The war of aggression against Ukraine, which Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a week ago, is now bringing discord to the idyllic communities around Lake Tegernsee. The Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, for example, apparently owns three villas there – and has done so for around ten years. He shouldn’t be the only one. In Bavaria it is speculated that there could be around ten oligarchs who could have bought into Tegernsee. So far, not much has been said about it, especially since local craftsmen and restaurateurs had non-disclosure clauses in their contracts.
But now it’s enough. The CSU district administrator for the district of Miesbach, Olaf von Löwis, told the German press agency on Friday that the possibility of expropriations had to be examined for oligarchs like Usmanow. The CSU member of the Bundestag Alexander Radwan, whose constituency is on Lake Tegernsee, had previously made a similar statement. In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung, he specified: “An expropriation would require compensation,” said Radwan. If so, the property must be confiscated. “There must be no bans on thinking,” demands the member of the Bundestag. But then you are in the area of criminal law. A confiscation is conceivable if Usamanov can be proven to have money laundered.
So far, however, the 68-year-old Russian has not even been able to prove beyond doubt that he owns his three villas. The properties actually belong to a company called Tegernsee (IOM) Ltd, which in turn can be assigned to a company on the Isle of Man, whose traces then disappear on the Cayman Islands. A typical business model.
This is also the reason why the Usamows yacht, which is anchored in a Hamburg shipyard, is first touched by the authorities with pointed fingers. When asked by the Berliner Zeitung, the Ministry of Finance referred to the Senate of the Hanseatic city on Friday evening. Otherwise, it is pointed out that the implementation of sanctions is a matter for the Ministry of Economic Affairs. But the Habeck Ministry does not want to be committed to anything at first. A spokesman said this week that the federal government is “now intensively taking measures to implement these sanctions efficiently and effectively”. That means in plain language: It is still unclear what happens when and how.
The defensive approach is well known in the Tax Justice Network. There one complains that the freezing of assets when enforcing sanctions against oligarchs regularly fails – because the assignment of the financial situation fails again and again. See Alisher Usmanov. It would certainly be worthwhile to delve deeper into the subject. According to estimates by the network, rich Russians own a total of 1 trillion in so-called offshore assets, i.e. sums that are not legally accessible to the authorities. In Germany, around 20 to 50 billion of these are said to be invested in bank and material assets such as paintings, real estate and yachts.
“Russian billionaires are not oligarchs in the true sense”
Even if the black money is of course tracked down and confiscated, the political hope behind it will not materialize – namely that the oligarchs concerned will use their influence on Putin. They don’t have that at all, says Fabian Burkhardt from the Leibniz Institute for East European and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg. “The billionaires we’re dealing with here aren’t really oligarchs,” he says.
The term means that those affected use their wealth to exert political influence in the country. Burkhardt divides Russian billionaires into three categories: First, there are the business tycoons who got rich in the 1990s. They include Roman Abramovich, who made his fortune in the oil business and sold some of his shares in Russian companies after Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s trial. Wagit Alekperow’s fortune, probably in the double-digit billions, also comes from the energy sector. For many years he has been head of Lukoil, which was converted from the state-owned oil company into a public company in the 1990s. With their wealth, Abramovich and Alekperov have a certain degree of independence from Putin, which is why it is not unreasonable that they in particular were cautious about the war as a “tragedy”. But they are far from forming an opposition.
Loyalty versus protection: Putin’s old clique from St. Petersburg
The oligarchs of the other two categories are completely dependent on Putin’s favor: These are those old friends from St. Petersburg who were favored by him, such as the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, Yuri Kovalchuk and Gennady Timchenko, as well as those who work in state-owned companies Gazprom and Rosneft sit at the top and make fantastic sums. For them, the following applies in particular: the president can only be protected with unconditional loyalty. “As long as Putin controls the military and security agencies, they will all wait and see,” says Burkhardt.
In any case, he suspects that criticism, not only from business, is no longer reaching the Russian president. This is a typical sign of an authoritarian government tailored to a man at the top, says Burkhard: “The longer he stays in power, the worse the information he gets.” terrible proof of this thesis.