Recently we were informed that Eli Dassa signed a huge contract with Dynamo Moscow in the amount of one and a half million dollars per season. In the world we lived in until February 2022, when the Russian military invasion of Ukraine began and ignited the war that still has no end in sight, Desa’s decision seems perfectly logical. Many of the Israeli players prefer to exhaust their careers in Europe before returning to the local league – mainly because of the much higher sums they can earn in European teams.
However, since the Russia-Ukraine war began, the situation in Europe has changed beyond recognition. Following the Russian aggression, the European Union and the United States imposed tight and paralyzing sanctions on all the Russian oligarchs and corporations – in a way that effectively prevents money from being taken out of Russia. This is also true in the case of Dynamo Moscow, which, following the imposition of sanctions, passed from the control of the Russian bank VTB back to the ‘Dynamo’ association and therefore still remains under Russian ownership (in contrast to Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea team, which was sold under the shadow of the sanctions) – but of course also in relation to any other field involving parties or Russian money.
In such a reality, it is impossible not to ask the following question: Who guarantees to Dessa, or to any Israeli or other Western entity, that a contract signed with a Russian entity will indeed be fulfilled? And how can you guarantee receiving a payment from a Russian corporation or person, when the entire Russian economy and also the Russian oligarchs who live outside of it are completely paralyzed?
According to attorney Uri Goldman, an expert in the prohibition of money laundering and taxation, “Anyone who does business with the Russians during this period should take into account that their money is placed in the deer fund.” According to Goldman, “the sanctions imposed on the Russians are also valid in relation to the accounts outside of Russia of corporations and private individuals Russians As long as the identification of the source of the funds is directly or indirectly related to Russia – it is not possible to transfer funds at all.”
The obvious conclusion from Attorney Goldman’s words is that in order to ensure that a contract signed with parties connected to Russia these days – it is necessary to make sure that the source of the funds is not in Russia, or in other words: that there is a payment solution. According to Goldman, this is not a trivial matter. These are managing some of the most senior Russian oligarchs, such as Abramovich and others, a lawsuit against the EU sanctions against them in the European Court of Justice as well as in various American courts. This lawsuit illustrates how much the sanctions paralyze the economy and the Russian oligarchs, and highlights the difficulty of receiving funds from a Russian entity these days.”
Attorney Goldman emphasizes that although the State of Israel has not issued official guidelines for trade with Russia, probably also in order not to annoy the Russians, in practice the sanctions also apply in Israel, indirectly, through the bodies that coordinate trade and business with the industry. By the way, Goldman notes that the transition to using Crypto doesn’t solve the problem for the Russians, since at the point of interface with the banking system (fiat/crypto) the problem surfaced again, so it’s only a postponement of the problem and not a solution.