US lawyers no longer want to work for Russian oligarchs, especially those who want their sanctions overturned, a report says

• US lawyers no longer want to work for sanctioned Russian oligarchs, the New York Post reported.
• Like other industries, law firms want to distance themselves from those targeted by Western sanctions.

Wealthy Russian oligarchs looking for US lawyers to try to overturn their sanctions may have a tough time.

Lawyers in the US are allowed to work for sanctioned people – but many no longer want to, with one litigator calling the cases "radioactive," according to a report by the New York Post.

The West has imposed heavy sanctions on Russia in an attempt to pressure President Vladimir Putin to end the invasion of Ukraine. As well as targeting banks, the West has sanctioned Russian elites and oligarchs, freezing their assets and in some cases limiting travel. Individuals hit by US sanctions include USM Holdings founder Alisher Usmanov, Rosneft CEO Igor Ivanovich Sechin, and top figures in Russia's banking and finance sector.

These oligarchs have "too much at stake and too much to lose" to not contest the sanctions, a person with knowledge of the situation told the Post. But to overturn US sanctions, oligarchs have to take the Office of Foreign Assets Control to federal court, the Post reported.

Erich Ferrari of Ferrari & Associates, who previously represented Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska after he was sanctioned in 2018, told the Post that US law firms could still take on sanctioned oligarchs as clients. Sanctioned people can't make payments using frozen Western assets, but can still transfer money from Russia to pay a lawyer, he said.

But lawyers are keen to distance themselves from the sanctioned oligarchs.

"Nobody is going near these cases," a New York litigator who previously worked with oligarchs told the Post. "It was a tough one to pass up since I could've charged whatever I wanted but it's too radioactive."

Sources told the Post that Igor Shuvalov – Putin's former deputy prime minister and current chairman of the country's state development bank VEB – is hoping to sue to overturn US sanctions and that his representatives have been scrambling to find US lawyers to take on his case. Some other oligarchs have said that they will contest the "unfair" sanctions against them.

Insider has reached out to VEB for comment. Shuvalov didn't respond to the Post's request for comment.

"Attorneys who have worked for all sorts of dubious characters and gladly took money from Putin's allies before now realize Putin's allies are so heinous, even they won't touch them," Bill Browder, an investment manager, told the Post.

Browder was a co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, an activist shareholder in Russian companies including Gazprom and Sberbank, and he lobbied for a 2012 bill that paved the way for US sanctions on human-rights violators.

US law firms have to follow rules of professional conduct and in active cases need approval from judges to withdraw their representation, Ronald Minkoff, who chairs the professional-responsibility group at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, previously told Insider. He added that firms often have to show that their clients have violated the law or that they'd be able to find replacement counsel before dropping them.

"You can't just walk away," Minkoff said.

"These law firms are damned if they do and damned if they don't," Jimmy Gurulé, an attorney who served as undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence under former President George Bush, told The Post.

"It could be a breach-of-contract suit if they get rid of their clients, but holding on to clients could result in significant reputational damages," he said, according to the paper.