Deripaska Says U.S. Fails to Prove He Acted as Putin Agent
Deripaska Says U.S. Fails to Prove He Acted as Agent of Putin
(Bloomberg) -- Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska wants a U.S. judge to lift sanctions against him because, he claims, the U.S. Treasury Department failed to prove he acted as an agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, known as OFAC, punished Deripaska last year in response to Russia’s “worldwide malign activities,” which included occupying Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, supplying weapons to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and attempting to subvert Western democracies.
Deripaska sued the U.S. this year over the sanctions, claiming they unfairly caused his net worth to drop by $7.5 billion as banks withdrew credit and as other businesses refused to work with him. In support of that lawsuit, Deripaska filed papers Monday saying that a redacted version of Treasury records concluded that he supported Putin’s projects, not that he acted on the leader’s behalf.
“OFAC provides no explanation as to how it determined that support for a project associated with a specific individual is the equivalent of acting for or on their behalf,” according to the filing in federal court in Washington. Deripaska is currently worth about $2.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
On Aug. 2, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and OFAC asked a judge to dismiss Deripaska’s lawsuit, arguing that as a foreign national, he can’t argue that his constitutional rights to due process were violated.
The filing on Monday said that eight of the nine paragraphs in an OFAC memorandum supporting the factual basis for the Deripaska sanctions were redacted, and that the Russian has no “alternative means to learn of the reasons” for the action. The Aug. 2 filing said that the redacted material was classified.
The sanctions could be imposed only in response to a national emergency, but the U.S. has failed to make such a declaration, according to Deripaska’s filing.
Deripaska said in his lawsuit that he was “the latest victim” of “political infighting and ongoing reaction to Russia’s purported interference” with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Deripaska, the founder of aluminum producers En+ Group and United Co. Rusal, was among the most prominent tycoons hit with sanctions by President Donald Trump’s administration. The move followed passage of a law to retaliate against Moscow for its election interference. In April 2018, the Treasury slapped sanctions on Deripaska and six other Russians it labeled oligarchs.
In the filing, Deripaska said that the methodology for designating him as an oligarch was “unreasonable and unlawful.”
The case is Deripaska v. Mnuchin, 19-cv-727, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).
To contact the reporter on this story: David Voreacos in New York at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeffrey D Grocott at jgrocott2@bloomberg.net, David S. Joachim, Robert Friedman
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