Couldn’t have happened to a nicer club

Her Majesty’s Government has finally moved to sanction Roman Abramovich, mainly known in Britain as the owner of Chelsea FC. The sanctions involve the freezing of all his UK assets, including Chelsea FC.

Now, though Abramovich shows a lamentable deficit in basic human qualities, such as decency and morality, he has plenty of street smarts.

Sensing that the sanctions were coming, he has been desperately trying to sell Chelsea FC. Yet moving a club valued at somewhere between two and three billion isn’t easy, especially when one is in a hurry.

A free tip for HMG: Abramovich and some of his fellow Russian ‘oligarchs’ started flogging their assets weeks before Putin pounced on the Ukraine. To an outside observer (well, me), this looks suspiciously as if they knew the invasion was on the cards, but kept that knowledge among themselves. That makes them directly complicit in Putin’s war crimes, a charge compared to which their corrupt ways look positively innocuous.

Chelsea FC has been left rudderless and penniless. The club isn’t allowed to sell tickets and merchandise, to sign any contracts, including those for players, to spend more than £22,000 for travelling to away matches (good news for EasyJet). Above all, selling it becomes problematic because Abramovich isn’t allowed to receive any payment for Chelsea FC, never mind three billion.

Since the will to sell is evident, I’m sure a way can be found. Off the top, HMG could nationalise Chelsea FC, sell it off to the highest bidder and use the proceeds for providing armaments to the Ukraine.

If we can confiscate the property of known drug dealers, we must have laws to do the same to gangsters directly complicit in mass murder. Should this prove impossible, Chelsea FC could well go bust, and you won’t see me shedding tears.

All I can offer to the crestfallen fans is a compendium of clichés, such as “what goes around, comes around”, “you make your bed, you lie in it” or, to please some of the more upmarket supporters, “tu l’as voulu, George Dandin”.

For me, the plight of Chelsea FC serves as an antiemetic. For ever since Abramovich acquired the club in 2003, I’ve been suffering from acute nausea every time those smug fans sang his name at matches.

They couldn’t even claim they didn’t know where Abramovich’s money came from, although some did try. That’s like the Germans saying they didn’t know about Nazi concentration camps or the Russians pleading ignorance of Stalin’s crimes. If they didn’t know, they didn’t want to know. Therefore they are guilty not just of stupidity, but also of complicity in evil.

Had I felt any residual pity for Chelsea fans, I would have lost it yesterday, when their team played its first post-Abramovich match away at Norwich. Those cynical morons were singing “There’s only one Roman Abramovich”, stressing yet again their unwavering commitment to money, regardless of its source.

Here I can’t resist drawing the oft-drawn, not to say overdrawn, parallel. What if the Second World War had ended in a draw, and a Nazi businessman bought Chelsea FC in 1943 with the proceeds of selling the property of murdered Jews? Would the fans have been as ecstatic? I bet they would.

“I told you so” isn’t my favourite genre, but I’ve been writing about Abramovich off and on for years, starting on 4 September, 2012. Most of that had an aspect of preaching to the choir: the facts of Abramovich’s rise from petty larceny to building an empire were in the public domain. Hence all decent people were as appalled as I was.

Those who refused to learn the facts were contemptible. Those who knew the facts and still welcomed Abramovich to London were beneath contempt.

Abramovich made his first billion in 1995, when he and his partner Boris Berezovsky made a killing from the elaborate robbery of the Russian people known in the annals of crime as the loans-for-shares programme.

Without going into too much detail, they used government loans to pay $200 million for the oil company Sibneft. Since the company was worth $2.7 billion at the time, that was like buying money at a huge discount.

The discount wasn’t as huge as it looked though. For Abramovich admitted later that he had paid billions in bribes to government officials and protection money to gangsters. Still, considering that Sibneft produces about $3 billion’s worth of oil annually, that deal paid off handsomely

Abramovich’s and Berezovsky’s next target was the aluminium industry, and in his book Godfather in the Kremlin Paul Khlebnikov described that move in some detail. He specifically mentioned some owners of smelting plants who were reluctant to sell at a knock-down price and then suffered fatal accidents.

One such befell Khlebnikov himself. He was machinegunned from a moving car in the centre of Moscow, which, if you ask me, is a rather extreme type of literary criticism. The late editor of the Russian Forbes didn’t cite any hard evidence of Abramovich’s involvement in ‘wet work’, but his hints were broad enough.

Yet a man doesn’t live by corruption alone, not in Russia at any rate. American gangsters bribe politicians; Russian ones create them. That’s why I am dismayed at the shoddy coverage of Abramovich’s “links with Putin” in our press.

Chaps, but for Abramovich, if Putin wanted to see the inside of the Kremlin he’d have to buy a guided tour. For Abramovich was a key player in the feat of political legerdemain known as ‘Operation Successor’ – to President Yeltsyn, that is.

Those obsessed with Abramovich’s Western residences worth billions are overlooking one of his former residences that cost him nothing. Yet without that freebie he wouldn’t have bought his £150 million palace in Kensington.

For in 1996 the Yeltsyn family invited Abramovich to move into an apartment inside the Kremlin. By then he had become a key member of that cabal, widely described as ‘the Family’, in the Cosa Nostra sense of the word.

Besides Abramovich, the Family included Yeltsyn’s daughter Tatiana Dyachenko, her second husband Valentin Yumashev and Boris Berezovsky. It was the Family that launched Operation Successor, when Yeltsyn’s lifelong attempt at suicide by booze was about to triumph.

The Family chose Putin, a relative newcomer to national politics. Unlike the likelier KGB candidate, Prime Minister Primakov, Putin was willing to offer immunity to Dyachenko and Yumashev, and believe me: there was plenty to immunise them against. That clinched the deal, and the button for a delayed-action bomb was pushed.

Neither Abramovich nor Yumashev was Berezovsky’s intellectual equal, but both were more ‘street’. Thus, having acted as Pygmalion to Putin’s Galatea, they fell in love with their creation, or at least wisely pretended to. Having quickly realised the dimensions of the power acquired by the KGB colonel, they happily assumed subservient roles.

Both have flourished since then. Yumashev has been Putin’s trusted advisor all these years, which, aside from wielding political influence, means he has become a billionaire. And Abramovich was allowed to keep and multiply his billions, provided he loosened his purse strings whenever Putin was a little short.

But Berezovsky’s hubris got the better of him. He thought Putin would become his poodle, rather than the other way around. That miscalculation drove Berezovsky into his British exile, where in 2013 he lost his life to a garrotte. The coroner passed an open verdict, probably encouraged to do so by HMG’s reluctance to rock the boat.

As for those imbecilic fans of Chelsea FC, they got that wrong: there’s more than one Roman Abramovich. Putin’s close entourage consists of dozens of such acolytes, each covered head to toe in Ukrainian blood.

No, they never killed anyone personally, gangland style. But then neither did Vlad Putin.

P.S. Putin’s Foreign Minister Lavrov made an odd statement yesterday. “We aren’t planning to attack other countries,” he said. “We didn’t attack the Ukraine either.” In other words, “We won’t attack other countries like we didn’t attack the Ukraine”.