EU must axe Russian F1 driver from sanctions list, rules court

Nikita Mazepin had an unsuccessful one-year stint as a driver for the US-based Haas F1 group throughout which he didn’t win any world championship factors earlier than being sacked from the group in March 2022, shortly after Russia’s navy invasion of Ukraine. He owed his seat at Haas partly to the truth that, on the time, Haas’s principal sponsor was Russian fertiliser large Uralkali, an organization managed by Uralchem, a chemical substances conglomerate then owned by Mazepin’s father Dmitry.

Haas terminated its sponsorship take care of Uralkali shortly after the beginning of the battle, prompting the Mazepin household to demand the compensation of over $100m [€92m] in funding. Dmitry Mazepin then introduced the sale of 52 p.c of his Uralchem shares.

“The affiliation between Mr Nikita Mazepin and his father is on no account established from an financial or capital perspective or by the existence of frequent pursuits linking them on the time when the sustaining acts had been adopted,” acknowledged the Luxembourg-based court docket.

It added that since Mazepin had left Haas in March 2022, his place on the EU sanctions listing was “due to this fact based mostly, de facto, solely on the household connection, which isn’t enough to take care of his identify on the lists of individuals topic to restrictive measures.”

The EU had described Dmitry Mazepin as “a member of the closest circle” of Russian president Vladimir Putin, and the chemical substances oligarch was one of many enterprise leaders who met Putin on the Kremlin shortly after the invasion began.

In April 2022, Italian authorities seized property and belongings value €105m from Dmitry Mazepin whose personal enchantment to be faraway from the EU sanctions listing was rejected by the ECJ final November.

The Mazepins are additionally interesting their place on sanctions lists within the UK and Canada.