Leaked documents suggest that Roman Abramovich privately financed the acquisition and sustained the operations of a top-tier football club in the Netherlands while concurrently owning Chelsea.
Vitesse Arnhem, the Dutch club in question, and Chelsea both maintained that Abramovich had no financial or managerial involvement with Vitesse during two investigations by the Netherlands football association.
However, the Oligarch files, a collection of leaked data from offshore service provider MeritServus, indicates that the russian billionaire provided a minimum of €117m (£102.8m) in clandestine financing for Vitesse's takeover through several entities registered in ambiguous offshore tax havens.
The Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism examined the documents.
The leaked trove of documents appears to show that Abramovich bankrolled Vitesse’s spending with a series of loans worth at least €117m (about £102.8m) by the end of 2015. This was a huge investment for Vitesse, whose total turnover in 2014-15 was €14m (£12.3m).
The rules of Uefa, the European football confederation, require clubs that play against each other to be independently owned and run “to ensure the integrity of the competitions”, and that “no individual or legal entity may have control or influence over more than one club participating in a Uefa club competition”.
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