Imagine promising to give £2.5 billion to humanitarian causes after selling one of the world’s most valuable football clubs, then letting that money sit in a bank account collecting dust for three years while people in Ukraine are literally dying from a war started by your mate Vladimir Putin. That is exactly what Roman Abramovich has been doing since he sold Chelsea Football Club back in 2022, and now Keir Starmer has absolutely had enough. The Prime Minister stood up at Prime Minister’s Questions and essentially told the Russian oligarch that the clock is ticking, honour your commitment, pay up now, or we are coming for you through the courts. This is £2.5 billion that was supposed to help victims of Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, money that was promised for humanitarian purposes, and yet three years later it is still frozen in a bank account while Abramovich haggles over the details like someone arguing about the service charge at a restaurant. The British government has now given him ninety days to do the right thing, and if he does not, they are prepared to take him to court and seize every single penny. This is political hardball at the highest level, and it is about bloody time.
So let us wind back the clock to understand how we got to this absolutely ridiculous situation, because the backstory is genuinely fascinating and infuriating in equal measure. Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club back in 2003 for £140 million, which at the time seemed like an absolutely bonkers amount of money for a football club. But Abramovich was not your typical football club owner. He was a Russian oligarch with connections to Vladimir Putin, with wealth that seemed essentially unlimited, and with ambitions to turn Chelsea into one of the dominant forces in European football. And credit where it is due, he succeeded spectacularly. Under his ownership, Chelsea won twenty-one major trophies including five Premier League titles and two Champions League crowns. He transformed the club from a respectable London outfit into a genuine football superpower that could compete with anyone in the world.
But then came February 2022, when Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and suddenly owning a Premier League football club became politically untenable for a Russian oligarch with Kremlin connections. The British government, along with governments across Europe, started sanctioning Russian businessmen linked to Putin as part of the effort to economically isolate Russia and make the invasion as costly as possible. Abramovich was on that list, and when you are sanctioned, you cannot exactly continue owning a massive English football club. So in May 2022, Abramovich sold Chelsea for an eye-watering £2.5 billion, which at the time was the highest price ever paid for a sports team anywhere in the world.
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Credit to : BRITISH MIRROR