Sanctions and Restrictive Measures against Business Representatives and Members of their Families: Legal Aspects

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the legal grounds for the imposition of sanctions by Western jurisdictions against representatives of Russian business and their relatives, as well as current law enforcement practice. An important general trend in the development of sanctions legislation is the gradual expansion of the scope of application of the grounds for imposing sanctions with the simultaneous simplification of inclusion in the sanctions lists. Prominent examples are the expansion of sectors of the economy affected by US sanctions, and the very ability of the US and UK to impose blocking sanctions simply by virtue of the fact that a person operates in a certain sector of the economy. In the EU, to impose sanctions on a businessperson operating in a particular sector, one still has to prove the presence of a leading position, but this is also a rather vague term. This approach is also the result of a simplification: there is practically no need to prove connection with the regime due to the presumption of connection between big business and the political regime considered in this paper. The UK also simplified the procedure for imposing sanctions by extending them to family members of sanctioned persons, which eliminated the need to prove the presence of financial and economic ties with the sanctioned person. An even more important easing in the imposition of sanctions was the emergence of a simplified procedure for imposing sanctions on persons who fell under the sanctions of the UK’s allies. This procedure only allows checking the coincidence of the grounds for imposing sanctions without checking the actual circumstances that caused the inclusion of a person in the sanctions list. In fact, the only way to avoid being included in the sanctions lists is to refuse any activity that serves as a basis for inclusion in the sanctions lists. Often, such a scenario is unrealistic, which means that representatives of Russian big business will only have to take measures to minimize possible harm, since the elimination of the sanctions risk becomes almost impossible.

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