In the fall of 2023, Arkady Abramovich, the son of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, received a new Lithuanian passport — this happened a year and a half after his father was included in the EU sanctions list, the Siena investigative journalism center reports.
Information about this was confirmed to journalists by the head of the Migration Department, Evelina Gudzinskaite. “According to the Migration Department, Arkady Abramovich’s citizenship was restored on 10.10.2013 by order of the Minister of Internal Affairs no. 1B-857,” the investigators clarified.
The billionaire’s daughter Anna also has a Lithuanian passport; she received it in 2011, and renewed it in 2021. Abramovich's children have the right to citizenship of the country, since the businessman's paternal grandparents were citizens of independent Lithuania.
At the same time, neither the billionaire nor his other adult children have Lithuanian passports.
The European Union imposed sanctions against Abramovich on March 15, 2022. Shortly before this, Abramovich announced his decision to sell the Chelsea football club, and he transferred control over it to the board of trustees. The entrepreneur later sold the club for £2.3 billion. The oligarch refused to transfer money from the sale of the club to Ukraine — he insisted that part of it be given to Russians affected by the war.
The Guardian, citing documents from the Cypriot MeritServus, reported that before the start of the war, the billionaire distributed a significant part of his assets between his seven children . The newspaper wrote that they became beneficiaries of trusts where at least $4 billion were kept.
The billionaire had already tried to challenge the sanctions, but the European Court of General Jurisdiction in Luxembourg rejected his claim.
Corrected at 14:29.In the fall of 2023, Arkady Abramovich received only a new Lithuanian passport, and not citizenship of the country — this happened much earlier, in 2013.