ukraine,” he said. “But, there’s one thing I can tell you for
sure, they won’t want to talk to you and we are calling the police unless you
leave now.”
Brad was
right. None of the drivers of cars leaving the estate, including the chauffeur
of a white Bentley, would speak about the potential sanctions threat.
However, a
few minutes’ walk away at a council estate that backs on the estate it was hard
to stop Joy, a 75-year-old retired furniture saleswoman, from speaking her mind
about “all those bloody dodgy Russians next door”.
“I think
they should all be turfed out of the country,” she said. “Why should they be
allowed to live here when there is a war going on over there. The only way to
stop Putin is to put pressure on Russians.
“The rich
Russians who live in the huge houses over there,” Joy said, pointing at the
fence that separates the communal garden of her council estate from the St
George’s Hill golf course in the estate, “the government should seize their houses.”
Johnson has
so far announced sanctions on more than 100 Russian companies and eight
individuals in what he described as “the largest and most severe package of
economic sanctions that Russia has ever seen”.
“We will
continue on a remorseless mission to squeeze Russia from the global economy
piece by piece, day by day and week by week,” he added.
St George’s
Hill is home to a greater concentration of rich Russians than Belgravia’s Eaton
Square – nicknamed Red Square by some locals – where Roman Abramovich and Oleg
Deripaska have had homes, and Highgate in north London, where several huge
mansions are owned by oligarchs including Witanhurst, the UK’s second largest
house after Buckingham Palace.
Built by
developer Walter George Tarrant in the 1910s and 1920s, the St George’s Hill
estate was originally popular with British business people and celebrities
including John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Tom Jones, Kate Winslet, Elton John and Cliff
Richard.
An
increasing number of Russians began to move in during the 2000s after the
introduction of the so-called “golden visa” scheme allowed wealthy people to
enter the UK if they invested at least £2m and Chelsea’s billionaire owner,
Roman Abramovich, moved the club’s training ground to nearby Cobham. The
government axed the visa scheme earlier this month amid concerns about
applicants having acquired their wealth illegally.
House
prices on the estate rose by more than a fifth last year, according to luxury
estate agent Savills, taking the total value of the homes on the estate to more
than £3bn. There is no suggestion that people named on the sanction list live
on the estate.
A UK
diplomatic source said the people to be subjected to forthcoming sanctions were
“people who have international lifestyles”.
“They come
to Harrods to shop, they stay in our best hotels when they like, they send
their children to our best public schools, and that is what’s being stopped,”
the diplomat said. “So that these people are essentially persona non grata in
every major western European capital in the world. That really bites.”
Johnson has
also ordered the creation of a new dedicated “Kleptocracy Cell” within the
National Crime Agency to “target sanctions evasion and corrupt Russian assets
hidden in the UK and that means oligarchs in London who have nowhere to hide”.
Margaret
Hodge, a Labour MP and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on
anti-corruption, said the measures do not go far enough and meant people “who
have stolen from the Russian people and support Putin would not be caught”.
“Russians
don’t come here for the weather, but instead for our lax regulation, pathetic
law enforcement and a property market that is ripe for abuse,” she said.
Hodge
called on the government to target sanctions at the 35 “kleptocrats” that
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny claims support Putin’s regime. The
Navalny list includes Abramovich and Alisher Usmanov, who previously owned a
15% stake in Arsenal FC. Only two people on the Navalny list: Gennady
Timchenko, a Russian investor and Putin ally, and Denis Bortnikov, deputy
president of the Russian state-owned VTB bank, were subjected to government
sanctions last week.
Over the
weekend, Abramovich passed “stewardship” of Chelsea FC, which he bought in
2003, to the club’s charitable foundation after a call in parliament for him to
be sanctioned after the invasion of Ukraine. Labour MP Chris Bryant said the
Home Office had identified Abramovich as having links to the Russian state as
well as to “corrupt activity and practices” and suggested the UK should seize
his assets.
Transparency
International estimated that Russians accused of corruption or with links to
the Kremlin have bought about £1.5bn of UK property since 2016.
Security at
St George’s Hill, which includes automatic number plate recognition technology,
was heavily tightened after a Russian millionaire resident was found dead on a
street near his home in November 2012.
Alexander
Perepilichnyy, a whistleblower who helped expose a multimillion-pound fraud in
Russia, was found by a coroner to have died of natural causes – sudden
arrhythmic death syndrome – while jogging. The coroner said he could not
“completely eliminate all possibility” that Perepilichnyy was the victim of
foul play but “there is no direct evidence that he was killed or any compelling
circumstantial evidence either”.
