Funds from Roman Abramovich’s sale of Chelsea FC have earned at least £175m in interest while sitting in a UK bank account, new accounts show. One analyst described the company holding the frozen cash as “the most profitable football business in the world.”
Accounts for Fordstam, the company through which the billionaire Russian oligarch owned Chelsea, show that the proceeds from the sale, completed in May 2022, have grown from £2.3bn to nearly £2.5bn.
Abramovich, who was hit with UK sanctions in 2022 over his ties to Vladimir Putin, has previously pledged to donate the money to victims of the war in Ukraine. However, the funds have yet to be released because of an ongoing legal dispute with the British government about how the money should be used.
The situation is further complicated by a separate criminal investigation by the Jersey authorities into the original source of the oil tycoon’s wealth.
There is also uncertainty about whether £1.4bn in loans, part of a vast network of offshore companies that the oligarch used to fund Chelsea’s success, will be deducted from the final sum available for donation.
In the meantime, the money, an initial £2.35bn
