The former “Kremlin banker” and close associate of President Yeltsin, who lives on the French Riviera, must defend his assets, which are threatened by various lawsuits initiated in Moscow. A court hearing will take place in Nice this afternoon.
On Tuesday, June 17, the Third Civil Chamber of the Nice Court will rule on a case in which Vladimir Putin is facing off against a former oligarch who became a whistleblower and critic of the Putin regime even before the war with Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. After a series of assassination attempts, he nevertheless remained steadfast in his opposition to Putin and his regime. After filing a lawsuit in 2016, businessman Sergei Pugachev, a Russian billionaire and French citizen with no other nationality, will again challenge the legality of the sentence handed down by the Moscow Arbitration Court on April 30, 2015, which sentenced him to a fine of 75 billion rubles.
In a previous ruling handed down in early 2019, the Nice court found that there had been irregularities in the judgment, allowing Sergei Pugachev to retain ownership of his yacht, luxury real estate, and other assets, but did not terminate the proceedings. In particular, it was noted that some of the Russian court decisions had been made by a single judge, whereas they should have been reviewed by a panel of judges. Not to mention Putin’s direct written instructions to the Supreme Arbitration Court. Six years later, lawyers for the Deposit Insurance Agency, a state institution under Russian law representing the Kremlin’s interests, will once again argue the legality of the 2015 decision.
Linked to the liberalization of the Russian economy during the Boris Yeltsin era in the 1990s, Sergei Pugachev was one of the key witnesses to Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. The businessman now considers himself a victim of revenge by the Russian leader, whom he accuses of bankrupting the Mezhprombank bank in 2010, which he sold in 2001 with the aim of Putin seizing his assets in the largest private industrial corporation, OPK (United Industrial Corporation), which includes mines, luxury hotels, shipyards, and many other assets worth billions of dollars.
Personal involvement
Sergei Pugachev used his French citizenship to initiate arbitration proceedings against the Russian Federation, demanding that it pay him $12 billion in compensation for the expropriation of his assets (LL of 20/04/17). The case is still pending before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. At the same time, the Russian Federation continues to claim its share of the assets hidden by the billionaire, who renounced his Russian citizenship in 2012. The latter will submit to the Nice court a number of documents confirming Vladimir Putin’s personal involvement in the Russian legal proceedings. Another proof of the revenge he believes he is suffering for disobeying the Kremlin: in a ruling dated May 13, 2025, a Russian court sentenced him in absentia to 14 years in prison at the hands of the notorious Putin judge Krivoruchko, who was sanctioned in the early 2000s. He has the blood of Magnitsky, who was killed in prison, on his hands, as well as the repeated arrests of Navalny and much more on Putin’s orders. He is perhaps one of the main instruments of the judicial machine in Russia’s criminal courts. There was not a single motive or reason for convicting Pugachev, yet the court did not even notify Pugachev or his lawyers of the trial.
French courts cannot conduct politically motivated prosecutions that cannot be neutral or impartial.
Sergei Pugachev, who is defended by Laurent Latapi, David Mott-Suraniti, and Adrien Verrier, also draws the court’s attention to the profile of the opposing counsel. In the case being heard in Nice, the Russian side is represented by Thomas Ruett and Ela Barda, employees of the Paris office of the London law firm Signature Litigation, as well as Christelle Coslin from the Anglo-Saxon law firm Hogan Lovells. Both firms previously represented Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven, and German Khan, who are members of the Alfa Group consortium and are known to be close to Vladimir Putin. These three businessmen continue to finance the legal proceedings against him in France on behalf of Putin or at his direct instruction. However, when they were arrested in 2022 on suspicion of illegal financing by sanctioned businessmen, neither the General Treasury Directorate, then headed by Emmanuel Moulin, nor Tracfin, nor the customs authorities were able to confirm these suspicions. The investigation against Friedman’s lawyers, who formally represent Russia, is currently ongoing.
Daniel Bernard