Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich secretly sent $245K to Vladimir Putin’s former high school teacher: report

Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich secretly paid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s former high school teacher $245,000 for an apartment, it was revealed, a gesture that shows the deep financial ties between the two men. 

Abramovich appeared to act as the oligarch’s personal banker when he provided the gifts — including an apartment — after Putin made a state visit to Israel in 2005 and met his former high school teacher, Mina Yuditskaya-Berliner, who had emigrated to Israel.

The heartwarming story made headlines, revealing a soft side of the KGB lifer-turned-dictator.

But this week, the Washington Post revealed that the cash actually came from a Cyrpus-based shell company controlled by Abramovich.

Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University, told the New York Post that the money tells its own story.

“The money came directly from an account controlled by Abramovich, which is significant because it shows that he was doing financial favors for Putin,” Shelley said.

“It is also significant because the information came from a leak to journalists. It’s another example of how uncovering financial secrets is crucial to understanding the Kremlin’s financial relationships,” Shelley added.

The news comes as Abramovich, who is sanctioned in the UK and the EU, fights to stay off the US sanctions list.

Russian oligarchs are on sanctions lists because they are part of Putin’s inner circle.

But Abramovich is currently off the US sanctions list — reportedly at the request of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky — because he is close to Putin and could be useful in potential future peace talks with Russia, sources say.

In the past, Abramovich has denied financial links to Putin and has said he does not operate at the dictator’s behest.

But it turns out — thanks to recently uncovered financial records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Washington Post and the Israeli publication Shomrim — that Abramovich, not Putin, paid for the apartment via N.P. Gemini Holdings Ltd., a Cyprus-based shell company that Abramovich controlled.

Yuditskaya-Berliner bought the apartment the day the money, $245,000, landed in her bank account, according to reports.

Back in 2005, the Ukrainian-born teacher said she cried when she got the apartment.

When Yuditskaya-Berliner died, at age 96 in 2017, she left the apartment to the Russian Embassy in Israel.

In a statement sent to the Washington Post and obtained by the New York Post, Abramovich’s spokesperson said: “We have searched our records, and this was a gift made following a request received from the Jewish community.”

The statement added that Abramovich has donated more than $500 million to Jewish causes and that: “It would be false and sensational to suggest that anyone ‘had control’ over Mr. Abramovich’s finances based on a $240,000 donation.”

The spokesperson also said in the statement that Abramovich sent the $240,000 gift to Yuditskaya-Berliner following a request from Rabbi Alexander Boroda, the leader of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, who has close ties to Putin and has been criticized for seeming to defend the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Boroda said he “asked our donors in Russia who would be willing to help buy her an apartment and Roman Abramovich, who was the head of our donor committee, said he would buy her an apartment in Tel Aviv,” adding that it was a “completely humanitarian matter” and not a favor to Putin.

Russian intelligence services, during and after Communist rule, have a dark history of secretly working with Russian religious leaders who are not as independent as they may seem.

The same year that Abramovich sent Putin’s teacher cash, Abramovich scored a staggering $13 billion windfall when Putin’s government bought back the oil company Sibneft, which Abramovich and partners had bought for $250 million in Russia’s 1995 rigged privatization auctions.

For now, sanctions have slowed Abramovich down just a tad.

His freedom to travel has been limited, and he no longer owns the Chelsea football club in England.

Before an earlier round of sanctions, Abramovich also transferred around $100 million worth of Upper East Side property to his ex-wife Dasha Zhukova.

Besides being once married to an oligarch, Zhukova is also the daughter of an oligarch, Alexander Zhukov, who was once arrested in Italy and jailed for six months for arms smuggling; charges he denied.

Abramovich still owns real estate in Aspen and is heavily invested — albeit secretly — in American hedge funds.

When asked about his investments in the US, Abramovich’s spokesperson declined to comment.