The second Russian oligarch has Portuguese citizenship

Assecond Russian oligarch has succeeded in persuading the Jewish community of Porto that he has a family history that dates back to Portuguese Sephardi Jews persecuted over 500 years ago.

As such, the multi-millionaire with alleged ‘Kremlin ties’ has been successful in his bid to get a Portuguese passport.

Andrei Rappoport – a businessman whose fortune is estimated by Forbes at around 1 billion euros – is already traveling on his Portuguese passport, according to reports. He indeed obtained it before the pandemic (in December 2019) – and before the hubbub sparked by the granting of Portuguese nationality to Mr. Abramovich, which led to the arrest of Rabbi Daniel Litvak on suspicion of corruption. , falsification of documents, criminal association, active corruption, money laundering, tax evasion and influence peddling – and which resulted in the withdrawal of the Jewish community of Porto from the naturalization program for Sephardic Jews.

Reporting on this latest fold in the saga, RTP’s Telejornal revisits an “old” interview with Rabbi Litvak, who explains that “most people prefer” (or rather prefer now) to use Porto’s services for naturalization, because Porto’s Jewish community was a large one processing applications faster than Lisbon, and “our criteria are much simpler”.

So much simpler in fact that people like Mr. Abramovich managed to establish Portuguese Sephardic heritage based on hearsay.

Of course, all this is now in the “past”: the rules on how to issue citizenship have changed (to the point that Roman Abramovich would no longer be entitled to them); Mr Litvak is an official suspect in an investigation that only recently involved new searches, this time of law firms.

As a result, two other Russian multi-millionaires were “caught in the crossfire”: unable to get a response to their demands from the Justice Ministry.

They are God Nissanov – one of the richest men in Europeaccording to RTP, again with “ties to Russian authorities” – and Lev Leviev, a man known as the “diamond king” and former business associate of former African (half-Russian) first daughter Isabel dos Santos, she -even at the heart of various corruption allegations.

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