The United Kingdom may move more quickly to sanction Russian businessmen following the decision of President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.

This was made known by the country’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who cited new legal measures, which will be sent to the parliament next week.

Responding to journalists’ question on why Roman Abramovich, the highest-profile Russian businessman in Britain due to his ownership of Chelsea Football Club, had not been sanctioned, Johnson said the government had to move carefully, according to Italy’s La Repubblica and other newspapers.
He was quoted as saying,

None of us wants to live in a country where the state can take your house off you without a very high burden of proof and due process.

There’s no point saying, yeah, we’re going to go after him, and then you come up against the brick wall of lawyers.

So we have to get it right. We’re also trying not to just make this about one individual.

Britain has been criticised for not moving as quickly with sanctions against individuals as the European Union, the United States and Canada.

Johnson said amendments to Britain’s economic crimes legislation due to be presented to parliament on Monday would help the government act with more speed.

Top line of what our package on Monday will do is that the measures that you have against individual oligarchs in Europe will essentially allow us to catch them too,

he said.

Meanwhile, Britain had sanctioned two more Russians – industrialist Alisher Usmanov and former deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov.

Abramovich said on Wednesday he would sell Chelsea Football Club and promised to donate money from the sale to help victims of the war in Ukraine.

Justin Nwosu

Justin Nwosu is the founder and publisher of Flavision. His core interest is in writing unbiased news about Nigeria in particular and Africa in general. He’s a strong adherent of investigative journalism, with a bent on exposing corruption, abuse of power and societal ills.