US charges Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska with violating sanctions

Oleg Deripaska, one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, who previously had deep links to British establishment figures, has been indicted by the US Department of Justice for criminal sanctions violations.

The indictment detailed a number of alleged crimes by the man who was long considered Vladimir Putin’s favourite industrialist, including an elaborate and failed attempt by Deripaska and his associates to shuttle his pregnant girlfriend to the US so that she could give birth there and secure American citizenship for their second child.

Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, said the indictment, in the wake of Russia’s “unjust and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine”, showed the US’s commitment to bring to justice those who evade US sanctions and “enable the Russian regime”.

The justice department said Deripaska, 55, and three other associates, including one American citizen, had used “lies and deceit to cash in on and benefit from the American way of life”.

Deripaska was first subjected to US sanctions in 2018, when he was designated by the US treasury as acting for a senior Russian official. Since then, the indictment alleges, Deripaska evaded those sanctions in a variety of ways, using corporate shell companies to hide his activities. From an Easter gift to an unnamed US television host, to a flower delivery to a former member of the Canadian parliament, to an attempt to shift $3m in proceeds from a US music studio to a Russia-based account, the indictment describes actions that were executed by associates on Deripaska’s behalf.

The most elaborate, however, involved Deripaska’s alleged girlfriend, Ekaterina Voronina, 33, who has been charged with making false statements to US agents during one of her attempts to enter the US.

The indictment alleges that Deripaska and his associates first arranged for Voronina to travel to the US in 2020 for the purposes of having her give birth to her child with Deripaska in the US.

The justice department said Deripaska spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for Voronina to take advantage of the US healthcare system because he did not trust the Russian hospital system, and at one point instructed her to be “careful” when discussing her plans to US agents . Following the birth of their child, who is an American, Deripaska’s associates then conspired to try to conceal Deripaska’s identity as the child’s father, in part by slightly changing the spelling of the child’s last name.

When Voronina tried to enter the US again in 2022 to give birth to the couple’s second child, she was denied entry and returned to Istanbul, through which she had flown to enter the US from Russia.

One Deripaska associate, a naturalized US citizen named Olga Shriki, was arrested on Thursday morning.

The metals magnate has been at the heart of high-profile political fights in the UK, where he was added to the sanctions list by the government this year in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

He previously faced scrutiny after it emerged that Peter Mandelson, who was then trade secretary, had been entertained aboard the oligarch’s “superyacht”, the $65m Queen K, off Corfu. Later it emerged that the Tory shadow chancellor, George Osborne, had also met with the Russian and had invited a Conservative fundraiser to also visit Deripaska on his yacht.

Deripaska gained control of vast previously state-owned aluminium assets following the fall of the Soviet Union, which he later consolidated within the Rusal group, in partnership with the former Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich, a fellow sanctions target.

Rusal, which was part of Deripaska’s En+ Group, raised $1.5bn with a listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2017.

Deripaska and his associates were not immediately available for comment.