If we have lost something at home, we now call on Stef Blok, because he seems to be able to find things. This rarely helps and we understand that. Knowing where something was just now, is not that difficult. Knowing where it is now: don’t do it.
Blok is after the oligarch money, sent on the hunt by the cabinet. He does this on behalf of the cabinet and more specifically on behalf of Wopke Hoekstra. At first we thought: what kind of consultancy government is this, if you can outsource everything that is difficult, I could also become a minister and the neighbour’s cat too. We now understand that Hoekstra realizes that files that are potentially toxic should be parked far away. Did he learn from Mark Rutte?
Because they’ll be gone in no time, those oligarchs. Stef Blok is a bit like the coyote wolf Wile E. Coyote who fruitlessly chases the Road Runner clip after clip. The 50-metre yacht that is docked in Vlissingen was just like that, owned by Roman Abramovich. Not anymore, T . revealedhey Guardian last week. After the invasion of Ukraine, immediately transferred to a friend’s name. Miepmeep, did the Road Runner.
It Financial Newspaper surfaced the data of another billionaire who has been on the European sanctions list since Friday. His name is Igor Kesayev, he grew up in drink, food, cigarettes and weapons. Those weapons go to the Russian army, among other things, so he earned his place on the criminal list.
Kesayev was recently involved as a director or shareholder in three companies in the Netherlands in which, according to calculations by the investigative journalists of the FD a billion euros of his assets would have been parked. Now he has retired as a director of one and there is uncertainty about his interests in the other two. Meepmeep!
It FD added a fascinating photo to the story of the oligarch, his wife, a top model and a world-famous actress, dressed in a dress, standing in front of the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg. The photo was taken at a classical music festival in 2011, according to Google, and it summarizes in one image how much they need each other, parasitize each other: the world of the oligarchs provides the money, the world of art and culture provides the respectability, and the world of entertainment, fame and outward beauty provides the glamour.
To extract the oligarch from this without causing pain to the others or having to sacrifice comfort: nothing to do.
It’s one of many explanations for why the billionaires don’t have to run so terribly fast. For example, in the Netherlands there have been sanctions against Russia since 2014, when the war against Ukraine started. And yet, every time a new oligarch ends up on the sanctions list, he has sold everything before Stef Blok has been able to start his excel files.
Trust offices, for example, have a reporting obligation to De Nederlandsche Bank, but Kesayev and his companies were not clients of a trust office. “That’s a blind spot,” explains FDjournalist Sonny Motké in a podcast. One of the many blind spots in Blok’s spreadsheets. Motké: ‘It is by no means clear who should do what and when.’
In de Volkskrant Pieter Omtzigt recently complained that the cabinet seems to have no infrastructure for sanctions since 2014, and seems to be unprepared and robbed. In the distance sounded ‘Miepmeep!’