Vladimir Putin financier’s Malta yacht delisted from US sanctions

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has removed a Malta-flagged luxury motoryacht from its Russian sanctions list, over connections to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

OFAC, an office under the American Department of Treasury, removed the motoryacht Addiction from its Specially Designated Nationals List.

The Malta-flagged yacht was said to have links to Russian-Israeli multi-millionaire Sergei Nikolaevich Adonyev, sanctioned earlier this year for being a financier for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The agency however did not release more information.

Adonyev, 62, is a telecoms mogul in Russia who is said to be a financier to Putin and Rostec State Corporation head Sergei Chemezov, a former KGB agent and high-ranking general who runs the state-owned defence conglomerate. A statement from the State IS Department in January did not elaborate on why the Adonyev, who is estimated by Forbes to be worth over half a billion dollars, was being blacklisted.

Adonyev’s other sanctioned entities include his company Kaleidoskop, and another yacht, called Annata. His other major blocked property is his private jet, a Global 6000.

In 1994, together with Oleg Boyko – who featured extensively in the MaltaFiles investigations on tax avoidance in 2017 – Adonyev founded Olbi-Jazz, a fruit importing company. In 1996, Adonyev’s Joint Food Company (JFC) became the leading fruit importing company in Russia.

Adonyev also co-founded the Russian mobile operator Yota, which he sold to Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s Megafon. He also has a stake in the Russian smartphone maker Yota Devices.

In 2019, Bulgaria revoked Adonyev’s Bulgarian citizenship over a 20-year-old fraud conviction in the United States, when Adonyev was convicted in the United States of defrauding the Kazakh government of $4m through false sales of Cuban sugar. He was sentenced to 30 months in jail, much of which he had already served, before being deported to Russia the following year.

He was originally investigated by the FBI over suspected involvement in a much graver criminal enterprise: traffic of cocaine from Latin America to Europe via the port of St. Petersburg. The investigation lost steam after Adonyev was deported without serving a full US sentence.

In 2019 his wife Maria Adonyeva, who has a London-based charitable foundation, had to step down as a patron of the Tate and from a prestigious advisory board at Somerset House, where she was a major donor.

Adonyev also supports cultural projects, perhaps the most significant of which includes the DAU, a large-scale international film project by director Ilya Khrzhanovsky that has produced the six-hour, arthouse satire on Soviet science, DAU: Degeneration.[email protected]