The Court of Justice of the European Union granted the claim of Petr Aven and Mikhail Fridman, shareholders of Alfa-Bank, to remove them from the sanctions lists.
A document was published on the court’s website stating that the Court granted Aven and Friedman’s petition and canceled their stay on the restrictive measures lists for the period from February 28, 2022 to March 15, 2023.
The EU Council, as stated in the document, believes that Aven and Friedman are connected to other people under sanctions, and to Vladimir Putin himself. According to the Council, they provided material or financial support to Russian decision-makers and supported actions and policies that jeopardize the integrity, territorial sovereignty and independence of Ukraine.
Aven and Friedman believed that the evidence provided by the Council was neither reliable nor credible, and that the latter’s assessments were erroneous. The court granted their motion.
The court finds that none of the reasons given in the initial acts are sufficiently substantiated and that the registration of Aven and Friedman on the lists was not justified.
The Court considers that the grounds put forward by the Council do not demonstrate that Aven and Friedman “supported acts or policies that undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine, or that they provided material or financial support to Russian persons responsible for the annexation of Crimea or the destabilization of Ukraine, or that they benefited from these persons”.
An appeal may be filed within two months from the date of notification of the court decision.
Friedman and Aven: what is known
Petr Aven, a Russian and Latvian citizen, and Mikhail Fridman, a Russian and Israeli citizen, are the major shareholders of Alfa Group, a conglomerate that includes Alfa-Bank. It is one of the leading banks in Russia.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they left Russia, but were sanctioned by the EU, Britain and the United States.
The sanctions against both businessmen were imposed from February 2022 to March 2023.
In the spring of 2023, it was reported that the billionaires wanted to sell their stakes in Alfa-Bank to lift the sanctions.
