In March 2022, the BBC reported that Daniel Litvak, a rabbi who helped Roman Abramovich obtain his Portuguese citizenship, had been detained as he prepared to travel to Israel.
Portuguese law recognises that Sephardic Jews were expelled from the Iberian peninsula more than 400 years ago during the Inquisition, and offers citizenship to their descendants subject to assessment by experts at one of Portugal's Jewish communities in either Lisbon or Porto. Daniel Litvak is the rabbi for the community in Porto, and was responsible for assessing Abramovich's application.
The BBC reported that "Portugal's Judicial Police and public prosecutor said ... that there were suspicions of money laundering, corruption, fraud and falsification of documents in the process of granting citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews."
This news came two days after it was reported that Abramovich (who is widely suspected to have close ties to Vladimir Putin, although he denies this) was one of seven Russian oligarchs to be sanctioned by the UK in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The Premier League subsequently disqualified him as a director of Chelsea Football Club, and he passed "the stewardship and care of Chelsea FC" to the trustees of the club's charitable foundation (while he continued to own it).
According to Wikipedia, "Reuters noted that there is little known history of Sephardi Jews in Russia."
© Haydn Thompson 2022