The Securities and Exchange Commission announced charges Tuesday against Concord Management LLC and its owner Michael Matlin for operating an unregistered investment adviser to a wealthy former Russian official. The SEC complaint doesn’t name the Russian, but previous reports have identified Roman Abramovich as the Russian oligarch who used Concord to access U.S. hedge funds and other investments.
The complaint describes the Russian official as one with “political connections to the Russian Federation and vast wealth from the privatization of state-run industries after the collapse of the former Soviet Union.” Abramovich earned his fortune after he bought a former state-owned oil company, Sibneft, from the Russian government for about $250 million in an auction following the dissolution of the USSR. He then sold it back to the government for $13 billion in 2005. Abramovich is worth roughly $9 billion, according to Forbes, and the SEC’s complaint states that Concord managed about $7.2 billion of the Russian national’s assets. His net worth took a hit last year after the United Kingdom froze his assets in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, leading to the forced sale of the English soccer club Chelsea for $3.2 billion, the proceeds of which were set to be used for humanitarian purposes in Ukraine.
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