Tan Albayrak, a sanctions lawyer at Reed Smith, agreed: “I do not see a legal basis, either way, because the funds are frozen. They cannot be used to fulfill any of the parties’ wishes.”
“In sanctions laws, frozen means frozen — and just that,” said Albayrak. “Normally, the funds can’t be distributed — neither according to Mr. Abramovich’s wishes nor to the U.K. government’s wishes,” he said.
Still, the £2.5 billion figure pales in comparison to the hundreds of billions of pounds frozen by the EU and U.K. since the Ukraine invasion in 2022. Despite bold statements, the British government is reluctant to sail into legally uncharted waters.
While Britain has frozen around £24 billion of Russian assets, and the EU has €200 billion, they have only gone so far as to use the interest gained on the funds to help Ukraine, rather than seizing them outright, and politicians remain deeply nervous about going any further.
In March, the Belgian Prime Minister said that to do so would be “an act of war” which could create “systemic risks to the entire financial world system.”
The sanctions lawyer quoted above thinks the government via the Reeves and Lammy statement “wants to show they’re not afraid to put their foot down on sanctions.” But, they added: “They don’t have a mechanism to do this. There’s no way of doing this via civil litigation at all.”
