Roman Abramovich's $963M Art Collection Hidden from EU Sanctions

An investigation conducted by The Guardian and OCCRP has uncovered that Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and his former spouse Dasha Zhukova possess a collection of 367 artworks, appraised at $963 million. This collection, curated over approximately ten years, features pieces by renowned artists such as Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and René Magritte, among others. In 2008, The Art Newspaper noted Abramovich's successful bids for Francis Bacon's Triptych at Sotheby's New York for $86.3 million and Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) at Christie's for $33.6 million. The couple established the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow in 2008. Although the collection was reportedly housed in a London warehouse around 2014, its current whereabouts remain unclear. The artworks are held through an anonymous offshore entity in the British Virgin Islands, later moved to Jersey, managed by a Cypriot trust (Ermis Trust Settlement) with Abramovich and Zhukova as beneficiaries. Just prior to the Ukraine conflict and EU sanctions targeting oligarchs aligned with Putin, ownership was adjusted to 51% for Zhukova and 49% for Abramovich, enabling the collection to bypass sanctions that freeze assets owned by sanctioned individuals over 50%. In early March, all of Abramovich's assets in the West were frozen, yet the concealed collection remained unaffected. Neither Abramovich nor Zhukova has provided any comments.