Two Wall Street firms continued to service a trust held on behalf of Suleiman Kerimov even after the Russian oligarch was blacklisted under U.S. sanctions in 2018, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

The companies—New York hedge fund Mantle Ridge and Morgan Stanley—had previously engaged Kerimov as a client and vetted the relationship, which entailed managing a $25-million investment and a Delaware-based family trust was used to hold and oversee Kerimov’s U.S.-based assets, the news outlet said. 

The firms’ ties to Kerimov, who had previously invested in American banks and has been described in some corners as the “Russian Gatsby,” took on new significance in April 2018, when the Russian investor was placed on a U.S. list of sanctioned oligarchs that were being targeted in response to Russia’s “worldwide malign activity,” Bloomberg said. 

The Treasury Department later concluded that Kerimov maintained a concealed interest in the Delaware-based Heritage Trust after he was sanctioned and, in 2022, barred the family trust from the U.S. financial system, according to the report. 

Emails and a person familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg show that Mantle Ridge and Morgan Stanley continued working with Heritage Trust for at least nine months after Kerimov was sanctioned however. Prior to the 2022 blacklisting of Heritage Trust, Mantle Ridge “proactively” consulted with Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and exited the relationship, the company said in the report. 

The news agency noted that OFAC has previously fined businesses and professionals that worked with Heritage Trust from 2018 through the entity’s blacklisting in 2022. 

The office imposed a $216-million monetary penalty on San Francisco-based venture capital firm GVA Capital in June, alleging it had willfully violated sanctions by managing an investment ultimately owned by Heritage Trust while Kerimov was sanctioned, Bloomberg said. In December, OFAC settled with Chicago-based IPI Partners for $11.5 million for failing to cut ties with the Russian oligarch.  

Kerimov, who has an estimated net worth of more than $10 billion and is believed to be among the few admitted into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, deployed a “complex series of legal structures and front persons to obscure” his interest in Heritage Trust, OFAC concluded in 2022.

Such efforts allowed him to grow his stake in investments in large public and private companies that grew to more than $1 billion, according to the report. 

Read more at Bloomberg