The Abramovich Chelsea frozen funds sitting in a Barclays bank account have earned at least £175 million in interest, according to newly filed company accounts, while legal battles over their destination show no sign of resolution.
Accounts for Fordstam Limited, the private company through which Roman Abramovich owned Chelsea FC, show the proceeds of the May 2022 sale have grown from £2.35 billion to nearly £2.5 billion. The pot earned £114 million in 2024 alone, and nearly £63 million the year before that.
Stefan Borson, head of sport at law firm McCarthy Denning, offered a mordant summary: ‘With the interest received, this now appears to be the most profitable football-related business in the world.’ It is a pointed observation. High-spending football clubs routinely lose money. Fordstam, which owns nothing but frozen cash, just keeps compounding.
Why the Abramovich Chelsea frozen funds cannot move
The immediate obstacle is a dispute with the British government. Abramovich missed a March 2026 deadline to release the funds, and the government has said it is preparing legal action if necessary. A government spokesperson said the proceeds ‘must be used for humanitarian causes in Ukraine,’ adding: ‘Our absolute priority remains ensuring the funds reach the most vulnerable in Ukraine who have endured over four years of relentless suffering.’
Abramovich, sanctioned by the UK in 2022 over his ties to Vladimir Putin, has indicated he may direct the money to a foundation with a broader global mandate rather than one focused exclusively on Ukraine. That difference of intent is the crux of the standoff.
The picture is further complicated by a loan that sits inside the Fordstam structure. According to the Fordstam accounts, Camberley International Investments Limited extended an interest-free loan of £1.429 billion to Fordstam. Whether that sum will be deducted before any donation is made has never been clarified. Football finance expert Kieran Maguire put it plainly: ‘It’s always been vague as to whether Abramovich was going to donate the whole sale proceeds to the Ukraine relief fund or just the profits. The sum due to his offshore company is still in the accounts which suggests the latter.’
Jersey’s criminal investigation adds a further complication
Camberley International Investments is registered in Jersey, and that matters enormously. In April 2022, Jersey’s Attorney General opened a money laundering investigation to determine whether assets connected to Abramovich were the proceeds of crime, as confirmed by a judgment of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council cited in The Athletic. Jersey also applied for a saisie judiciaire, a court-ordered seizure of assets, which was granted. Camberley was among the companies subject to that freezing order.
A BBC report at the time put the total value of Abramovich’s assets seized in Jersey at approximately $7 billion. Abramovich has not been charged in any jurisdiction in connection with the investigation, and he has been attempting to challenge the proceedings to regain control of the affected assets.
The Fordstam accounts state directly that ‘it remains unclear as to what steps can lawfully be taken in relation to the loan while that investigation remains ongoing.’ Jersey courts published further judgments on the matter in November 2025, and those judgments informed Fordstam’s latest disclosure about the Camberley loan’s uncertain status, as reported by ESPN.
The sanctions layer adds yet another constraint. Even if the loan question were settled in Abramovich’s favour, the money cannot legally be repaid to him without a licence from the Office for Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI). OFSI has already been involved: a written statement to Parliament dated 17 December 2025 references a licence permitting the transfer of over £2.5 billion from the Chelsea sale, though the funds remain contested and undistributed. An earlier parliamentary statement from May 2022 confirmed that OFSI issued the original licence permitting the sale itself on 24 May 2022.
Fordstam’s next accounts, covering the period to 30 June 2025, are due by 31 March 2026. By the time those numbers are published, the interest pile will have grown again. The underlying inquiry into the source of Abramovich’s wealth, including the 2005 acquisition of his oil company Sibneft by the Russian government for $13 billion, remains live. Until Jersey’s prosecutors reach a conclusion, the loan question cannot be resolved, which means the donation question cannot be resolved either. The government’s legal deadline has passed. The money keeps earning.
