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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
According to the newspaper, Brussels’ precedent-setting ruling will allow “hundreds of people linked to the Kremlin” to challenge the restrictions.<\/p>\n
Experts said the ruling exposed a number of flaws in the way EU sanctions are drafted.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“Some of these documents were prepared with only a few hours’ notice,” a source familiar with the sanctions mechanism told the newspaper.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4046,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2178,610,2176,2177,683,659],"class_list":["post-4045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe","tag-alfa-group","tag-eu","tag-mikhail-fridman","tag-pyotr-aven","tag-russia","tag-sanctions"],"yoast_head":"\n