Secret payments cast doubt on Abramovich era at Chelsea
InvestigationConfidential documents reveal that the oligarch personally paid tens of millions of euros to leading figures in the world of football, at the risk of breaching UEFA regulations.
More than a year after the forced departure of Roman Abramovich, skeletons are still lurking in Chelsea's closets. The veil is gradually being lifted on the practices of the Russian oligarch who ruled the London soccer club for 20 years.
The Cyprus Confidential investigation has revealed the existence of a slush fund used to pay several key figures in the club's entourage. Until now, these payments were confidential. They were made via offshore companies and are likely to have breached the financial fair play rules introduced to ensure fairness between European clubs.
Roman Abramovich, 57, is a multi-faceted character. He's an oil-rich multi-billionaire, patron of the arts, diplomat in the shadows, close to Vladimir Putin, and he was also one of the major figures in football for two decades. It was he who brought Chelsea back to the forefront of the European scene after buying the club in 2003 for £140 million. Beset by economic sanctions following the war in Ukraine, the oligarch was forced to sell the club in 2022 for €5 billion to a group led by Todd Boehly, co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team.
An opaque financial center, a haven for Russian money, a grey zone for the cyber economy: The Cyprus Confidential investigation tells the story of how Cyprus, a small Mediterranean island, has allowed itself to be overwhelmed by its offshore industry, and has become the European Union's weak link in the fight against dubious financial flows.
The investigation is based on the leak of 3.6 million confidential documents from six Cypriot financial services firms (ConnectedSky, Cypcodirect Corporate Services, DJC Accountants, Kallias & Associates, MeritKapital and MeritServus) and the i-Cyprus company register. The leaks were obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the German investigative outlet Paper Trail Media, with the support of Distributed Denial of Secrets, a group of activists campaigning for transparency. The leaks were then shared with 69 international news organizations, including Le Monde.
After taking over the club, Boehly quickly alerted the football league's financial authorities to the "incomplete financial reporting" during the Abramovich era, without making any further details public.
The Cyprus Confidential data leak now seems to provide part of the answer. Internal documents from MeritServus, a firm specializing in the provision of offshore services in Cyprus, consulted by Le Monde and its partners, show that Abramovich repeatedly supplemented his club to pay several tens of millions of euros to agents, talent scouts and owners of rival clubs, using his own resources.
Hidden fees?
In 2017, for example, an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands, owned by oligarch Conibair Holdings, signed a contract to pay £10 million (€11.2 million at the time) to the Italian agent Federico Pastorello. On the same day, it was announced that Antonio Conte had renewed his contract as Chelsea coach. Yet several sources indicated that Pastorello was Conte's agent at the time. Was the payment to Conibar Holdings a way of disguising the commission he took on the contract? Pastorello refused to explain these transactions or confirm that he represented the coach at the time, saying only that this is not currently the case.
A few years earlier, Abramovich may have used similar methods to buy the playmaker Eden Hazard for the Blues. In March 2013, a few months after the Belgian international's official signing, his agent John Bico Penaque signed a contract with Leiston Holdings, another shell company owned by the oligarch in the British Virgin Islands, for services "related to sports research and consultancy." Once again, the justification behind the €6.5 million payment to the agent raises questions. When contacted, Bico Penaque did not respond.
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