Putin does like to be beside the seaside. Credit: VLADIMIR RODIONOV/ITAR-TASS/AFP via Getty Images

âSlava Ukrainaâ. Glory to Ukraine. So reads an anti-war graffito sprayed on a wall. But not any old wall. It daubs the gateway of Villa Suzanna, avenue des Dunes, outside Biarritz. An extravagant 1927 Art Deco residence facing the Atlantic Ocean, Villa Suzanna is owned by Vladimir Putin’s ex-wife, Lyudmila. Hence the accompanying tag on the gates, âPutin Sukaâ. Or in your basic Slavic, âPutin bitchâ.
Londongrad may be where Russian oligarchs go for their financial transactions of various legitimacy, but La Belle France is where they play. Last weekend, France 2âs Journal, a TV news show given more to sobriety than sensationalism, took its viewers on a visual tour of how Russia’s new rich live it up locally, from the ski chalet in Courchevel to the Cap-quelque-chose-ou-autre summer house. What stuck on the retina â and in the French craw â were the pontoons running into the bright blue sea so that the oligarchs could park their yachts.
And what yachts! Amore Vero, owned by Igor Sechin, head of the Russian state oil company Rosneft, has a Thunderbirds-esque swimming pool that turns into a helipad. Worth ÂŁ90 million, the Amore Vero has now been seized by French customs in a night-time raid on a dockyard near Marseille. âHe is one of Vladimir Putinâs most trusted and closest advisers, as well as his personal friendâ, the accompanying EU sanction notice alleges.
Some years ago, The Hollywood Reporter, covering the Cannes film festival, happened to ask a local estate agent how many ultra-rich Russians there were on the French Riviera. He estimated 20,000 of them. âThey bring their funny money from Russia through Cypress into the Riviera. Theyâve kept the market moving for 10 years. So they can be a little thuggish â who cares?â In a detail one would blush to make up, the secretive Kremlin billionaire Suleiman Kerimov (the subject of a long-running tax evasion and money laundering investigation by the French authorities) is believed to own the sumptuous villa on the Cap dâAntibes used in the Michael Caine movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
The Med may be the place for Putin’s friends, but the family and the real intimates head to Biarritz for their holidays. France’s glittering south-west coast has been irresistible to rich Russians since the middle of the 19th century. (It was once dubbed the âqueen of resorts and the resort of kings.â) Flunkies of the imperial court came both for the climate and for the coddling offered by the beach-side HĂŽtel du Palais, originally built in the 1850s for the French Empress EugĂ©nie. And it was in Biarritz that the then-head of the Federal Security Service received an urgent phone call from Boris Yeltsin, in the Summer 1999, asking him to become prime minister.
Around the same time Putin accepted the rule of all the existing Russias, and those to be regained, the Kremlin appointed an honorary vice consul in Biarritz, a town of less than 30,000 people. Nearby Bordeaux, Franceâs seventh largest city, received no diplomatic outpost. âIt was because Putinâs circle has an affection for this place,â admitted the man selected for the job, otherwise known as biographer Alexandre de Miller de La Cerda. The âTo Doâ list of the Kremlin’s man in Biarritz has included hosting debutante balls in the casino for the children of the Russian elite â an opportunity for Putinâs courtiers to feel like the heirs to the czarist aristocracy. Indeed, a sojourn in Biarritz is an attempt to confer class and legitimacy on Russianâs nouveau riche.

As one might expect, the Putins are tight-lipped about their property holdings in Biarritz, though various news agencies have identified at least three, beginning with the villa located at 9, rue de la FrĂ©gate (the street once home to Igor Stravinsky), in the town centre, bought in 1996 for around $400,000. The title deed is in the name of one of Putinâs daughters. According to Time magazine, in 2012 another Putin daughter bought a property in the town with her husband, Kirill Shamalov, an oil-executive reputed to be worth $1.25 billion. (He is also one of the founders of Bank Rossiya, which the US Treasury Department identified in 2014 as the âpersonal bankâ for Putin and his close associates.) The seller of the property was oil trader Gennady Timchenko, one of Putinâs oldest friends.
