A billionaire Russian oligarch has reportedly managed to get his hands on a luxury $110 million A320neo jet despite European Union sanctions that are meant to stop Russia’s powerful elite from doing business with Airbus and other aircraft manufacturers.
The purchaser of the luxury jet has been named as Zarakh Iliev, a Russian-Azerbaijani billionaire and one of Russia’s richest men who made his fortune in real estate development, including hotels and residential properties.
The 58-year-old oligarch has faced sanctions from the EU, United States and United Kingdom following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and those sanctions are supposed to stop him from acquiring luxury goods, including private jets.
Through his company, Kievskaya Ploshchad, it’s understood that Iliev was able to acquire the ACJ A320neo (Airbus Corporate Jet) by transferring the plane through various ownerships in different countries until it eventually reached Russia.
The aircraft was built in 2019 and initially flew from the factory in France to Basel in Switzerland, where it received a new paint job and was specced out with a luxury interior.
From there, a company based in San Marino but with a registered address in Malta purchased the aircraft and obtained a new registration number for the plane. In 2022, the plane switched to an Azerbaijani registration and just a few months later, it received yet another new registration – this time in Tajikistan.
On June 14, the plane once again surfaced, but this time with a Russian aircraft registration.
According to publicly available data supplied by Flight Radar 24, the aircraft (registration: RA73889) last flew on June 16 from Muscat in Oman to Moscow as a ferry flight – meaning that it was being delivered to a customer in Russia.
Over the last couple of years, other Russian oligarchs have managed to get hold of sanctioned aircraft with similar schemes to transfer ownership from one country to the next until they eventually end up in Russia.
In the past, both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have been used as ‘third’ countries to cloak the transfer of private jets to Russia’s ultra-wealthy elite.
Close this loophole at once!