Venture capital fund Target Global managed tens of millions of dollars for Roman Abramovich and helped the now sanctioned oligarch build up stakes in some of Europe’s biggest startups.
Venture capital fund Target Global managed tens of millions of dollars for Roman Abramovich and helped the now-sanctioned oligarch build up stakes in some of Europe’s biggest startups.
Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich quietly invested $63 million in a string of European startups through his relationship with London-based venture firm Target Global, according to a cache of documents reviewed by Forbes. The venture capital fund, which has raised over $3.2 billion of capital and backed at least 15 European tech unicorns including fintech Revolut and car marketplace Cazoo, counted on Abramovich as a co-investor and limited partner from 2015 to 2021, the documents show. The U.K. later sanctioned the oligarch in March 2022 over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The previously unreported investments appear in leaked documents from Meritservus, a Cyprus-based offshore service provider, that were shared anonymously with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and its partners, including Forbes. The documents reveal the inner workings of Abramovich’s relationship with Target Global, which was cofounded by the son of another now-sanctioned oligarch Aleksandr Frolov.
The documents show that Abramovich invested over $63 million either as a limited partner or through specific companies that Target Global introduced for investments between 2015 and 2021. In 2018, Abramovich invested $25 million as an “anchor” limited partner in one of Target’s earliest funds, Target Global Mobility 2.0, according to a subscription document for the fund. That check accounted for around a fifth of the total assets of the $132 million fund, according to investment database Preqin.
Abramovich’s cash was used for Target’s investments in European scooter company Circ in 2019 (which was acquired in 2020 by American startup Bird, which recently declared bankruptcy) and German secondhand car unicorn Auto1 in 2015. The documents also show that another Abramovich shell company Ervington was a shareholder of Auto1, and that it signed over a power of attorney to Target Global to vote on mundane corporate affairs like remuneration packages for new executives.
Auto1 confirmed Target and Ervington’s investments and noted they occurred years before the first sanctions.
Auto1 listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange for $2.2 billion in February 2021 — making it one of Germany’s most high profile startup success stories in recent years. But Abramovich’s stake in the company through Target and Ervington was not disclosed to investors in its January 2021 public listing prospectus (Auto1 said German law does not require shareholders with less than a 3% stake to be disclosed in an IPO prospectus). However, the oligarch’s Ervington investment vehicle was named as a shareholder in a January 2021 Auto1 investor document that was included in the leaked files. Abramovich sold part of his stake in Auto1 to a Target special purpose vehicle via a private sale in September 2021, according to Ervington’s company minutes.
According to the leaked documents, Abramovich, and his holding companies, also loaned tens of millions of dollars to Target special purpose companies to indirectly buy stakes in startups. For example, between 2020 and 2021, Abramovich provided Target Global with a series of loans totaling $23.5 million to invest in female health app Flo, a London-based period tracking app with over 300 million users, according to contracts between Target and Norma. In May 2017, he lent Target’s Helium special purpose vehicle $10 million to buy a stake in Berlin-based Delivery Hero, a food delivery startup now with a market cap of $7.1 billion on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Delivery Hero said no sanctions were in place against any shareholders at the time of its 2017 IPO. Flo and Bird did not respond to a request for comment.
The oligarch’s family office also drafted an unsigned contract for the now London-based fund to manage his personal investment into British semiconductor company Compound Photonics.
