Newly filed accounts for Fordstam Ltd, the company through which Roman Abramovich owned Chelsea Football Club, show that the proceeds of the club's 2022 sale have swelled from roughly £2.3bn to nearly £2.5bn, driven almost entirely by interest accrued while the money sits frozen in a UK bank account. The filings show the fund has generated at least £175m in interest since the sale closed, more than four years after the transaction and with no resolution in sight over how the money will eventually be released.
Abramovich agreed to sell Chelsea in March 2022, days before the UK imposed sanctions on him over his links to Vladimir Putin following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The club was sold that May to a consortium led by American investor Todd Boehly and private equity firm Clearlake Capital, in a deal the government licensed on the condition that the net proceeds would go toward humanitarian causes for victims of the war. The money has remained locked in a Barclays account ever since, controlled by Fordstam and released only with the permission of British authorities.
An Unlikely Windfall From Doing Nothing
The Fordstam accounts show the fund earned close to £63m in interest during 2023 and £114m in 2024 alone, pushing the cumulative total past £175m. Because the latest published accounts only run to June 2024, the true interest income accrued since is likely considerably higher. Football finance expert Stefan Borson, head of sport at law firm McCarthy Denning, described the situation wryly, saying the shell company now looks like "the most profitable football-related business in the world" — a pointed jab at a sport in which even the biggest clubs routinely lose money.
Borson cautioned that the growing balance says nothing about how close the two sides are to an agreement, noting that the accounts offer no indication of progress toward actually distributing the funds.
A Standoff Over Where the Money Should Go
At the heart of the delay is a disagreement over the scope of Abramovich's original pledge. He had promised the "net proceeds" of the sale would benefit all victims of the war, language some read as potentially extending to Russians affected by the conflict. The UK government has insisted the money must instead be directed to humanitarian programmes inside Ukraine itself. Successive foreign and finance ministers have said they remain willing to negotiate a foundation structure that satisfies both the licence terms and Abramovich's concerns, but talks have repeatedly stalled.
The impasse escalated in March 2026, when Abramovich missed a government-set deadline to transfer the funds to a newly proposed foundation. Officials said he had been given a final opportunity to honour the commitment made at the time of the sale, and that solicitors acting for the government had warned his legal team that court proceedings were being prepared. It was not the first such warning: government ministers had previously said they were fully prepared to pursue the matter through the courts if a negotiated settlement could not be reached. Lawyers for Abramovich have pushed back sharply against any suggestion of confiscation, arguing the funds remain the legal property of Fordstam and that seizure attempts would be contested in court.
Loans, a Jersey Inquiry, and No Clear Endgame
Complicating matters further is a separate £1.4bn debt Fordstam reportedly owes to Camberley International Investment, another Abramovich-linked vehicle registered in Jersey. If that loan is repaid before any donation is made, the amount ultimately available for humanitarian causes could shrink substantially from the headline £2.5bn figure. Jersey prosecutors are separately investigating, as part of a wider corruption and money-laundering inquiry, whether the original Chelsea sale proceeds could themselves be considered proceeds of crime.
Any eventual transfer will still require a licence from the UK Treasury's Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation, since Abramovich remains a sanctioned individual. More than four years after the sale that was meant to swiftly benefit war victims, the fund's only confirmed achievement so far is compounding interest — with the underlying dispute over its final destination no closer to being settled.
