Meet the Russian oligarchs making a mockery of Western sanctions despite ... trends now

The day after a series of Russian air strikes hit the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre in Mariupol, southern Ukraine, on March 16 last year, a wealthy socialite called Svetlana Maniovich headed to an invitation-only event at an exclusive jewellers in Paris.

As the people of Mariupol mourned the death of 600 of their fellow citizens, Maniovich, 50, was driven to the Place Vendome, one of the grandest squares in the French capital, where she knocked on the door of the atelier of Joel Arthur Rosenthal, a venue so discreet that it doesn’t even have a display window.

JAR, as he is known, boasts a client list that has included the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Elle Macpherson and Barbara Walters. 

While Maniovich couldn’t hope to match them in terms of celebrity wattage, she was more than a match when it came to spending power and, as rescue workers in Mariupol pulled bloodied and broken corpses from the rubble, she picked up some diamonds she had ordered.

What makes her behaviour particularly obscene is that her husband was Russia’s deputy defence minister Timur Ivanov, who — as one of the architects of the Ukraine war — has hands that are drenched in blood up to the elbows.

The West’s sanction enforcers caught up with the stupendously corrupt Ivanov in October last year, slapping him with an asset freeze and travel ban. 

But Maniovich continues to gallivant around Europe as if nothing has happened.

Her main residence is a £6 million mansion in central Moscow but during the summer you’ll find her in St Tropez renting a fantastic villa for £120,000 a month and cruising the Riviera in a vintage Rolls-Royce.

And she spent last winter in Courchevel, 120 miles north of Monaco, where she was spotted strolling through the streets of the exclusive ski resort in an ostentatiously vulgar fur coat.

When’s she’s not working on her tan or practising winter sports, Maniovich engages in a little retail therapy in Paris, where she rents an opulent apartment.

She is a particular fan of Italian design duo Dolce & Gabbana — one dress alone cost £50,000 — and when the urge takes her she’ll spend anything up to £120,000 on a pair of earrings.

No wonder her first husband wailed that she found it impossible to get by on pocket money of less than £40,000 a month.

So how is it that Maniovich, in an era when Russian politicians, oligarchs and officials are the subject of draconian sanctions, can carry on spending and cross borders with impunity, even visiting her 19- year-old son Mikhail at university in the UK?

The answer is that she is one of a growing band of Russians who are finding increasingly ingenious ways to get round sanctions. Some render their private jets untraceable by changing their tail-fin numbers. 

Others shield their superyachts by turning off the AIS (Automatic Identification System) tracker. While still more put property into the names of wives, children, even mistresses.

But Maniovich has been most imaginative of all: she owes her access to cash and freedom of movement to what has been called a ‘pre-emptive divorce’.

In August last year — five months after the war began — she formally ended her marriage. But the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a body founded by imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, revealed in April that it had obtained a cache of 8,000 of Maniovich’s emails that show the couple’s separation is a sham.

As she is able to provide the necessary paperwork to ‘prove’ her marriage is over, however, she has escaped sanctions.

It also helps that Maniovich is able to travel on an Israeli passport, one that was obtained, incidentally, on payment of a bribe to an Interior Ministry employee in Jerusalem in 2000, something that emerged in a court case six years later. 

While the slippery Maniovich is one of a select few members of the Russian elite to have maintained her Western travel privileges, many others exploit their status to dodge the draft.

The thuggish head of the Wagner mercenary group, whose members are dying in their tens of thousands on the front line, has highlighted the ‘fat, carefree’ lives of Russia’s gilded youth, who remain free to travel to holiday hotspots such as Turkey’s Turquoise Coast on the Mediterranean and the United Arab Emirates.

In an obscenity-strewn tirade, Yevgeny Prigozhin laid into politicians, such as defence minister Sergei Shoigu, who use their influence to protect their relatives from being called up to fight in Ukraine.

Prigozhin has even threatened to pressgang Alexey Stolyarov, a 33- year-old fitness blogger married to Shoigu’s daughter Ksenia, who recently posted photos online of their stay at a luxury hotel in Dubai.

‘The children of the elite smear themselves with creams and show off on the internet while ordinary people’s children come home in zinc [coffins] torn to pieces,’ Prigozhin snarled in his latest rant.

The breathtaking presumptuousness of the children of the rich and powerful was first laid bare last September when two associates of Alexei Navalny ‘prank-called’ Nikolai Peskov, the son of Vladimir Putin’s Press secretary.

When asked to report to a call-up centre at 10am the next day, Nikolai said he would ‘obviously not’ do so.

He added: ‘You must understand it is not right for me to be there. I have to resolve this on a different level.’

The ensuing publicity was acutely embarrassing for Nikolai and his father and, in a bid to restore the family’s reputation, Nikolai last month revealed that he had served a six-month tour of duty in Ukraine as an artilleryman with Wagner, something that was confirmed by Prigozhin himself. 

But whether he can really be said to have put himself in harm’s way is a matter of debate. There are rumours that conscripts with connections can engineer cushy deployments with battalions based well out of range of the enemy.

Meanwhile, there are signs that their parents are becoming equally imaginative in their efforts to elude the clutches of sanctions enforcers such as Operation KleptoCapture, the taskforce set up by the U.S. Department of Justice to seize the assets of sanctioned Russians.

In the early days of the war, Western governments de-registered and impounded hundreds of private jets.

But many others escaped either because they were moved out of countries that were signed up to the sanctions effort before their owners were added to the list, or they happened to be in jurisdictions that were not part of the offensive.

And in recent months many of these unseized jets, which could once be monitored via online tracking services such as Flightradar24 and FlightAware, have mysteriously disappeared.

Intriguingly, this phenomenon coincided with a flurry of new registrations published by Russia’s Federal Agency for Air Transport.

Given that it is well-nigh impossible for a Russian to acquire a Western-made jet due to the severity of the sanctions regime, the assumption has to be that many Boeings, Bombardiers and Gulfstreams have been re-registered under new tail numbers.

On the face of it, this offers their owners a welcome degree of anonymity as they flit around the globe.