Fresh reporting on the Cyprus Confidential leak has alleged that the former Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich concealed billions of pounds in assets with the assistance of the Cyprus arm of the accountancy giant Deloitte.
The allegations centre on draft accounts prepared by Deloitte Cyprus for Amiscan Investments, Abramovich's Cypriot company, which owned many of his properties and personal assets. The portfolio included Fyning Hill, a 424-acre estate in West Sussex, a luxury apartment in London, the Chateau de la Croe in the south of France, formerly owned by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and fleets of superyachts and private jets. The portfolio alone was valued at £508 million.
According to the BBC's reporting on the leaked documents, when new transparency rules threatened to make details of the holdings public, Abramovich's associates and the corporate services firm MeritServus decided to, as the BBC put it, rewrite history. MeritServus produced a set of accounts purporting to show that the assets had been transferred to Amiscan's parent company in the British Virgin Islands in 2003, and so did not have to be declared. Instead of pushing back, Deloitte Cyprus signed off the new accounts, which showed a balance of just $75,000.
MeritServus is said to have used a similar manoeuvre in relation to the interest earned on two other vast Abramovich assets: $2 billion lodged with his company Kravin Investments and $10 billion with Electus Investments. In the case of Electus, after the transfer to the British Virgin Islands had been safely backdated, the public accounts for 2006 showed assets worth just $145,000. Billions of pounds had simply disappeared from the declared books.
The material came to light through the Cyprus Confidential leak of 2023, a cache of more than 3.6 million documents from six Cypriot firms, including MeritServus, which closed following the leak. Nobody involved has admitted wrongdoing. A law firm representing Abramovich, 59, told the BBC that he was not involved in the day-to-day operation of the companies in question and that where arrangements were proposed by professional advisers, reliance on that advice was entirely proper and legitimate. Deloitte Cyprus said it could not comment because the documents were more than 20 years old and no longer accessible.
Abramovich, who owned Chelsea FC from 2003 until he was forced to sell the club in 2022 after being sanctioned by the British government following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has long been one of the most controversial figures in British public life. His two decades at Stamford Bridge transformed Chelsea into one of Europe's elite clubs, but his wealth and its origins were the subject of persistent scrutiny.
The latest revelations add to the pressure on professional services firms that handled the affairs of sanctioned oligarchs. They also raise fresh questions about the role of major Western accountancy firms in managing the offshore structures of politically exposed persons, and about whether the UK's sanctions regime arrived too late to capture assets that had already been moved beyond reach.