The UK government has slapped an assets freeze and travel ban on Chelsea Football Club's Russian owner Roman Abramovich. (Ian KINGTON AFP/File)
Roman Abramovich, an oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, has come under investigation by the Department of Justice after it was discovered that companies he owns have $1.3 billion invested with U.S. financial firms.
The probe is led by the task force called KleptoCapture, which aims to identify the wealth and freeze the assets of oligarchs who have aided Putin, a U.S. official told BuzzFeed News. The oligarch's ownership of the funds was previously hidden behind a secretive network of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and Cyprus.
That network was exposed when investigators with State Street, a Boston-based bank that was founded in 1792, dove into confidential financial records it obtained from the FinCEN Files. The bank reported Abramovich's ownership in a series of “suspicious activity reports” to the US Treasury Department in 2015 and 2016.
State Street investigators' review of the documents led them to estimate that the $1.3 billion could represent about 10 percent of the oligarch's wealth.
Last week Abramovich was sanctioned by the United Kingdom, which cited his "close relationship" with Putin and the possible use of materials from a steel company he controls being used to build Russian tanks. The UK froze his assets in the country, including several mansions and the Premier League soccer team Chelsea Football Club.
Abramovich's yachts have departed European ports, bound for the open seas where they can't be seized. Likewise, his airplanes have been repositioned to the safety of airports in Russia and Turkey.