OLEG DERIPASKA, PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA, SANCTIONED BY AUSTRALIA AND THE U.K.

The Australian government has imposed a battery of sanctions against 11 banks and government entities and two Russian oligarchs with business interests in the oceanic country over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The list of sanctioned Russian oligarchs, which already includes 41 people, includes businessman Oleg Deripaska whose business dealings are linked to Australian companies. Deripaska is chairman of the Russian aluminum company Rusal, which has a 20 percent stake in the Queensland Alumina Limited (QAL) refinery in Gladstone, eastern Australia.

Other governments, such as the British government, have also joined the sanctions against the businessman. In recent years, the metallurgical tycoon has been unable to avoid being at the center of a series of high-profile political disputes that have ended with the British government’s decision to add him to the list of sanctioned persons in reaction to the war in Ukraine.

Deripaska, 54, had already been in the limelight for his political ties in the UK. In 2008, he was involved in a bitter row that exposed his relationships with two of the most powerful figures in modern British politics: Lord Mandelson and George Osborne.

Like many oligarchs, Deripaska owes much of his wealth to the messy collapse of the Soviet Union. He took control of large aluminum assets that until then had belonged to the State and later consolidated them into the Rusal group in partnership with Roman Abramovich (another of those sanctioned). Rusal, now part of the En+ Group (owned by Deripaska), raised $1.5 billion when it floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2017.