Eugene Shvidler: Former Sibneft President and His Fight Against UK Sanctions

/ Oligarch Profiles / By
Saint Basil's Cathedral at night, Moscow

Photo: Nikolay Vorobyev, Unsplash License, via Unsplash

Sanctions status — checked 4 August 2026

Listed by: UK (OFSI)

This person appears on the sanctions lists named above. Date of birth used for identification: 1964-03-23. Checked against the OFAC SDN list, the UK OFSI consolidated list and the EU consolidated list. Sanctions lists change without notice — verify against the primary source before relying on this.

Current figure: Forbes puts Evgeny (Eugene) Shvidler’s net worth at $1.6 billion as of 8 August 2026 (Forbes profile). Estimates are revised continuously and Forbes and Bloomberg frequently disagree.

Eugene Shvidler is a businessman and a longtime friend and business partner of Roman Abramovich. He was president of the oil company Sibneft from 1998 to 2005 and sat on the board of the steel and mining group Evraz from 2011 to March 2022. He left the Soviet Union in 1989 and holds British and US citizenship. The United Kingdom sanctioned him on 24 March 2022, and New Zealand followed in October 2022. His challenge to the British designation became the first court case against the UK’s Russia sanctions regime and ended in July 2025, when the UK Supreme Court dismissed his appeal by four votes to one.

  • Born: 23 March 1964 in Ufa, Soviet Union (UK sanctions list, High Court, 2023)
  • Education: Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, master’s degree in applied mathematics, 1986
  • Citizenship: British (naturalised 2010) and US; never a citizen of the Russian Federation
  • Known for: president of Sibneft (1998–2005), non-executive director of Evraz (2011–2022), former chairman of Millhouse
  • Sanctions as of October 2026: United Kingdom (since 24 March 2022), New Zealand (since 12 October 2022). Not listed by the United States, the European Union or Canada.

Early life and emigration

Shvidler was born in 1964 in Ufa, in what is now the Russian republic of Bashkortostan. His family moved to Moscow when he was three (High Court, 2023). He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas in 1986 with a master’s degree in applied mathematics (UK Supreme Court, 2025). In January 1989 he left the Soviet Union for the United States, where he was granted refugee status and later worked for an accountancy firm in New York (High Court, 2023, UK Supreme Court, 2025). Because he left before the Russian Federation was formed, he has never been a Russian citizen. The courts also recorded that he has not visited Russia since 2007.

He received a British visa in 2004 and was naturalised as a British citizen in 2010 (UK Supreme Court, 2025). He is also a US citizen (Reuters via Swissinfo, Law Gazette). According to The Telegraph and Bloomberg, he now lives in the United States (The Telegraph via Yahoo News, Bloomberg via Fortune).

Sibneft, Evraz and Millhouse

Shvidler has been a friend of Roman Abramovich since 1986. From 1996 he was vice-president for finance of Sibneft, an oil company majority owned by Abramovich, and from 1998 until 2005 he was its president (UK Supreme Court, 2025, High Court, 2023). In September 2005 the state gas monopoly Gazprom agreed to buy 72.7 percent of Sibneft from Millhouse Capital, Abramovich’s investment company, for 13.1 billion dollars (RFE/RL, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism). Shvidler held only a nominal shareholding in Sibneft, which was not part of that sale. When he stepped down as president, he received a severance package of about 10 million dollars (High Court, 2023).

In 2011, after he and his family had moved to the United Kingdom, Shvidler joined the board of Evraz plc, a London-listed steel and mining group. From 2018 he held the seat as the nominee of Greenleas International Holdings, a company controlled by Abramovich (UK Supreme Court, 2025). He told the High Court that he was paid 204,000 dollars a year as a director between 2013 and 2021 (High Court, 2023). On 10 March 2022, the day the United Kingdom sanctioned Abramovich, Shvidler and the other directors of Evraz resigned (UK Supreme Court, 2025, PA Media via Yahoo Finance). The British and New Zealand sanctions lists describe him as the former chairman of Millhouse LLC (UK sanctions list, New Zealand sanctions register).

The High Court recorded that Shvidler has given some 10 million pounds to educational initiatives in the United Kingdom (High Court, 2023).

