POLITICO: UK MP took paid role with company linked to sanctioned Russians

Former U.K. Attorney General Geoffrey Cox was paid £93,000 to provide legal services to ABH Holdings S.A., a Luxembourg-based firm whose shareholders include two sanctioned Russian oligarchs.

Cox, who remains a serving Conservative Member of Parliament and previously acted as chief legal counsel to former prime ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson, declared 62 hours of work for the company since December last year in the U.K. parliament’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Neither Cox nor ABH Holdings responded to a request for comment from POLITICO. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing in Cox’s decision to provide legal services to the firm, which is entitled to legal representation.

Billionaire Mikhail Fridman and Russia’s former Minister of Foreign Economic Relations Petr Aven are listed as shareholders of the banking and financial services holding company.

Both men were placed on the U.K. Sanctions List in March 2022 following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, with their roles at ABH Holdings cited among the reasons for their designation. At the time, the U.K. government said the company was an “entity carrying on business in a sector of strategic significance to the Government of Russia, namely the Russian financial services sector.” Their involvement in the Russian banking group Alfa Group was also referenced in the official justification for sanctions.

Fridman and Aven remain under the European Union sanctions regime, despite a partial legal victory in April 2024 in the bloc’s General Court. The court found that the EU had not been justified in imposing restrictive measures on them for the period between February 2022 and mid-March 2023, but the ruling does not remove their current sanctioned status.

Fridman has initiated multiple legal challenges against European governments over sanctions decisions through Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms, which allow foreign investors to sue host states over regulations affecting their business interests. He has filed a €16 billion ISDS claim against the government of Luxembourg in response to sanctions imposed on his assets and has also launched several arbitration cases against Ukraine using the same process.

In addition, U.K. Foreign Office minister Chris Bryant disclosed last November that Fridman had brought an ISDS case against the United Kingdom, although further details of the claim have not been made public.

The U.K. parliament’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests does not specify the nature of the legal advice provided by Cox or whether his work is connected to Fridman’s ISDS case against the U.K.

Cox, an experienced arbitration barrister, is currently representing investors involved in an abandoned coal mine project in Cumbria, who are suing the U.K. government through the ISDS mechanism. These cases are understood to be the first known uses of ISDS arbitration against the United Kingdom since 2006.

The former attorney general has previously faced criticism over his external legal work while serving as an MP. In 2021, it was reported that Cox spent a month in the Caribbean representing the government of the British Virgin Islands in a corruption case brought by the U.K. Foreign Office.

By Tamilla Hasanova