"Who else are you going to sue?" Fridmans € 14bn claim explained

It is February 9, 1989, in Moscow, and the Cold War is still ongoing. None of the signatories from Luxembourg, Belgium and the USSR could have known that the Berlin Wall would fall exactly nine months after they met to sign a bilateral investment treaty (BIT). The document, still in effect in 2026, is only eight pages long and aims at the "mutual encouragement and protection of investments" (concernant l'encouragement et la protection réciproque des investissements). It does this, primarily, by protecting investments from state seizure. It lay dormant for over three decades before becoming relevant again, just as relations between today's EU and Russia reach a new low.

Thirty-three years later, on February 24, 2022, Russia launched what Moscow calls a "special military operation" in Ukraine, meant to take three days. It has evolved into a hot war that, at the time of publication, has lasted over four years. As a result, the Council of the EU has adopted 21 sanctions packages against Russia and Russian entities and individuals.

Among those listed is Mikhail Fridman, a Russian multi-billionaire with a net worth of about €11.5 billion and reportedly the second-richest person in Russia in 2013. The 2022 listing, approved unanimously by the Council of the European Union, describes Fridman as having "strong ties to the administration of Vladimir Putin". His assets, many of them located in Luxembourg, which a Paperjam interview describes as the "operational centre of his international investments", or held by Luxembourg banks, were frozen until September.

Sanctions-list stalemate

Two years later, in 2024, Fridman successfully contested those allegations before the EU General Court. It ruled that "none of the reasons set out in the initial acts is sufficiently substantiated and the inclusion of […] Mr Fridman on the lists at issue was therefore not justified." The 2022 listing was thus annulled.

However, this legal victory rang hollow for Fridman. The court did not order his assets to be unfrozen. And the listing it ruled on had already been replaced a year earlier, on March 13, 2023, by a new one that included the name Mikhail Fridman once more. That new listing had to be contested in separate proceedings. In effect, he succeeded only in being removed from the old list, but had been put on a new one long before the judgement came.

"That can happen over and over, and he can go to court again and try again, " says Javier García Olmedo, Research Scientist at the Faculty of Law of the University of Luxembourg. In the meantime, Fridman's assets in Luxembourg remained frozen, largely by Luxembourg banks executing decisions of the Council of the European Union.