By BigEyeUg Team
The United Kingdom government has today, Thursday, March 10, 2022 officially sanctioned Chelsea Football Club owner, Roman Abramovich.
The government have said that Roman Abramovich does face a prohibition on transactions with UK individuals and businesses, a travel bans and transport sanctions.
Roman Abramovich
It also implies that Abramovich’s UK assets have been frozen, his recent attempt to sale of the football club has been held, no merchandise or ticket sale allowed.
However, UK government’s sanctions on Abramovich does leniently hit the club as its granted Chelsea a special licence to allow fixtures to be fulfilled, staff to be paid and existing ticket holders to attend matches.
“Given the significant impact that today’s sanctions would have on Chelsea football club and the potential knock-on effects of this, the Government has this morning published a licence which authorises a number of football-related activities to continue at Chelsea,” a government statement said.
“This includes permissions for the club to continue playing matches and other football related activity which will in turn protect the Premier League, the wider football pyramid, loyal fans and other clubs. This licence will only allow certain explicitly named actions to ensure the designated individual is not able to circumvent UK sanctions. The licence will be kept under constant review and we will work closely with the football authorities,” it adds.
It’s also noted that an application to the UK government can be made to sell Chelsea in the future as long as Abramovich does not profit or make any money from the transaction.
However, Chelsea are now banned from:
- Offering new contracts to players or staff – Antonio Rudiger, Andreas Christensen and Cesar Azpilicueta see their deals expire on June 30
- Conducting any official transfer business
- Selling new tickets to any game for any of their teams – including women and junior sides (season ticket holders and existing ticket holders only)
- Selling merchandise to fans (existing merchandise can be sold via third parties)
- No stadium work or redevelopment
- Spending £500k on security, steward and catering costs per home match and £20k expenses per away games
Abramovich, who is renowned for being a close friend to Russia President Vladimir Putin, has been sanctioned along with six of Russia’s wealthiest and most influential oligarchs, whose business empires, wealth and connections are closely associated with Vladimir Putin’s regime.
These have a net worth of £15bn, its understandably.
Those sanctioned by UK government are:
Roman Abramovich (owner Chelsea FC and has stakes in steel giant Evraz and Norilsk Nickel), Oleg Deripaska (has stakes in En+ Group), Igor Sechin (the chief executive of Rosneft), Andrey Kostin (chairman of VTB bank), Alexei Miller (CEO of energy company Gazprom), Nikolai Tokarev (president of the Russia state-owned pipeline company Transneft), and Dmitri Lebedev (chairman of the Board of Directors of Bank Rossiya).
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “There can be no safe havens for those who have supported Putin’s vicious assault on Ukraine.”
Nadine Dorries, the minister for Sport and Culture in her tweet notes that the move brings some uncertainty, but the Government will cooperate with the league & clubs to keep football being played while ensuring sanctions hit those intended.
It’s also understandable that Chelsea and government officials will meet on Thursday, but the club have indicated that Thursday night’s game with Norwich will go ahead.
We will keep you posted