As football fans wend their way to Stamford Bridge for Chelsea’s home game against Brentford next month, not all will realise they are walking past dozens of apartments belonging to one of Britain’s most valuable private property portfolios.
The sanctioned club owner, Roman Abramovich, and his family have amassed a UK property collection worth more than £250m, numbering about 70 homes, buildings and pieces of land.
The list of assets connected to the oligarch has been compiled by the Russian asset tracker, a partnership involving the Guardian, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and other international news organisations that are reporting on the wealth of Russia’s most powerful operators.
It is a snapshot in time, based on information dating from 2020 to the present.
The Guardian, working alongside the campaign group Transparency International, has also seen evidence connecting the billionaire’s companies and relatives to 53 luxury residential properties – plus commercial buildings and plots of land – in central London.
Alongside the oligarch’s widely reported 15-bedroom mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens, bought for £120m, the Abramovich collection includes 42 flats and apartments in Chelsea Village, the hotel and residential complex situated around the football ground, including a $5.5m penthouse apartment overlooking the stadium and a $1m penthouse in the hotel.
Properties owned by the wider Abramovich family include two luxury addresses next door to each other in a square in Belgravia, where the adjacent homes are adorned by neat privet hedges and a flower-filled first-floor balcony.
Less than three miles down the road, near Kensington Palace, the family added to their luxury collection last year with a £17.5m townhouse.
Other connected assets include the use of two jets – a £39m Gulfstream and a $10.4m Bombardier – plus a pair of Airbus helicopters, struck off the Isle of Man registry the day after sanctions were imposed on Abramovich by the UK. There are two yachts linked to Abramovich: the 458ft Solaris and the 533ft Eclipse. Confirmation is also being sought for the ownership of two more private jets.
There are also trust funds connected with Abramovich and his family, including two in Cyprus: the first, HF Trust, valued at $900m, according to 2016 data contained in the banking leak known as the FinCEN files. A second entity, the Sara Trust Settlement, was involved in transactions totalling $304m, also in 2016.
The compilation of the list of assets linked to Abramovich comes as governments have warned how opaque ownership structures could frustrate efforts to implement sanctions.
Abramovich was sanctioned by the UK government at the beginning of March after ministers accused him of having “clear connections” to Vladimir Putin’s regime and being among a group of businesspeople with “blood on their hands”.
The oligarch has previously vehemently disputed reports suggesting his alleged closeness to Putin and Russia, or that he has done anything to merit sanctions being imposed against him.
The most visible effect of the UK move has been to plunge the Russian tycoon’s football team into crisis, with the business restricted from making further ticket sales. The club is up for sale, with bids of more than £2bn submitted by interested parties last weekend. The proceeds are expected to be either donated to charity or held in a restricted account.
Among other well-known assets held by the oligarch is a 29% stake in the London-listed steel and mining group Evraz, which was worth £2.5bn at the end of 2021.
However, the shares then plummeted, with Abramovich’s stake worth about £338m as the crisis in Ukraine unravelled. The 10-member board of directors of Evraz resigned this month after sanctions were imposed on the Russian oligarch and shares in the company were suspended.
Abramovich did not respond to numerous efforts by the Guardian to contact him.
