UK Treasury helped the boss of a murderous Russian mercenary army circumvent the government’s own sanctions

Posted: 2nd February 2023

It sounds unbelievable but it’s true: the UK Treasury helped the boss of a murderous Russian mercenary army circumvent the government’s own sanctions to launch a legal attack on a British journalist.

It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?

Sanctions introduced in the UK and Europe in 2020 were supposed to prevent anyone from doing business with Yevgeny Prigozhin. He’s the warlord who founded Wagner, a private army that the US government has announced it would designate a “transnational criminal organisation”. The group’s mercenaries have been accused of war crimes including killing and torturing civilians near Kyiv.

However, in 2021, a little-known department within the Treasury, called the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation, issued a special licence to let him override sanctions and launch an aggressive legal case against journalist Eliot Higgins in the London courts.

After my colleague Jim Fitzpatrick broke the story, MPs demanded answers from the UK government, and a minister said the Treasury will review how this happened. But we have to make sure the results of any such review are made public. We have a right to know how on earth the UK Treasury found itself helping someone like Yevgeny Prigozhin.

To make that happen, we need to demonstrate that people care about what’s happened here. Will you please sign an open letter to the chancellor demanding that the results of this review are made public? We’ll use it to put pressure on him and in communications with MPs pushing for transparency on this. You’ll also be given an option to email your MP about this as well, if you wish.

Thank you for helping openDemocracy,

PS: Once you’ve added your name to the open letter, please share the link to it to anyone else who you know who might be interested.

Peter Geoghegan,
Editor-in-chief, openDemocracy