#usmanov

It’s not a stupid question at all.  What most people know about Usmanov is that he says he wants to pump money into Arsenal and that’s he’s not Stan Kroenke, which is enough to make a lot of people like him.  Unfortunately, there’s a lot of skeletons in his closet.

@mertes4cker​ just wrote a good post summing up some of the problems with Usmanov, but I’d add a few other things.

He is a criminal gangster with very close ties to the Russian mob who served 6 years in prison. He was able to get out of prison early because the Uzbek president pardoned Usmanov, due in large part to the president’s close alliance with Uzbek mafia boss and major international heroin overlord Gafur Rakhimov (who was a close friend of Usmanov’s).  

He used his mafia connections to help secure very good deals for himself in the privatization stage of the fall of the Soviet Union and became increasingly rich and powerful.  He is one of Putin’s puppets and uses his control over Kommersant (one of the biggest papers in Russia) to shill for Putin and carry out censorship campaigns.  As soon as he bought Kommersant, he replaced the editor-in-chief with someone who was unabashedly pro-Putin.  More disturbingly, one of the reporters who did not fall in line with the new pro-Putin standard (Ivan Safronov) fell to his death from a window 3 months later.  (x)

There is also persistent and widespread talk about Usmanov’s involvement in a heinous rape in Uzbekistan.  The victim and others connected to the case have disappeared and Usmanov has gone to great lengths to remove all references to what he calls “a mean lie spread by small minded people who were naive to think that I was their competitor”.

In short, Usmanov is a gangster who has been trying to clean up his image for years and sees Arsenal as a way to further legitimize himself as he uses his power and money to try and erase the record of his past misdeeds.

The Council of the European Union could be forced to defend itself in a Hamburg court in what lawyers say would be a first-of-its-kind defamation action linked to an EU sanctions decision—if an appeal now pending before Germany’s Federal Court of Justice succeeds, according to filings seen by Euronews. The case targets the Council’s statement of reasons adopted in September 2023 for listing…