UK permitted Abramovich associate on sanctions list to sell off £16m mansion

A close associate of Roman Abramovich was given permission by the Treasury to sell his Surrey mansion for £16m a month after the government designated him for UK sanctions and froze all his assets.

The Guardian can reveal the government agreed to allow Eugene Tenenbaum, a former director of Chelsea football club, to sell Park Hill in Weybridge's exclusive St George's Hill estate, under a licence issued by sanctions officials on 12 May 2022. Tenenbaum was added to the UK sanctions list on 14 April last year.

The sale, to the chief executive of a Singapore hotel group, completed on 17 May 2022, according to Land Registry records.

Park Hill, an eight-bedroom mansion set in about 1 hectare (2.5 acres) of grounds on a gated estate popular with wealthy Russians, was jointly owned by Tenenbaum and his exwife, a British citizen not under UK sanctions.

Lawyers for Tenenbaum told the Guardian the sale of the property was completed in accordance with the law and with the consent of the UK government. They said "his proceeds of the sale were frozen on completion of the transaction in accordance with the sanctions regime".

The transaction raises questions about the government's approach to enforcing sanctions. Liz Truss, then foreign secretary, said last year UK financial restrictions would "tighten the ratchet on Putin's war machine and target the circle of people closest to the Kremlin". The US and EU have imposed similar sanctions.

Tenenbaum, a Canadian citizen born in 1964 in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, was Abramovich's right-hand man as the billionaire oligarch built his empire, serving as head of corporate finance at his oil company, Sibneft; a director of Chelsea; and a board member at his mining group, Evraz. He helped Abramovich float the latter on the London Stock Exchange where its shares were traded until shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.