Witanhurst in Highgate, London, owned by Russian
tycoon Andrei Guriev. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Bloomberg
Mega-rich homes tour puts spotlight on London's
oligarchs
This article is more than 6 years old
Campaigners connected to Russian opposition leader
Alexei Navalny offer tour of billionaires’ exclusive homes, including those of
Vladimir Putin’s friends
Luke
Harding
Thu 4 Feb
2016 20.53 GMT
It is
London’s biggest non-royal private home, a palace in Highgate with 28 bedrooms,
a 40,000-sq-ft basement and designer orangery. On Thursday the huge mansion,
Witanhurst, was on the list of several destinations for what was billed by
political campaigners as London’s first ever “kleptocracy” tour.
Campaigners
connected to Russia’s opposition leader Alexei Navalny – a lawyer and critic of
corruption – hired a bus and gave a guided tour of houses and flats in London’s
most exclusive districts, properties owned by Russian government ministers and
wealthy friends of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
“It’s a
refuge, a showroom and deposit box,” Roman Borisovich said of Witanhurst,
standing near its massive red-brick wall. The palace was purchased in 2008 for
£50m, but the owner was for some time a mystery. Last year the New Yorker magazine
revealed that the mansion belonged to Andrei Guriev, a Russian tycoon and
fertiliser baron who until recently had served in Putin’s senate.
People
outside coach in street
The tour
included properties owned by Russian government ministers and wealthy friends
of the country’s president, Vladimir Putin. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The
Guardian
Borisovich
is an anti-corruption activist who appeared in the Channel 4 documentary From
Russia With Cash. Posing as a Russian official who had stolen his country’s
health budget, he exposed the antics of unscrupulous estate agents. He said his
latest idea aims to draw attention to how dirty money from countries such as
Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, continues to pour into the west.
Borisovich
said he also wanted to highlight how a group of “enablers”, such as lawyers,
accountants, and bankers, were helping oligarchs launder their “ill-gotten
gains” by investing the cash in prime London mansions.
In central
London offshore companies owned one in 10 of the houses, he said, and shell
companies owned £122bn worth of property.
As well as
Witanhurst, the tour members visited Eden House, a pleasant villa in Highgate.
A silver Mercedes was parked in the driveway, near a tasteful statue of a boy.
The house, they were told, belonged to Andrei Yakunin.
Yakunin’s
father, Vladimir, was reportedly close to Putin and until 2015 had run the
company Russian Railways. A former KGB officer, Yakunin Sr had sponsored
anti-western Russian thinktanks. Yakunin’s neighbour, Andrew, popped out and
said he had invited the Russian and his wife round for drinks when they moved
in a couple of years ago. “Funnily enough, they didn’t invite us back,” he
said.
He said the
Yakunins had installed hi-tech security cameras. They bought the house for
£4.5m in 2007 via a Panamanian company. “One day I was clipping the hedge next
to their property. Suddenly I heard a voice from the security camera telling me
‘Keep clear! Leave the premises!’”
Were
Russian millions a bad thing for London? “Well, I made my money as an engineer
and a lawyer,” he said.
Thursday’s
London tour had begun just down the road from the Houses of Parliament, on
Victoria embankment. Borisovich posed with a lifesize cardboard cut-out of
Russia’s deputy prime minister, Igor Shuvalov. As well as being one of the top
figures in the Russian government Shuvalov and his wife, Olga, owned two luxury
apartments worth £11.4m overlooking the Thames. The homes cost 100 times
Shuvalov’s official salary.
“It’s in
Britain’s interests to stop this flow of corrupt money,” said Vladmir Ashurkov,
a Russian opposition politician, who has received political asylum in the UK.
Ashurkov said he rejected the argument that foreign money helped the economy.
Rather, he said, it raised house prices to unaffordable levels and turned
London into a global centre for money laundering.
The
apartments at One Hyde Park, London, are among the world's most expensive, with
prices ranging from £6.5m to £140m
The tour
bus trundled past Belgrave Square, in Kensington, known jokingly as Red Square
because of its association with other high-profile Russians.
The metals
tycoon Oleg Deripaska owned No 5; the former oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who
died in 2013, had several flats at No 26. Roman Abramovich’s home, two adjacent
townhouses in Chester Square, was a short stroll away.
The
smallest house on the tour belonged to Roman Rotenberg; situated in Cadogan
Lane, Belgravia, it cost a mere £3.3m. Rotenberg’s father and uncle, Arkady and
Boris Rotenberg, were said to be Putin’s oldest friends and former judo
partners. Since Putin became president in 2000, the pair had become
billionaires, supplying pipelines to the state-controlled energy corporation
Gazprom. In 2014 the EU and US sanctioned both of the Rotenbergs in connection
with the Crimea crisis.
Roman
Rotenberg is a British citizen, and now the formal owner of many of his
father’s companies. On Thursday he did not seem to be at home. There were no
signs of life outside his mansion, with its handsome Dutch wooden shutters.
“The US has sanctioned the Rotenbergs,” Borisovich said, standing in the
cobbled road outside. He added: “Why doesn’t Britain do something?”
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