- The successful evasion of Western sanctions by some of Russia’s richest raises the question of whether it’d more effective to go after the managers of the oligarchs’ wealth . A group of U.S. scholars in a recent issue of PNAS Nexus believe the answer is “yes.” “Our ‘knock-out’ experiments pinpoint … vulnerability to the small group of wealth managers themselves, suggesting that sanctioning these professional intermediaries may be more effective and efficient in disrupting dark finance flows than sanctions on their wealthy clients,” according to Ho-Chun Herbert Chang of USC and his co-authors from Dartmouth. “This vulnerability is especially pronounced amongst Russian oligarchs, who concentrate their offshore business in a handful of boutique wealth management firms,” they write. In a separate commentary for MT, Russian journalists Farida Rustamova and Maxim Tovkaylo explain why a recent attempt by Kremlin-linked Russian billionaires to have the personal sanctions against them lifted with the help of the country’s opposition is both surprising and comical.
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