Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the UK government are determined follow "due process" before deciding whether or not to sanction Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich.
Abramovich has put the Blues up for sale amid increasing scrutiny into his finances in the wake of Russia's war on Ukraine, with the oligarch's ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin - something Abramovich has always denied - being looked into.
Sanctions have already been put in place on a number of wealthy Russian individuals, with Russian sports teams barred from competitions and sponsorship deals torn up.
But Johnson says there are many factors to consider before deciding to sanction Abramovich.
"None of us want to live in a country where the state can take your house off you without a very high burden of proof and due process," the prime minister told the foreign press, with his quotes carried by Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
"There’s no point saying, yeah, we’re going to go after him, and then you come up against the brick wall of lawyers. So we have to get it right.
"We’re also trying not to just make this about one individual. The top line of what our package on Monday will do is that the measures that you have against individual oligarchs in Europe will essentially allow us to catch them too.
"Plus the extra things that we are doing that Europe hasn’t caught up with or is not prepared to do, like Swift."
The Labour MP Chris Bryant has questioned why Abramovich has yet to be sanctioned.
Speaking earlier this week in the House of Commons, Bryant also called for Alisher Usmanov - who has had ties to Arsenal and Everton - to face sanctions, something which has since happened.
"The government has said, quite rightly, that it wants to sanction Duma [Russian Assembly] members, and it wants to sanction members of the Russian Federation Council, but it's not been able to do so yet," Bryant said.
"Alisher Usmanov has already been sanctioned by the EU but not yet by the UK, and I suspect he'll be pretty soon on a UK list, and Everton should certainly be cutting ties with him already
"Roman Abramovich - well, I think he's terrified of being sanctioned, which is why he's already going to sell his home tomorrow, and sell another flat as well.
"My anxiety is we're taking too long about these things.
"Now, I'd have a suggestion on what might help. I fear that the government is frightened of letters, lawyers' letters from all these oligarchs' friends, [and] one way to circumvent that is if ministers just read into the record in a proceeding in Parliament, all the sanction criteria, and then they'd be protected."
