Our revelation that Roman Abramovich may owe HMRC as much as £1bn in unpaid UK taxes has prompted an immediate call for an investigation by senior politicians.

Abramovich held as much as $6bn in a global network of hundreds of hedge funds, generating huge returns that he then pumped into things like buying Chelsea FC.

Our investigation revealed that he likely dodged £537m in UK tax when he kept the funds moving between companies registered in the British Virgin Islands and owned by Abramovich’s trust in Cyprus. All lovely islands, but probably not where Abramovich actually conducted his business – and thus owed tax.

Your support allowed our reporter Simon Lock to spend months digging through a massive (digital) pile of leaked documents to piece it all together. Working with the BBC, the Guardian and his editor Eleanor Rose, Simon was able to figure out that, although the money was kept safely offshore, the main person managing it was right here in the UK. 

That person was Eugene Shvidler, one of Abramovich’s oldest and closest associates. But because tax on this kind of stuff is based on where the money is managed and controlled and Shvidler was based in the UK, HMRC will have a right to claim taxes. The £1bn I mentioned includes the back-taxes along with interest and potential penalties.

Representatives for Abramovich said he obtained independent professional tax and legal advice and acted in accordance with it. He denied knowledge of any unlawful tax avoidance or evasion scheme and said he was not liable for any scheme.

Lawyers for Shvidler said he denied knowingly or negligently being involved in an unlawful scheme to avoid paying tax. They said that the investments uncovered by TBIJ were the subject of very careful and detailed tax planning, undertaken and advised on by leading tax advisors. 

But after reading our investigation, Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader who’s now the chair of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on Magnitsky sanctions, wanted answers. He asked the chancellor Rachel Reeves whether she would “ensure that funds potentially owed by Roman Abramovich to HMRC are investigated and reclaimed”. 

Keir Starmer’s own MPs had questions too. Joe Powell MP, who heads up the APPG on fair taxation, told the BBC’s File on 4 programme that HMRC needed to urgently investigate the case to recover what could be “very significant amounts of money that could be invested in public services”. 

And so on Thursday Powell, with the backing of the APPG, wrote to HMRC, calling for an investigation. We’ll be paying close attention to the response.

The story doesn’t end there. Simon, Eleanor and a big group of partners both here in the UK and across Europe also exposed how Abramovich dodged millions of dollars in tax on his fleet of superyachts.

A sham company was set up to manage his yachts as if they were a boat-for-hire operation, meaning he didn’t have to pay tax on things like maintenance, repairs and fuel. But Abramovich was renting his own yachts, so it wasn’t really a commercial business, was it?  

Again, Abramovich says he got advice on this and hasn’t done anything wrong. But the emails his associates were writing at the time – and that we got our hands on – make for fascinating reading.  

Finally, a thank you to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and Paper Trail Media, who set up the Cyprus Confidential project, and the whistleblowing group Distributed Denial of Secrets, which provided some of the original documents.

Let me know if you want to know more about how Simon did it – I read every reply I get to this email.

Factchecked!

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

Did you know?

Donald Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental rules and policies during his first term in office.

Find out more

Trump and senior figures in the Republican party have been rallying against so-called “woke capitalism” – finance that aims to achieve better environmental, social or governance (ESG) outcomes.

For his 2024 election campaign, Trump enjoyed the backing of numerous fossil fuel executives and his “drill, baby, drill!” mantra signals a likely fossil energy boom in the US. Read more here. 

Going undercover to expose injustice

Our undercover investigation with Tortoise Media this week exposed the shocking biases of a court expert whose advice has led to children being removed from their mothers’ care. 

Melanie Gill is an unregulated psychologist who says she has given evidence in more than 150 family court cases. She specialises in parental alienation, a heavily contested concept that describes a child’s rejection of one parent after being manipulated by another.

When she appears in a family court case, Gill is instructed as an expert witness and is supposed to provide fair and accurate evidence, as well as independent opinion. 

But our investigation raised serious questions about her ability to act impartially.

Our undercover reporter set up a call with Gill, posing as a separated father with an occasional temper. Gill asked him very few questions. Instead she told him that a new generation of family court judges “haven’t got a bloody clue”. 

They had bought into ideas about domestic violence, she said, “spun internationally by radical feminism” – and that “all men are violent, all women are victims”. She dismissed “hopelessly biased” domestic violence charities that “validate” women’s allegations of abuse. And she went on to claim that men were just as likely as women to be victims of domestic abuse saying  “what you see in figures throughout the world is it’s actually evening up.” 

Over many years as a court-appointed expert, Gill’s evidence has informed decisions to remove at least a dozen children from the care of their mothers. And those are just the cases we know about.

In a statement Gill said our interpretation of her comments was “distorted” and that she had no confidence that we would report this matter fairly. 

But it wasn’t just Gill we looked at. Across the country, court-appointed psychologists are influencing the outcomes of private family law cases, leading to a concerning pattern of child removals and mothers facing other draconian orders. It’s systemic, particularly in cases where women have raised allegations of abuse, including rape and coercive control. 

The Ministry of Justice agreed. It said: “We share the concerns about these unregulated ‘parental alienation’ experts and we are working with the Family Procedure Rule Committee to prevent them from giving evidence in the family courts.”

To go through protracted divorce proceedings is one thing, but to have your children removed on the advice of an expert who is not even regulated by a professional body adds a whole new layer of trauma.

That’s why it’s so important that family court proceedings, once kept largely secret, are now scrutinised openly. One mother who spoke to TBIJ said she “feels hopeful for the first time that people will see the truth”.

And there’s more to come. This week the transparency pilot project, which allowed journalists to report on what they heard in court for the first time, was extended to all family courts in England and Wales. 

This is in no small part due to the success of our family court reporter Hannah Summers. She remains the only full time family court reporter in the UK, and her work during the pilot scheme unearthed some of the gross injustices that had put vulnerable children at grave risk. With your support, we can keep bringing scrutiny and accountability to our family justice system.