Russian oligarchs, flurry of appeals against seizures of luxury goods
“Behind the war in Ukraine there is an all-Italian battle”. The Corriere della Sera tells it, in reference to “that between the State and 28 Russian oligarchs who own villas, yachts, planes and companies in the Peninsula”. These are names “part of the black list drawn up by the European Union after the invasion of Ukraine, when assets were frozen for a global value of around 2.7 billion euros”.
As Corriere della Sera explains, “ten appealed to the Lazio Regional Administrative Court, competent to judge the matter, mostly invoking a basic defect: the assets in question would not be owned by individual natural persons but by various trusts i whose benefits, according to them, are not attributable to the “listed” oligarchs. There is therefore an ongoing legal battle which results in about ten proceedings”.
But in the only one that arrived at the sentence Italy was proved right. As Corriere della Sera explains, “it is the lawsuit between the Italian state and Alexey Alexandrovitz Mordashov, the billionaire indicated by Forbes as the richest in Russia with his 29.1 billion euros in family assets. Co-owner of Rossiya Bank, the personal bank of many high-ranking Moscow officialsmain shareholder of the industrial giant Severstal, Mordashov had appealed against the “seizure” of the yacht Lady M moored near San Remo, a 60-metre 65 million euro yacht flying the flag of the Cayman Islands”. But he lost.
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