Janet Yellen vowed that the United States would continue to act.
Washington:
The United States on Thursday blocked a US-based company linked to Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov, saying an ally of President Vladimir Putin had used it to funnel and invest shady money.
The Treasury Department said Kerimov, a billionaire active in Russian politics, secretly managed the Delaware-based Heritage Trust, which dumped its money into several large public companies.
Treasury Department officials said the Heritage Trust, founded in 2017, brought money to the United States through shell companies and under-the-radar foundations established in Europe.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen vowed the United States would continue to act “even as the Russian elite hide behind proxies and complex legal systems.”
The United States “will actively implement multilaterally coordinated sanctions imposed on those who finance and benefit from Russia’s war against Ukraine,” she said in a statement.
The action comes weeks after Fiji handed over a $300 million superyacht involving Kerimov to the United States, who has been under US sanctions since 2018 over alleged money laundering and his role in the Russian government.
The United States and European nations have intensified crackdown on Russian oligarchs after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, triggering a series of Western sanctions.
Originally from the Russian Republic of Dagestan in the Caucasus, Kerimov became one of the world’s richest people after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
His family controls the major gold producer Paulius. The Group of Seven Industrial Democracies agreed on Sunday to ban gold exports from Russia.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index, in newly updated figures, ranked him as the 127th richest person in the world with a net worth of $13.3 billion.
Kerimov triggered an international outcry in 2017, when he was arrested by French authorities on a flight to Nice on charges of tax fraud and the suspicious purchase of five luxury villas.
Russia called a French envoy to protest and the charges were eventually dismissed but French prosecutors resumed an investigation in 2019.
BBC News said in April that it had seen leaked documents showing Kerimov’s extensive efforts to hide his wealth, which allegedly included putting a Swiss tattoo artist in charge of a company that Transferred more than $300 million.
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