Former Russian minister sentenced to 40 months in prison for violating British sanctions

LONDON (AP) — A former Russian government minister who violated British sanctions by receiving financial support from family members was sentenced Friday to more than three years in prison.

Dmitrii Ovsiannikov, who was appointed governor of Sevastopol in Crimea by Russian President Vladimir Putin, became the first person convicted of violating the sanctions put in place after the illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

He set up a British bank account to illegally receive tens of thousands of pounds from his wife and accepted gifts and payments from his brother, prosecutors said.

Ovsiannikov, 48, was convicted Wednesday in Southwark Crown Court of six counts of circumventing sanctions between February 2023 and January 2024, and two counts of money laundering. He was sentenced to 40 months behind bars.

Ovsiannikov, who also served as deputy minister for industry and trade, was an important political figure placed under European Union sanctions in 2017 for work that threatened the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine, prosecutors said.

The sanctions prevented him from depositing or withdrawing funds in EU countries. Although the EU sanctions were annulled by the Court of Justice of the EU in 2022, they remained in place in the U.K. under the Russian Regulations adopted in 2019 as it left the bloc.

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“He knew he had been on the U.K. sanctions list since 2017 but chose to ignore this,” said Julius Capon of the Crown Prosecution Service. “Another member of his family sought deliberately to breach the sanctions to live their own lavish lifestyle and showed complete disregard for the law.”

Ovsiannikov resigned as Sevastopol governor in 2019, and returned to his role in the Russian government but was later dismissed and he was expelled from the United Russia party in 2020. He moved to the U.K. in February 2023, a year after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Ovsiannikov could have faced up to seven years in prison for each sanctions violation.

Justice Sara Cockerill said she gave limited weight to the ongoing war in Ukraine war and said his offenses were at the simple end of the scale — a “country mile” from complex fraud.

Defense lawyer Rosemary Davidson said the conviction had hurt those “nearest and dear to him” and resulted in his family, including some of his children, having their bank accounts closed after news of his conviction.

“It’s going to be a feature of their lives going forwards,” she said. “That is also part of the consequences that he has to bear.”

His brother, Alexei Owsjanikow, 47, was convicted of two counts of circumventing sanctions for paying school tuition for Ovsiannikov’s children. He was acquitted of three additional counts of breaching sanctions for buying his brother a Mercedes-Benz worth 54,500 pounds ($70,000) and giving him access to a bank account.

Owsjanikow was given a 15-month suspended sentence.

Ekaterina Ovsiannikova, 47, was cleared of four counts of circumventing sanctions for allegedly funneling 76,000 pounds ($97,000) to her husband.

Defense lawyers for the most part did not dispute those transactions but argued the brother and wife didn’t know Ovsiannikov faced sanctions or were unaware he couldn’t receive financial assistance.

All three are Russian nationals, though Ovsiannikov and his brother have British passports because their father was born in England.

The case was the first prosecution for breaching sanctions put in place by the U.K. in 2019, according to prosecutors.