The US Department of Justice lawyers admitted that when compiling the “list of Russian oligarchs”, they checked with the list of the richest Russians according to Forbes. This is stated in a petition filed with the court at the suit of businessman Valentin Gapontsev, who does not agree with the inclusion in the list.
“The maximum that the Ministry of Finance did was consulted with the Forbes list when it compiled the list of Russian oligarchs. But the report on the implementation of the law on sanctions admitted that the Ministry of Finance used open information, ”RIA Novosti quotes the document.
The entrepreneur claimed that he was on the list solely because he appeared in Forbes. At the same time, there were no justifications for why he should be considered an oligarch in the document, he stressed. According to Gapontsev, who lives in the US, the inclusion in the document had a bad effect on his business.
In January 2018, the U.S. Treasury, in accordance with the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, published a “Kremlin list” that included almost all of the Russian leadership, and a “list of oligarchs” that included 96 Russian businessmen with a net worth of over $1 billion. The list coincided with the Forbes ranking released in March 2017.
