A24 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, MAY 17 , 2022
but because of the war.
“It’s not that the Russians
broke down my plans for vaca-
tion,” said Aleksandr Nastenko,
50, the owner of a geological com-
pany. “They destroyed my life.”
Most summers, Nastenko rents
a villa in Sardinia — far smaller
than the Russian ones. But earlier
this month, he was instead stand-
ing in Kharkiv, holding his phone
as he walked through the bat-
tered eastern Ukrainian city. He
hadn’t shaved in several days. His
wife and four children had fled
early in the war to Germany. A
missile strike had damaged his
house and injured his dog. He
was sleeping at friends’ homes
some nights. He’d stopped run-
ning his business, volunteering
instead for the war effort while
raging about what Russia was
doing to his city and country.
“What happened to these oli-
garchs — well, I believe they de-
served it,” Nastenko said. “They
robbed their country and [their
wealth] is their payment for their
silence. They were silent when all
these things were happening.
They let these things happen.”
Sardinia, he said, is a place that
symbolizes what his life used to
be. It was a place he’d go when his
family was still together — rent-
ing a home on the water with a
covered terrace and a grill where
he’d cook oysters. His family
picked figs from the garden and
went boating along the white-
washed cliffs.
“Our past life,” he said.
As he spoke, he paused every
now and then, pointing out the
sounds of shelling several miles
away.
“Listen,” he kept saying.
He said that during the war,
many of his priorities have
changed, and material posses-
sions seem less important than
they had before. But returning to
Sardinia, he said, was something
he still badly wanted. After the
war, he said, he’d buy a house
there.
Just not the villa of an oligarch.
“No way,” he said. “They’re tox-
ic.”measures — such as members of
Myanmar’s junta — didn’t have
significant wealth stored away in
Europe.
“These were individuals that
didn’t have such a glamorous life-
style,” Portela said.
On the street with the Us-
manov-linked villas, there is no
sign that Italy has yet begun its
work, and the agency responsible
for the frozen assets says it is still
finalizing how to manage the
properties.
“The Italian state has to make a
decision,” said Grilloti, a real es-
tate agent who previously rented
properties to Russians. “If it were
up to me, I’d put them up for rent,
and give the money to Ukraine.”
Italy says it has the option to sell
the frozen assets if they become
too expensive to manage. But such
a move would be likely to draw
legal challenges.
Already, Usmanov has pledged
to use “all legal means” to protect
his reputation. And there have
been successful challenges to Eu-
ropean sanctions over the past
decade-plus, including on due-
process grounds.
In a statement, Usmanov’s
spokesman said he would not
comment on any possible legal
steps. But he said Usmanov con-
siders the sanctions to be “unfair
and based on false and defamato-
ry allegations.” The statement said
that most of the properties in Eu-
rope that have been connected to
him were in fact long ago “trans-
ferred into irrevocable family
trusts.”Sardinia represents life
before the war
While the Russians own many
of the Emerald Coast’s top proper-
ties — “like diamonds,” said the
head of the land- and homeowners
association — they represent only
a minority of Sardinia’s jet-set
class. In the summer, villas also fill
up with Germans and Swiss and
Italians, and many others from
the Persian Gulf. There are even
some Ukrainians — though they,
too, are now finding themselves
cut off, not because of sanctionsa sensitive issue, say the govern-
ment faces a monumental task.
Italy has on its hands not just
the Emerald Coast villas, but an-
other in Sardinia, 40 minutes by
car, linked to Petr Aven, until re-
cently the head of Russia’s largest
commercial bank. There is also a
frozen villa in Tuscany and several
others near Lake Como. That’s in
addition to two of the world’s most
expensive yachts, which tend to
have annual operating costs in the
millions.
And that is probably not the full
list of assets in Italy controlled by
Russians targeted by sanctions.
Several real estate agents connect
another Emerald Coast property
to industrialist Oleg Deripaska,
who is under sanction. No proper-
ty belonging to Deripaska is on
Italy’s list of frozen assets, and the
Finance Ministry declined to com-
ment on specific cases.