Whatâs wrong with buying a few holiday homes? Well, as a civil servant of the Russian state, Putin was barred in 1996 from taking money out of the country. He was also officially only earning circa $1,000 a month. Currently, the self-described âgalley slaveâ ascetically proclaims no individual wealth at all, beyond a small plot of land, a modest pension pot, three Russian cars, a couple of homely apartments, and a Skif M1 trailer tent. Lyudmila Putinâs financial records, filed during her marriage to Putin, show only relatively miniscule sums. She supposedly earned just 121,000 rubles ($3,800) during the whole of 2012. The following year, Villa Suzanna was purchased in her name and that of her new husband, the head of a non-profit with no known money. The villa had been on the market for around ÂŁ5 million.
âLuxury property is a preferred means of laundering money stemming from corruption or embezzlement of public funds”, Sara Brimbeuf of Transparency International France told France 24 News. When Time magazine asked Father Panteleimon, the priest at the Russian Orthodox Church in Biarritz, about the Kremlin elites who visited his parish, he replied: âwhat they do here just doesnât look good.â Nor does it look good to French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, who has created a âtask forceâ of customs officers, tax officers and ministry officials to draw up a list of oligarch-controlled assets in France and begin seizing them.
Fabien Roussel, the French Communist Partyâs personable candidate in the upcoming election for the ĂlysĂ©e, tweeted a suggestion: storm the oligarchâs summer palaces and use them âto welcome refugees from Ukraineâ. He got 2,500 likes; he normally gets a hundred. At the capitalist end of the French spectrum, luxury brands HermĂšs, Chanel and LMVH â all beloved of Russian oligarchs â have announced suspension of activity in Russia itself.
And the EU, of which France currently holds the presidency (and, a cynic would aver, always holds the political reins), has sanctioned 400 times more Russian entities than Downing Street. Le Maire claims that the total amount of Russian assets frozen amount to âalmost 1,000 billion dollarsâ.
âNo oligarch will slip through our netâ, promises Le Maire, adding that oligarchsâ âpartners, their children, their property holding companiesâ would be affected, âsuch that they won’t be able to hide behind financial constructsâ. Like owning villas.
While Macron’s parlaying with Putin sometimes smacks of appeasement, his fellow Frenchmen are taking a harder line. It’s less Bienvenu Ă Biarritz, more “Fuck Poutine” â as another local daubing proclaims.
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SubscribeâThey bring their funny money from Russia through Cypress into the Riviera…”
Cypress, as in the tree? Wow, those Russians are pretty smart if they can route their money through wood & leaves.
Yes, I spotted that too! Does no-one edit anymore?
But it’s correctly spelled!
Surely its time for an investigation into the connection between Russian money, Boris Johnson and the Conservative party. How on earth does Evgeny Lebedev end up in the House of Lords.
Like anybody else does, influence. Whatâs wrong with that as long as they donât rock the democratic boat, like they did with Brexit.
Oh…so it’s just the Tories is it? Get real.
My wife’s father fought for the Germans in WW2! I clearly shouldn’t have married her.
Well $1000 billion will certainly solve a lot of France’s weighty fiscal problems so that’s a good electioneering stunt. Whether or not France actually gets to hang on to them all, or where they ultimately end up, is another matter altogether.
The French should realise that if you seize a holiday home your Russian oil well gets seized in retalliation. A holiday home costs money, an oil well makes money. Undoubtedly, the houses will be sold to Chinese billionaires. After all, those are pillars of society.
A wee silver lining to the war and sanctions is that we wonât need to hear and work around the Russian boors at the better holiday resorts, much worse than the yanks.
Dirty money gets thrown around only because our feckless Elite are happy to recieve it. Only when it becomes socially unfashionable to their elite friends do they start to show only slight remorse. Meanwhile I’m sure those happily taking Igor Kolomoisky’s money aren’t complaining.
I believe the 6th EU anti-money laundering directive is to be issued shortly. It makes you wonder about the point of it all, doesnât it?