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In response to
"Putin, you strategic genius. It looks like your latest shenanigans just got Ukraine NASAMs"
by
crash davis
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The U.S. charges a Russian oligarch’s British employee with evading sanctions.
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WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has charged Graham Bonham-Carter, a British national, with wire fraud and conspiring to evade sanctions to benefit his boss, the Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska, according to a three-count indictment unsealed on Tuesday.
Mr. Bonham-Carter, 62, who has worked as a business manager for Mr. Deripaska since 2003, has been arrested in Britain and is awaiting extradition to the United States, officials said.
Prosecutors with the Southern District of New York have accused Mr. Bonham-Carter of participating in a convoluted scheme intended to illegally funnel about $1 million for upkeep and staffing of Deripaska-owned properties in the United States. He has also been charged with trying to illegally ship artworks from the United States to Britain, by falsely claiming the pieces did not belong to Mr. Deripaska, in violation of executive orders targeting oligarchs linked to President Vladimir V. Putin.
In 2018, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control slapped severe restrictions on Mr. Deripaska, a billionaire industrialist with holdings in Europe and the United States, following Mr. Putin’s invasion and illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
In September, the Justice Department indicted Mr. Deripaska and several other Russian nationals with sanctions evasion and obstruction of justice, accusing the energy executive of seeking to circumvent rules through “lies and deceit” in an attempt “to cash in on and benefit from the American way of life.”
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, in a statement on Tuesday, cast the indictment of Mr. Bonham-Carter as an extension of that case, and reiterated his intention to hold Mr. Putin’s associates accountable for “Russia’s unjust and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine” this year.
Steve Rodhouse, a senior official with Britain’s National Crime Agency, said Mr. Bonham-Carter’s arrest was intended to send a message to operatives in the West who continue to work for those who have enriched themselves through their support of the Kremlin.
“Oligarchs seeking to evade sanctions rely on skilled professionals to help them hide their true ownership of assets and sustain their lifestyles,” Mr. Rodhouse said in a statement. “This criminality exploits global financial flows and hubs including the U.K., and requires a collaborative international response.”
It was not immediately clear who was representing Mr. Bonham-Carter. A request for comment sent to an email address associated with him was not returned.
As part of the arrest documents, Justice Department officials made public several emails from Mr. Bonham-Carter that showed that he was working for Mr. Deripaska long after the oligarch was sanctioned by the United States.
In one email written last October, Mr. Bonham-Carter told an associate that things were going well — “apart from banks keep shutting me down because of my affiliation to my boss Oleg Deripaska.”
Mr. Bonham-Carter, who is a member of a prominent extended aristocratic family that includes the actress Helena Bonham Carter, added that he had been advised “not to go to the USA where Oleg still has personal sanctions as the authorities will undoubtedly pull me to one side and the questioning could be hours or even days!!”
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