In theory, Italy can use the oli-
garchs’ frozen bank accounts to
help pay for the upkeep of the
frozen villas and yachts. But one
person with knowledge of the Rus-
sian cases said the maintenance
costs will exceed the money in the
accounts.
Clara Portela, a specialist in in-
ternational sanctions at the Uni-
versity of Valencia, said E.U. coun-
tries have scant experience in han-
dling mega-assets; most of the
people previously targeted by E.U.on the island and who owns a
nearby restaurant and dance club
called the Billionaire. “Some
pump isn’t working, whatever.
And then when everything is final-
ly ready to go, it’s time to go back
[home].”
“Sooner or later I want to sell
mine,” he said.
As an example of what it takes
to manage an ultraluxury proper-
ty, one typical morning this
month, 20 workers were scattered
across the grounds of a villa be-
longing to Ezio Simonelli, an Ital-
ian tax accountant. One man was
retouching the bottom of a swim-
ming pool — one of three on a
property that has been rented in
the past by George Clooney and
the then-president of Kazakhstan.
Six workers were pulling up rotted
wood from around a hot tub. Yet
more were attending to the vari-
ous other needs of the property,
which includes a vegetable gar-
den, a tennis court, two golf holes,
a wine cellar, and an industrial-
sized kitchen that can cater par-
ties of up to 350 guests.
“Look at this wood; it’s like
dust,” one of the workers said,
digging up some broken planks.
Italy doesn’t have to keep the
frozen villas guest-ready, but by
law it is supposed to keep them
from falling apart. People familiar
with the work, speaking on the
condition of anonymity to discussrity roles, as being complicit in the
invasion. The town of Arzachena,
for instance, has not revoked Us-
manov’s citizenship honors.
“Many of these oligarchs are
still perceived here as magnates,
as benefactors,” said Mirko Idili, a
union leader. He said he is trying
to broker a deal between the Ital-
ian government and Usmanov to
protect the workers, some of
whom have lost their jobs, and
others whose jobs have been sus-
pended without pay.
But Pili, the former governor,
said Sardinia now has a chance to
wean itself from reliance on Rus-
sian wealth. He compared the op-
portunity to the decision facing
European countries on whether to
continue buying Russian oil and
gas.
“We ended up relying funda-
mentally on one world,” he said.
“And once you close the tap, there’s
damage.”Keeping up with the
Usmanovs
Four Usmanov-linked villas are
clustered on a tiny peninsula,
where the properties slope down
toward the beach, nestled among
cactus paddles and flowers. They
are among the most exclusive
properties in Sardinia. And the job
of attending to them now falls to
the Italian government, which is
required by law to maintain the
value of any asset it freezes.
Real estate agents and owners
say that even outside the context
of sanctions, villas like these can
be as vexing as they are alluring.
They cost several hundred thou-
sand dollars annually to operate —
and that’s just the beginning.
Workers, sometimes commuting
as far as an hour away, are hard to
come by, especially for employers
who aren’t willing to pay as well as
the Russians did. Across the Emer-
ald Coast this month, many villas
— weeks away from the summer
surge — looked more like con-
struction sites.
“When you arrive the first day
of the summer, it’s always a disas-
ter,” said Flavio Briatore, an Ital-
ian entrepreneur who has a homegovernment, leaving the targeted
oligarchs — three Russian billion-
aires — cut off from the secluded
coves and crescent-moon beaches.
But the move to strip Russians
of their European property and
privileges leaves several dilemmas
in its wake.
Hundreds of workers — some-
times receiving five- and six-figure
tips — are out of a job. Sardinians
are left to wrestle with whether
they miscalculated in catering to
Moscow’s super-rich; some devel-
opers even had websites in Rus-
sian. Then there is the biggest
headache of all: figuring out how
to manage the frozen properties —
more than $250 million in real
estate, all now in the hands of the
Italian state, with no clear answer
on how long they might sit empty.
“They’ll be like haunted man-
sions,” said Tamara Grilloti, a lux-
ury real estate agent in Sardinia.