Sanctions

CountryListedStatus in October 2026
United Kingdom24 March 2022Listed (UK sanctions list, RUS1100): asset freeze, transport sanctions, trust services sanctions, director disqualification
New Zealand12 October 2022Listed (Russia Sanctions Register)
United States–Not on the OFAC SDN list
European Union–Not on the EU consolidated list
Canada–Not on Canada’s consolidated autonomous sanctions list

The United Kingdom designated Shvidler on 24 March 2022, a month after Russia invaded Ukraine. The designation freezes his assets worldwide and makes it a criminal offence for others to deal with him, subject to a few exceptions (UK Supreme Court, 2025). The British government revised its reasons in November 2022. It now relies on two grounds: that Shvidler is a business partner of Abramovich, “with whom Mr Shvidler has maintained a close relationship for decades and from whom he has obtained financial benefit”, and that he worked as a non-executive director of Evraz (UK Supreme Court, 2025, UK sanctions list). Neither ground alleges a personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. The United Kingdom added trust services sanctions on 21 March 2023 and a director disqualification sanction on 9 April 2025 (UK sanctions list).

Two private jets were caught up in the measures. One was held at Farnborough Airport on 9 March 2022. On 26 March 2022 the British government said that a Bombardier Global 6500 and a Cessna Citation Latitude belonging to Shvidler would be detained indefinitely (CNBC, AP via Fortune, AIN). New Zealand listed him on 12 October 2022 as a person “of strategic or economic significance to Russia” (New Zealand sanctions register).

The court case

Shvidler asked for a ministerial review in July 2022. When the government kept the designation, he brought a claim in the High Court on 24 February 2023 (High Court, 2023, UK Supreme Court, 2025). The anti-corruption group Spotlight on Corruption described it as the first court challenge to a designation under the UK’s Russia sanctions regime (Spotlight on Corruption). He told the court that he has no relationship with Putin, whom he says he last saw at Boris Yeltsin’s funeral in April 2007, and that he has never been involved in politics (High Court, 2023, Bloomberg via Fortune).

  • High Court, 18 August 2023: Mr Justice Garnham dismissed the claim. He held that the government had reasonable grounds to suspect that Shvidler had received significant financial benefits from Abramovich, and that he owed his roles at Sibneft and Evraz to Abramovich ([2023] EWHC 2121 (Admin)).
  • Court of Appeal, 27 February 2024: The appeal was dismissed. Lord Justice Singh accepted that the sanctions were “both severe and open-ended” but said that sanctions often have to be so to be effective ([2024] EWCA Civ 172, Reuters via Swissinfo).
  • UK Supreme Court, 29 July 2025: By a majority of four to one, the court dismissed his appeal (press summary, Reuters via Yahoo News). The majority held that ministers should be given a wide margin of appreciation in using sanctions against Russia. It also accepted that the consequences for a British citizen were likely to be very serious (press summary).

Lord Leggatt dissented and would have allowed the appeal. He noted that the Transport Secretary at the time, Grant Shapps, had publicly described Shvidler in 2022 as one of “Putin’s friends” and “Putin’s cronies”. He wrote: “These aspersions were all baseless. According to Mr Shvidler’s uncontradicted evidence, he has no involvement in Russian politics and no relationship with President Putin.” ([2025] UKSC 30, The Telegraph via Yahoo News). The majority’s reasoning rests on Abramovich: the High Court found it reasonable to conclude that there was a continuing relationship of trust and confidence between Putin and Abramovich, and that Shvidler might be able to put pressure on Abramovich (UK Supreme Court, 2025).

After the judgment, The Telegraph reported Shvidler as saying that the government’s choice of whom to sanction was often “more about cheap virtue-signalling for purely political purposes” (The Telegraph via Yahoo News). The UK sanctions list of 8 October 2026 still includes him. We found no record of a removal from the list.

We checked the US, UK, Canadian and Polish lists on 10 October 2026 and the EU list as of 22 September 2026. Neither the United States, the European Union, Canada nor Poland lists him, and he does not appear in Ukraine’s sanctions decision of 19 October 2022 (Decree 727/2022). We found no record of a criminal investigation against Shvidler.

About this profile

This profile was rewritten in October 2026. The 2022 version called Shvidler a close associate of Putin and said he had been described as Putin’s “cashier” and “personal banker”. We found no source that uses these words for Shvidler. In March 2014 the US Treasury used them for a different businessman, Yuri Kovalchuk (US Treasury, ICIJ). The old version also said that Shvidler bought Sibneft in 2001 for 13 billion dollars, chaired Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element, bought a stake in The Daily Telegraph and received the Order of Friendship from Putin. It described an art collection worth over 1 billion dollars, a 100 million dollar house in London and a yacht. We found no source for any of these statements, and the Sibneft sale went to Gazprom in 2005. They have been removed. The net worth figure in the box at the top of this page comes from Forbes and carries its date.

Sources

Articles You Might Enjoy Reading

Who Are The Russian Oligarchs Sanctioned?

Why Do So Many Russian Oligarchs Live In London?

Do Russian Oligarchs Own Planes?