British Ministry of Finance helps Prigozhin bypass sanctions to sue journalist

OpenDemocracy reports.

The publication notes that sanctions introduced in Britain and Europe in 2020 were supposed to prevent anyone from doing business with Prigozhin. In 2018, he also came under US sanctions.

But a large number of hacked emails show British Treasury in 2021, led by Rishi Sunak, issued special licenses that allowed the oligarch to bypass sanctions and launch an aggressive legal campaign against a journalist in London courts.

Infamous libel suit against Higgins followed Bellingcat's revelations about the shadowy operations of the Wagner group and was part of Prigozhin's strategy to undermine sanctions against him.

The government has given a British law firm a license to work on the case and approved major steps along the way. Sanctions prevented Prigozhin from coming to London, but the British government allowed his British lawyers to fly business class to St. Petersburg so they could meet face-to-face and complete a legal case against Higgins. Prigozhin paid his London lawyers directly by wire transfer from Russia, which forced British bank to initially withhold funds due to sanctions.

E-mails and documents that the publication has seen were exposed as a result of a series of hacker attacks on more than 50 Russian companies and state institutions, carried out after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

• On January 20, it became known that the US Treasury recognizes Wagner as a transnational criminal organization.

• Founder of Wagner's PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, wrote a letter to the White House in which he asked about crimes committed by his mercenaries.