Italian media: Orbán’s veto protects Gazprom CEO, richest Russian from EU sanctions

The biggest Italian daily, the Corriere della Sera, writes that the European Union cannot sanction multiple influential Russian oligarchs because of the veto of the Hungarian prime minister.

According to g7.hu, the daily mentions three names in their article:

Alexey Miller: the CEO of Gazprom, who blackmails Europe with the gas, Corriere della Sera characterizes him;
Vladimir Potanin: the CEO of Norilsk Nickel, a nickel and palladium mining and smelting company, who is also the richest Russian with a fortune estimated to be around 26 billion USD;
Andrey Bokarev is the chairman of the Transmashholding, a railway company. He had a joint business in Hungary with Hungarian defence minister Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky.

Of course, all three are close allies of President Vladimir Putin and were sanctioned by the USA and the United Kingdom.

However, the European Union cannot sanction them, so they can travel freely to the EU. Even though, e.g., Miller’s Gazprom threatened in a video with shutting the gas taps to freeze the West. HERE you can watch their video. To make matters worse, the Kremlin openly declared in September that they reduced the amount of gas delivered to Europe because of the EU sanctions.

Read also: The debate on the rule of law has begun: Hungary is no longer a democracy

The Italian daily did not share details about Orbán’s veto but refers to unnamed sources working in Brussels.

However, that would not be the first time Hungary vetoed an EU sanction against a person. For example, Hungary took the pro-war Patriarch Kirill of Moscow from the sanctions list Hungary, g7.hu said. The Hungarian news outlet asked Orbán’s office about the claims of the Italian paper but received no answer.