By John O'Donnell
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska dismissed the latest U.S. sanctions on a series of companies that the U.S. Treasury said were connected to a scheme to evade sanctions and unlock frozen shares as nonsense.
"This balderdash isn’t worth the time," Deripaska said by message via a spokesperson in response a Reuters request for comment about the latest U.S. sanctions.
"While the horrific war in Europe claims hundreds of thousands of lives every year, politicians continue to engage in their dirty games. I strongly believe that we need to do everything we can to establish peace, not serve the interests of warmongers," he said.
The U.S. Treasury on Tuesday announced it had sanctioned a web of Russian companies it said were being used to disguise ownership of a $1.6 billion industrial stake controlled by Deripaska.
Austria's Raiffeisen Bank International was planning to buy the stake and dropped the transaction following mounting U.S. pressure to abort the bid.
In its sanctions announcement, the U.S. Treasury alleged it was an "attempted sanctions evasion scheme" to unfreeze a stake using "an opaque and complex supposed divestment".
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Deripaska has been sanctioned by Britain for his alleged ties to Putin. He has mounted a legal challenge against the sanctions which he says are based on false information and ride roughshod over the basic principles of law and justice.
Deripaska, who made his fortune by buying up stakes in aluminium factories has also been subjected to sanctions by the United States, which in 2018 took measures against him and other influential Russians.
Those sanctions were "groundless, ridiculous and absurd", Deripaska has previously said.
(Reporting by John O'Donnell; Writing by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes; Editing by Elisa Martinuzzi and Tomasz Janowski)
