Deloitte, the world’s largest accountancy firm, helped falsify documents to conceal Roman Abramovich’s wealth and evade tax, a joint investigation by BBC Panorama and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found.
According to the investigation, accounts signed off by Deloitte in Cyprus caused assets worth $672m (£508m) — including superyachts, mansions and private jets — to vanish from the Russian oligarch’s company accounts. Deloitte also appears to have advised on a scheme to evade a substantial tax bill on that wealth through the falsification of documents.
Andrew Mitchell KC, an expert in financial services law, said the evidence uncovered by Panorama showed “straightforward” tax evasion and that “it couldn’t be more blatant”.
Lawyers for Abramovich said he denies evading tax or concealing his fortune. They stated that Panorama had provided no evidence he knew about, authorised or directed the falsification of any document, adding that it was legitimate to rely on advice from professionals. Deloitte Cyprus said it “acts in compliance with applicable laws”.
For almost twenty years, Abramovich was the best-known Russian oligarch in Britain, welcomed in London after buying Chelsea Football Club in 2003 and funding the club’s most successful era. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the UK government sanctioned him as an associate of President Vladimir Putin, and he was compelled to sell the club.
He has been reported to be living in Turkey, which did not apply sanctions and has served as a safe haven. On the Channel Island of Jersey, £5.4bn of his assets remain frozen, and a criminal investigation has been under way for four years. His lawyers told the BBC he denies the allegations in the Jersey probe, describing it as “undertaken for political purposes”.
The investigation has uncovered new evidence about how Abramovich’s business empire was run, raising serious questions about the integrity of some of his professional advisers.
The evidence comes from a leak containing thousands of documents about the oligarch’s finances and the operations of a network of offshore companies administered from Cyprus — a former tax haven popular with Russians — between 1995 and 2022.
Since 2023, the BBC and media partners including the Guardian, Paper Trail Media, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the Cyprus Investigative Reporting Network, alongside the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, have reported on the leaked files as part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Cyprus Confidential investigation.
In 2022, Panorama also reported that Abramovich built his fortune through a corrupt deal to acquire a Russian state-owned oil company in the 1990s, before selling it back to the government a decade later at billions in profit. He has previously said allegations of corruption in that deal are false.
Profits from his Russian oil deals were channelled into a web of offshore companies, administered from Limassol, Cyprus’s second-largest city, by a corporate services firm called MeritServus.
Until 2005, Deloitte — now the largest of the “big four” firms that dominate accounting — owned MeritServus. After the two split, they continued to work closely with Abramovich’s associates to manage his global fortune.
The leaked MeritServus documents shed light on some of their practices.
A first instance of backdated paperwork dates to 2006, when a new Cypriot law required company accounts to be made public. The transparency measure threatened to expose the details of Abramovich’s wealth.
Deloitte Cyprus had prepared but not yet finalised draft accounts for 2003 for his Cypriot company Amiscan Investments. Those accounts set out $672m of luxury property, including a West Sussex mansion, a London flat and an estate in the south of France, along with helicopters, private jets and a small fleet of boats he owned at the time, among them the $147.5m Pelorus.
To keep the holdings secret, Abramovich’s associates and MeritServus decided to rewrite history. They devised a plan to sidestep the transparency law by moving the assets to Amiscan’s parent company in the British Virgin Islands, where they could remain hidden, and backdated the change by three years so it appeared the transfer had taken place in 2003.
Deloitte Cyprus reviewed the backdated documents and described them as “adequate” for removing the assets from Amiscan’s accounts.
When the 2003 accounts were signed off by Deloitte in 2006, the homes, planes and yachts disappeared at the stroke of a pen, leaving only $75,000 in assets.
Deloitte signed off the accounts despite the leaked documents showing it knew they were completely misleading, according to the investigation.
Lord Sikka, professor of accounting at the University of Sheffield, said misrepresenting transaction dates and failing to publish true and fair accounts amounted to a “violation of a statutory duty” and was “pretty scandalous”.
Panorama also found evidence that backdated documents were used in a tax evasion scheme involving another Abramovich Cypriot company, Kravin Investments, which held almost $2bn in the bank in 2003.
The company had been earning large sums in interest, meaning Abramovich’s firm should have paid tax on that interest to the Cypriot authorities. His advisers instead proposed rewriting history.
An August 2005 email from MeritServus to Abramovich’s Russian associates said a plan had been drawn up after a meeting with Deloitte. “If you agree, it will be necessary to change the financial statements and the accounting records accordingly for 2003 and 2004,” the email stated.
MeritServus told the oligarch’s Russian associates that Kravin’s “Provisional Tax Assessments for 2005” would be filed showing the company earning no income from the money. A month later, an associate in Russia replied by email: “I agree”.
MeritServus then produced a series of backdated documents falsely purporting to show that Kravin was merely holding and investing the funds on behalf of its parent company in the British Virgin Islands. This made it appear Kravin did not own the money and was therefore not liable for tax in Cyprus.
In a September 2005 email, Deloitte wrote that “certain changes will have to be made to the accounts (bank account balances, interest income, profit and loss account)” because of the backdated changes to Kravin’s assets. Deloitte was therefore apparently advising on the falsification of financial records, and the evidence suggests it allowed Abramovich’s company to evade millions in tax.
Mitchell told Panorama the scheme amounted to “straightforward” tax evasion. “If it happened in England and it was in the millions, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs would be thinking about a prosecution,” he said.
Cypriot MP Christos Christofides said that if tax had been evaded, “we have to see how we can get our money back and how, if some people are guilty, they have to pay the price according to our law”.
Beyond the records Deloitte helped to backdate, Abramovich’s advisers at MeritServus falsified a third set of records, relating to more than $10bn of his business fortune held by a company called Electus Investments in Cyprus.
MeritServus backdated documents to make it appear Electus did not own the fortune. It used another Abramovich company bearing exactly the same name, Electus Investments, but based in the more secretive British Virgin Islands, where accounts did not have to be made public.
Emails show that in 2006 MeritServus acknowledged the fortune was owned by Electus Cyprus, but again proposed rewriting the past, this time “to transfer the beneficial ownership to Electus Investments in the BVI” and to make it appear the change had occurred three years earlier.
MeritServus signed and backdated documents falsely purporting to show the BVI company had owned the $10bn fortune since 20 November 2003. When the Cypriot company’s accounts were made public, it appeared to hold assets worth just $145,000.
Mitchell told Panorama: “What you take away from it is there are professionals who are prepared to bend and break the rules of their profession and therefore the law. And it looks that they will stop literally at nothing in terms of creating documents.”
Vladimir Milov, Russia’s deputy minister of energy while Abramovich was building his empire and now a critic of the Russian government, said: “For each Russian oligarch or Middle Eastern or African corrupt oligarch, there’s an army of Western financial and legal services and PR services providers, who is easily taking money for whitewashing their reputation and making them look normal.”
Denying any wrongdoing by the oligarch, Abramovich’s lawyers said he was “not involved in the day-to-day operation of those companies” and that where arrangements were put forward by professional advisers, “reliance on that advice was entirely proper and legitimate”.
Deloitte Cyprus said it could not comment on the specific allegations because the documents were more than 20 years old and no longer accessible.
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