The villas are scarcely visible
from behind their front gates. The
views encompass rocky head-
lands, sea and sky. The Emerald
Coast is less developed than Myko-
nos or Ibiza. And it springs to life
only for a few weeks a year, when
the ultrarich arrive in July and
August, private planes touching
down by the hundreds.
Visitors have included George
Clooney, Bill Gates, hedge fund
managers and supermodels. On at
least two occasions, in 2003 and
2008, Russian President Vladimir
Putin stayed as a guest at the
palatial compound of then-Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Among Russians, those trips
helped boost the popularity of Sar-
dinia, which is 100 miles across
the Tyrrhenian Sea from Rome —
and nearly 2,000 miles from Mos-
cow.
According to the Italian govern-
ment, the Russians with frozen
property here include Alexei Mor-
dashov, a steel magnate said to be
Russia’s richest man, and Dmitry
Mazepin, who until March was the
chief executive and controlling
owner of fertilizer company Ural-
chem, and who held the Sardinian
property in tandem with his son.
Among locals, though, the most
well-known of the targeted oli-
garchs is Usmanov, who unlike the
other billionaires spent months,
not just weeks, in Sardinia each
year, and who ingratiated himself
to the year-round community that
tends to live more inland.
Usmanov, 68, started coming to
Sardinia soon after the collapse of
the Soviet Union, and, as he as-
sembled a constellation of proper-
ties, he developed a reputation for
being generous with his riches.
He bought several ambulances
for the municipality. He spon-
sored the local soccer team. He
funded cultural activities. He also
spent much of Italy’s coronavirus
lockdown in Sardinia — providing
an economic boost when tourism
slowed.
In 2018, when the community
named him an honorary citizen,
Usmanov spoke at the local town
hall about how Sardinia’s geogra-
phy reminded him of the area of
Uzbekistan where he grew up.
“[There is] a certain chemistry
between my soul and this land,”
Usmanov said.
Sardinians are now trying to
reconcile what they saw with what
Western governments are saying
about his role in the war.
The United States says Us-
manov is one of the elites whose
wealth — accumulated through
metals, mining, IT and telecom-
munications — is allowing Putin
to sustain his assault on Ukraine.
The European Union says Us-
manov has been called one of Pu-
tin’s “favorite oligarchs,” has front-
ed money for the Russian leader
and has “solved his business prob-
lems.”
Usmanov controls a daily news-
paper, the Kommersant, whose
entire political desk resigned in
2019 as he curtailed editorial free-
doms and instituted a pro-Krem-
lin line.
Usmanov also used the villas in
Sardinia for treating Russian
elites. One former employee,
speaking on the condition of ano-
nymity because he had signed a
nondisclosure agreement, re-
called Usmanov more than a dec-
ade ago introducing him to one of
the guests aboard a yacht. “This
man will be president one day,” the
former employee remembers Us-
manov saying. It was Dmitry Med-
vedev, who served by turns as
Russia’s president and prime min-
ister from 2008 until 2020.
Amid the sanctions, Usmanov
has lost access to assets European
governments say he controlled.
France has impounded two heli-
copters, and German officials in
Hamburg have frozen a $600 mil-
lion yacht, outfitted with two heli-
pads and an 80-foot swimming
pool.
Many Sardinians still hope Us-
manov might ultimately be able to
come back to the island. They tend
to see the war as Putin’s alone, and
don’t view Usmanov, or other oli-
garchs without military and secu-
EMERALD COAST FROM A1
Italian sanctions dismantle an ‘oligarch state’ in Sardinia
PHOTOS BY FEDERICA VALABREGA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: A villa on Sardinia’s Emerald Coast
connected to Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov is seen May 5.
Security cameras and clipped hedges line the property
connected to Usmanov, among the Russian elites who have been
cut off from Emerald Coast property by Italian sanctions. A bay
view from inside a villa belonging to Ezio Simonelli, an Italian
tax accountant. The entrance to the villa connected to Usmanov.
Unlike other Russian billionaires, he spent months in Sardinia
each year and ingratiated himself to the year-round community.