The European Union’s (EU) decision to lift sanctions against Alfa Group founders Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven has been described by Brussels authorities as setting a “worrying precedent”, the Financial Times (FT) reports.
Unnamed EU officials and experts told the newspaper that the decision challenged the sanctions principle that a person’s proximity to Russian President Vladimir Putin gives grounds to believe he or she supports the conflict in Ukraine.
According to the newspaper, Brussels’ precedent-setting ruling will allow “hundreds of people linked to the Kremlin” to challenge the restrictions.
Experts said the ruling exposed a number of flaws in the way EU sanctions are drafted.
A number of sanctioned Russian citizens told the FT that the evidence used against them was unsubstantiated, inaccurate or misleading, and relied heavily on publicly available information.
The evidence of Pyotr Aven’s and Mikhail Fridman’s links to the Kremlin included four articles. One, published in 2005, claimed that Putin had praised their company, Alfa Group.
The newspaper’s sources pointed out that the need for the swift adoption of sanctions stemmed from the due diligence measures taken by the Brussels authorities.
“Some of these documents were prepared with only a few hours’ notice,” a source familiar with the sanctions mechanism told the newspaper.
The EU decided to sanction Fridman and Aven in April 2022. On 10 April, it emerged that the EU had decided to lift the restrictions as unfounded.
