What Triggered the Confiscations: Citizenship and Corruption
The key reasons for confiscation are foreign citizenship and corruption. The amount of confiscated property that falls to them is now comparable – 1.5 and 1 trillion rubles, respectively.
Asset Seizures Triple in One Year
The total value of assets seized under claims by the Prosecutor General’s Office or transferred to temporary management by the state over the past three years has reached 3.9 trillion rubles or 2% of Russia’s GDP at the end of June 2025, according to calculations by the NSP law firm (Nektorov, Savelyev and Partners). Research results published “Kommersant”.
“It is difficult to find a scale for comparison,” the publication notes. Over the year, the figure has tripled — at the end of June 2024, it was 1.3 trillion rubles. At the same time, the number of lawsuits themselves has increased less significantly, from 85 to 99. “Many lawsuits are about depriving owners of the right to ownership of dozens of enterprises, shares, land plots, aircraft, etc.,” Kommersant explains.
Speed and Scale of Court Decisions
Decisions on cases were usually made in one session, and the seizure took an average of only about two months. Only in three cases did the courts refuse to satisfy the claims of the Prosecutor General’s Office. In one case, the agency dropped the claims on its own, and in another, it came to a settlement with Andrey Melnichenko, a billionaire withseventhlines of the Russian Forbes list.
Violations during privatization are far from the most common reason for the seizure of property. Under this law, assets worth 385.1 billion rubles were converted to state revenue, less than 10% of the total amount. The key reasons were foreign citizenship and corruption: 1.5 and 1 trillion rubles, respectively.
In the first case, the prosecutor’s office pointed to the ban on foreign citizens owning strategic enterprises, which, as Kommersant notes, was introduced even before the military actions in Ukraine. For example, Domodedovo Airport was seized on this basis.
In the second case, the basis is the prohibition of persons who have or had powers of authority (deputies, mayors, etc.) to own a business and develop it with the help of their administrative resources. According to the civil code, the court can seize property in corruption cases if there is no evidence that it was acquired with legal income. Thus, among others, FESCO was nationalized from the Magomedov brothers and TGK-2 from Leonid Lebedev.
At the end of October 2024, the Constitutional Court indicated that the law does not have a statute of limitations for anti-corruption cases, NSP recalls.
Legal Gray Zones and Hidden Risk Factors
At the same time, the Prosecutor General’s Office in its claims, regardless of the formal grounds, mentions the beneficiary’s possession of foreign passports and property, his actual presence abroad, and the payment of dividends to foreign holding structures in “unfriendly” countries such as Cyprus or the Netherlands, lawyers note.
Expert Insights: How to Reduce Legal Exposure
There are no legislative restrictions on traveling abroad or owning real estate there, reminds NSP partner Roman Makarov. At the same time, “entrepreneurs who fear an imminent visit from ‘plainclothes doctors’ should consider giving up second passports, real estate abroad, and perhaps even a strong partner in the form of a state-oriented business as a shareholder,” says the lawyer.
