The billionaire Mikhail Fridman and Russia’s former Minister of Foreign Economic Relations Petr Aven are listed as shareholders of a banking and financial services holding firm which Geoffrey Cox declared he provided legal services to in the U.K. parliament’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
LONDON — Former U.K. Attorney General Geoffrey Cox was paid £93,000 to provide legal services to a Luxembourg-based company whose shareholders include two sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
Cox, a serving Conservative MP who was the chief legal counsel to former Conservative prime ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson, has declared 62 hours of work for ABH Holdings S.A. since December last year in the U.K. parliament’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
Neither Cox or ABH Holdings responded to POLITICO’s request for comment. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing in Cox’s decision to provide services to the firm, which is entitled to legal representation.
The 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 firm.
Both men were placed on the UK Sanctions List in March 2022 in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, with their roles at ABH Holding cited among the reasons given for their inclusion.
The company was deemed to be an “entity carrying on business in a sector of strategic significance to the Government of Russia, namely the Russian financial services sector,” the U.K. government said at the time. Fridman and Aven’s involvement in Russian banking giant Alfa Group was also referenced in the official reasoning for imposing sanctions on the pair.
The pair also remain under the European Union’s sanctions regime, despite a successful legal challenge in the EU’s general court in April 2024. The court ruled that the bloc was not justified in imposing restrictive measures on them, but the ruling only applies between February 2022 and mid-March 2023, meaning they remain sanctioned.
Fridman has launched multiple legal challenges against European governments over the sanction decisions via the Investor State Dispute Settlements (ISDS), which allow foreign investors to sue host countries over regulations that affect their businesses.
Previously listed among Russia’s richest citizens, he brought an ISDS case against the government of Luxembourg for €16 billion, in response to the sanctions against his business interests. He has also used the arbitration mechanism to bring several cases against the government of Ukraine.
U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office minister Chris Bryant revealed last November that Fridman raised an ISDS case against the U.K., but further details about the nature of the case have not been made public.
The Register of Members’ Financial Interests does not disclose any detail of the legal advice provided by Cox, or if it is connected to Fridman’s ISDS case against the U.K.
Cox, who is an experienced arbitration barrister, is currently representing investors in an abandoned coal mine project in Cumbria. They are suing the U.K. government using the ISDS process. The two ISDS cases are the first known uses of the arbitration process against the U.K. since 2006.
The former Conservative attorney general has previously faced criticism for the lucrative legal work he has carried out while sitting as an U.K. MP. In 2021, it was reported that Cox had spent a month in the Caribbean where he represented the government of the British Virgin Isles in an alleged corruption case brought by the U.K. Foreign Office.